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Echoes |
Topic: [programs] foobar
Posted: 2004-09-29 @ 03:32:27
Sorry about the absence, but school and life have a funny way of taking up one's time. I'll try and post with more regularity, so make sure to call me on it. I'll try and make amends by giving a quick little review on foobar, an alternative to Winamp
I have a relatively large playlist, and sometimes I like to just take all the files, throw them on random, and listen to Radiohead, Ben Folds, Pearl Jam, Pantera, and everything in between. I began to notice some thing with winamp, however. Its random function, to put it bluntly, wasn't that random at all. After less than a few hours, I would hear a song repeat. This struck me as slightly off, especially with so many songs on my playlist. Also, I found that certain clumps of songs, such as my Metallica and Beatles, were heavily facvored over the remaining 80% of my playlist.
Enter Foobar. The first thing that I noticed was the efficiency of the randomization algorithm used here. It seems almost entirely unbiased, and I'm hearing a much more varied spread of songs than I did with winamp. This is a very good thing. The song playback is the same as winamp, so there's no real loss in quality there.
However, this program has some faults that have prevented me from fully converting. First off, its a very simple player, with just a window listing the playlist loaded, with a few simple commands at the top, thusly :
 | Nothing Special here |
I guess the picture more or less shows how the aesthetics up it don't stack up to the extreme customizability of winamp. Secondly, I've had a couple of problems with the program locking up (and on one occasion, crashing my windows box). Compared to winamp, this doesnt run well minimized while you are say, playing a game, or using a lot of memory. I had no such memory loss problems before this, so I consider that a problem mostly relating to this player. Finally, it isn't as user-friendly as winamp, and it (obviously) doesnt play videos.
however, if you are adept with computers, you can code your own componenets for the player, which I find to be really nifty, if not a trifle complicated at first. But this could lead to some extremely exciting applications in the future.
So I'm on the fence here, but I think I'll use foobar for all my big-playlisdt random sessions, and If I feel like listening to other, more ordered songs, I'll probably use winamp for individual band playlists. Foobar can be found here, I suggest you at least give it a try, unless you really care about your desktop looking sleek and refined, because I havent found any good skins yet.(3)Comments
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