kwliner.blogg.se - Quod libet vs foobar

foobar2000’s library contains a bunch of track metadata and it automatically monitors folders for updates. All in all I suppose this is the least important feature. Plus there’s usually a cancel button for instant control, whereas a frozen GUI requires killing and restarting for that. If the GUI doesn’t freeze, but does lock me out with a “nice” adding files dialog it isn’t really that much better than freezing, is it? Still, at least you’ve got a rough idea regarding what’s going on and whether it’ll take seconds, minutes, or hours before you regain control.

Shouldn’t lock out the interface or keyboard bindings while adding music.

It seems that any Python-based application utterly fails here, including Quod Libet, which says “Do other media libraries choke and die after a mere 10,000 songs?” Perhaps it doesn’t die, but it certainly chokes for enough time for me to stop caring if it will so I’ll kill it manually. Preferably it’ll be able to do it completely out of your sight, but I’ll take some kind of “busy” notice as long as it doesn’t interfere with the application’s ability to play music, be paused, go to the next track, and the like.

Must not freeze when adding a few files.

Then there are some peripheral things I like that aren’t directly related to audio quality: Many players that support some form of RG fail here because they only do it on a per-track basis. But perhaps most important, this means album gain, not just track gain. I don’t like to be surprised by overly loud music or some such. At any rate, even though this applies most strongly to only a minority of albums it’s a prerequisite.

Fading might be alright between songs from different albums, though I feel that true gapless playback removes any need for silly fading practices. Either way, I still list it because it’s probably the most important requirement. What player you chose could significantly affect the output. It would seem that all players on Windows as well as Linux have reasonable output quality these days, and I remember that 10 years ago that wasn’t necessarily the case. While that sounds too obvious to mention, the primary reason I only came up with four audio players is because none of the other players I tried met what I mean by this, which is the following: My most basic requirement for an audio player is, logically, playing audio well. In this post I’ll explain my requirements for an audio player.

Anything else simply doesn’t do it for me. Slightly longer answer: there are only four applications (of the ginormous number I tried) capable of playing music well: Aqualung, Deadbeef, GogglesMM, and mpd.