Foobar VS Winamp VS iTunes

Pininfarina_

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Which of these players do you prefer?

I use itunes but I also made this thread to ask for help since I've considered switching to foobar for quite some time now. iTunes' inability to play FLAC is a huge bummer not to mention I'm pretty sure foobar sounds better (?).

What I loved about itunes was its ease of use, it made sense and my music library was organized around it. I have all my music in one place: the windows 7 default music library, and nothing is separated into folders. I just dragged and dropped the music I wanted in the itunes library and the layout was very easy to navigate.

Foobar feels a bit more intimidating and confusing since it somehow found music that I haven't organized or that I don't listen to anymore.

I've also tread into customizing the look of foobar with skins and such but nothing seems to work like itunes does. Maybe I'm just retarded but in itunes, if I wanted to find an artist, I'll just click the column that organizes all the artists and scroll there. It feels so much clunkier in foobar.

Halppls.
 
I prefer iTunes, but I am already deep in the Apple ecosystem. If you want to keep iTunes you can convert your FLAC to Apple lossless.

Apple lossless is open source and royalty free so there is support in open source programs. I'm not sure about hardware devices.

Unless a codec is implemented out of spec they should all sound alike.

- - - Updated - - -

I might add that you can convert between FLAC and Apple lossless easily enough (they both produce identical wav files when converted to such).
 
Last edited:
mediamonkey!!! end of discussion

together with mediamonkey for android on the phone...
 
I use iTunes, it has the best library system of the players I've used over the years, and with AirPlay and remote on mobile devices it provides a level of functionality none of the other players offer me, allowing me to run iTunes on my home server, stream via airplay to my Raspberry Pi and control it all from my iPad and Android phone.
 
I've also tread into customizing the look of foobar with skins and such but nothing seems to work like itunes does. Maybe I'm just retarded but in itunes, if I wanted to find an artist, I'll just click the column that organizes all the artists and scroll there. It feels so much clunkier in foobar.

i use foobar with the facets addon, which adds exactly that kind of functionality. also customizable as much as you like... which is also a little bit of a bummer with foobar, you have to spend a bit of time fiddling with it until it behaves the way you want it to :)
 
My most favorite is Winamp 2.91, I never liked al lthat insane amount of functionality that iTunes had. Hell even on the Mac I tend to use Vox instead of iTunes.
 
I also stick to Winamp.
 
I used Foobar until I found AIMP3. It can play lots of lossless formats(including FLAC), it has tabbed playlists, auto-shutdown, plus other cool features. The UI is very similar with that of Winamp.
 
I use all 3?

Winamp, I like since it's a nice versatile bit of kit with just the range of power I need balanced with a intuitive UI

Itunes I use solely for loading music onto my ipod nano 6g (winamp worked for my 1g, but I haven't checked for a workaround for the 6g) it feels kind of insidious and bloated with the constant need to update and integration to quicktime and complaining about my file types

Foobar, I like for its light and nimble footprint and ability to work with most things out of the box. I also go to it as my portable application of choice.

Then again, I listen to my music on shuffle>all across several genres, so that might say something about the state of my mind...
 
I think I'll just have to spend a bit more time on Foobar to try to get it working the way I want it.

I've been using these skins that all require the Columns UI instead of the default UI and I can't seem to organize my music with it. There's like library view, default view, can't really move songs around. Still very confused :(
 
foobar for me.
A bit hard to get started, but once you know what you're doing it's awesome. Replaygain is very useful when you want to make a huge playlist and the levels on the tracks don't match with each other.
 
Winamp for me. It doesn't care what format you throw at it, I think it has the best media library for huge music collections, and it's what I'm used to. Occasionally I'll try something else, especially if there's a new alternative or a new version, but so far I've always come back to Winamp.

I use iTunes but only for transferring music to an ipod and for iphone maintenance. Any alternatives I've tried for iphone stuff suck worse ass than iTunes itself.
 
If you're on a Mac, I hear iTunes is actually pretty decent. On Windows though it's an absolute pile of garbage.

I use Winamp and have been for a decade.
 
Winamp all the way. I tried foobar and it just didn't seem all that intuitive and the ui customization is lacking comparatively. There are some great skins out there for winamp and the media library is about as straightforward and intuitive as it could be.

And I'm allergic to apple products.
 
yeah, foobar doesn't seem all that great when you try it out first and takes some work getting it to behave the way you want it to. imo one of its biggest disadvantages. getting it to look fancy is a whole nother thing... never gonna happen :lol:
 
I'm so close to rage quitting on foobar. It's so frustrating not to mention it's really freaking ugly without a skin. And even with a skin, it has the horribly ugly windows border around it. Yucky.
 
Winamp with classicpro skin for most things.
Itunes for podcasts and my ipod video.
Tried using foobar for a different music library since winamp lacks album shuffle function but disliked it so much that I just installed a second winamp reserved solely for classical music.
 
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