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Foobar vs. MediaMonkey
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Peregrine 2008-11-13, 08:17 #1
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Subject: Foobar vs. MediaMonkey
Only those of you that have used both ... which do you prefer?

I have used both and I think MM trounces Foobar but very curious to see what others THAT HAVE USED BOTH think.
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theRover 2008-11-13, 08:52 #2
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I have MediaMonkey installed and I've played with it a bit, but I hardly ever use it. I haven't found anything it could do that my other tools can't do better. For listening, I'm a Winamp die-hard. However, for most of my media management tasks I use Foobar.

Winamp uses:
-Listening to music
-Showing pretty visualizations on flat-screen TV in family room

Foobar uses:
-Editing tags
-Renaming files in bulk
-Calculating and writing or applying Replaygain on new tracks/albums
-Format conversions (from FLAC to Ogg, or from anything to mp3 for portable files)

I used to use TheGodfather for tag editing/file renaming, and I still use it from time to time, but Foobar has mostly taken over this role.
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LycoLoco 2008-11-13, 09:12 #3
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In reply to post #1
Having tried to use Foobar multiple times and always going back to MediaMonkey, my choice is clear. For as great as Foobar can be, I really have no desire to spend hours tweaking it to my liking, particularly when MM is set up for me pretty much the way I like it from the start. Now, I haven't used Foobar since 0.8 but one thing I hated in particular was the inability to add new tracks to the database without rescanning the entire folder, or at least that's what I remember. Anyways, I just like the layout of MM and have ever since I read about it in some PC magazine at our local Barnes and Noble back in high school, and version 3 has grown on me a whole lot more than I thought it was going to.
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Peregrine 2008-11-13, 12:12 #4
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I certainly didn't start this thread to convert anyone, but Rover, did you know:

MM allows you to 'plug-in' Winamp so you still get your WinAMP goodness through the MM interface?

-and-

The visualizations in MediaMonkey are the best I've ever seen. It displays the name of every track that comes on inside the visualization which then wisks and fades away into the visualization. Awesome for parties.

_______
The thing I love that I have yet to see anyone do as well as MM is tagging. I have not tried Godfather.
MM has nodes for every tag. Click the node, like ARTIST and it autosorts your collection by ARTIST. Click the UNKNOWN ARTIST heading and you can instantly see anything missing Artist tags. Then you can just drag and drop them onto the appropriate Artist and it tags it automagically. Probably my favorite feature next to the Vis's and "Party mode".
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flattop100 2008-11-13, 12:27 #5
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In reply to post #3
Quote by LycoLoco:
Having tried to use Foobar multiple times and always going back to MediaMonkey, my choice is clear. For as great as Foobar can be, I really have no desire to spend hours tweaking it to my liking, particularly when MM is set up for me pretty much the way I like it from the start. Now, I haven't used Foobar since 0.8 but one thing I hated in particular was the inability to add new tracks to the database without rescanning the entire folder, or at least that's what I remember. Anyways, I just like the layout of MM and have ever since I read about it in some PC magazine at our local Barnes and Noble back in high school, and version 3 has grown on me a whole lot more than I thought it was going to.

Lyco, you're missing out if you haven't used foobar since .8....it's come MILES just since .9 (up to about .9.5 now). Give it a spin again - the two gripes you have are at least particially addressed. Upon installation of Foobar, it presents you with different layouts to use, and those layouts have default color schemes to pick from. Also, if you add a file or folder to the playlist that is a subfile/folder of your music library location, it's added to the database (you may need to refresh the tree).

I haven't used MM in over a year, so I won't comment on that, and I can't believe Winamp is still on version 5.5. Speaking of which, does Winamp still have the EQ clipping issue?

Reasons to use foobar: 1. It sounds gooder than Winamp 2. It's less of a system hog than any other player. YMMV.
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MacDancer 2008-11-13, 12:55 #6
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I need to revisit this issue, especially since my foobar config file got corrupted on my desky. I still have a pretty similar config on the lappy, but it's as good a time as any to try new things. Or at least update foobar.
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flattop100 2008-11-14, 09:29 #7
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In reply to post #4
Heh, just dropped by foobar's site; there's a new release out:

    * Media Library now automatically keeps track of any changes made to its folders; no more need to manually   rescan them.
    * Improved compatibility of file type associations with Windows Vista.
    * No more delay when playing/enqueuing files from Windows Explorer.
    * The installer now includes “portable mode” that works in limited user contexts and doesn't make any changes to system configuration, registry, etc.
    * New Converter user interface.
    * Built-in Matroska support.
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Nordburgh 2008-11-15, 13:30 #8
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I still use foobar and WinAMP occasionally. I tried MediaMonkey a long time ago (before foobar) and wasn't impressed. Apparently Songbird is at 1.0 now. I may give that a try as it looks interesting.

Hate to hijack but has anyone tried Songbird yet?
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Peregrine 2008-11-16, 11:22 #9
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That's kind of funny. We were talkiing about Songbird on another site I frequent and a discussion there is what prompted me to start this post.
Here is what a friend of mine had to say about it:

Today I've been searching for an alternative music player for Linux. I've been using Amarok for ages, but the 1.4 version doesn't work properly in KDE4, and the KDE4 version ("amarok 2") looks like bullcrap and has a ton of features missing. Hell knows what they've been thinking.

So I've been searching around and I have stumbled upon this nice cross-platform music player which is based on the Mozilla XUL engine. Lo and behold: Get Songbird.
The link they have on the main page is horrendously outdated, so I would recommend you pick your download of choice here in the latest Nightlies section.

Yes, it kinda looks like iTunes, and no that's not too bad. The interface is very clean and there are a shitload of add-ons which enhance the media player every which way. Lyrics, videos, album cover fetchers, last.fm integration, automatic facts lookup for artists, including pictures directly from flickr.

Seriously, that thing rocks and is easily one of the best players I've used so far. here are some of hte addons:
Media Flow
Lyrics Master
iPod support
Album Art Manager
mashTape (displays all kinds of information for the currently playing song)
last.fm integration
and tons more...
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jaw2ek 2008-11-20, 09:35 #10
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In reply to post #4
Quote by Peregrine on 2008-11-13, 12:12:
The thing I love that I have yet to see anyone do as well as MM is tagging. I have not tried Godfather.
MM has nodes for every tag. Click the node, like ARTIST and it autosorts your collection by ARTIST. Click the UNKNOWN ARTIST heading and you can instantly see anything missing Artist tags. Then you can just drag and drop them onto the appropriate Artist and it tags it automagically. Probably my favorite feature next to the Vis's and "Party mode".

Cool.  Din't know that last tagging bit.  I use mediamonkey mostly for its "Auto-Tag from Web" feature.  It messes up the  database (esp album art) of my 80gb ipod classic.   Its kind of bloated, so I tend to use foobar more for everyday tasks and playing.  However, I don't configure it much.  I once spent days configuring it, just to have my settings become corrupted and had to start over.
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MacDancer 2008-11-21, 23:10 #11
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Downloaded the newest versions of both foobar and Media Monkey. Started playing with foobar, and I'm not even gonna try Media Monkey, I'm happy.
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Cartoon 2009-01-15, 05:10 #12
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I use foobar as a player. I have used MediaMonkey and it looks good features. It tries to do too many things for my liking and it lacks the killer-feature that I am looking for (multiple databases for multiple-format music collections, e.g seperate databases for the same music in flac, mp3, aac format etc...).

foobar has the features I generally need with good quality output.
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