Yeah, this is another post about managing my digital music collection. It's a doozy.

I have been an iTunes user for years, but it was only recently that I decided to force myself to switch to another music library application. I've tried a few over the years, including Winamp and more recently Songbird, but I felt they all seemed to lack some pretty basic functionalty that a picky user like myself just needs. Winamp was alright, but its lack of drag-and-drop always bothered me. I liked how iTunes let me drag a song directly from my playlist window to an MSN contact so I could easily initiate a file transfer. Songbird is open source and seemed to have an abundance of features, but it ended up using even more RAM on my computer than iTunes did. A music library application does not need to use more than 150-200 MB of RAM when it would be better off spent by another application that is better suited for it. I could go on about why I like to have a buffer of free RAM versus the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument, but I won't.

So although I have been fairly pleased by iTunes over the years, I was starting to get a little annoyed by the sluggish interface, especially when scrolling through a library of 8000+ songs. Add album art into the mix, and your RAM usage skyrockets while the interface gets even more sluggish. So I decided to finally make the switch to a little piece of software called foobar2000. Foobar2000 is an application that you can tell was made by programmers. The interface is ugly, menu items are hard to find, and there are no handy "getting started" wizards when you first launch it. The appeal of it, though, is its blazing speed (launches in about 2 seconds), low RAM usage (15-25 MB with over 9000 [har har] songs) and most importantly, the fact that you can customize anything in the application. The difficult part is figuring out how.

Ugly as sin.

Foobar has a fairly active community of programmers constantly making and updating components that add all kinds of features and tools to the application. One of the first things I did was download a custom UI component (columns UI) that let me create an interface that closely matched iTunes. There are numerous UI components available, some that can completely reskin the player. I also changed the color scheme to something that was a little easier on the eyes. It's not quite as slick as other applications but it does the job nicely.

Much better.

So now to the reasons why foobar is a complete dreamboat:

• Complete customization of the interface - Besides being able to customize where interface items are laid out, I wanted to see how many songs were inside each of my playlists, as well as how many hours, minutes, and seconds each playlist was. I made it show me. I wanted to see the codec and bitrate of the file I was playing in the status bar. I made it show me. You can pretty much do anything you want.
• File format support - Besides the standard MP3, foobar will also play pretty much anything you throw at it. If you find a format that isn't natively supported by foobar, you can be pretty sure somebody made a component that adds support for it. AC3 is one example.
• Folder monitoring library - Instead of dragging files into foobar to add them to your library (like iTunes), you can tell foobar to monitor one or many folders on your PC and it will add them to the library automatically. Delete a file from the folder, it gets removed from your library. You can also tell it to ignore certain file types.
• X to X file conversion - Want that FLAC file converted to OGG? You can do that. Though that is a little obscure of an example, I've found myself needing to convert AC3 files (ripped from a DVD) to MP3 a few times.
• Mass tag/rename/move - Pretty self explanitory. You can retag, rename, or move large amounts of songs at once. Format the target file names however you like using built in variables. Have it sort files into an organized folder structure based on artist and album tags.
• Statistics - With an optional component, you can keep track of ratings, play counts, and dates songs were last played. By default, your tags are not modified. A nice option for those (like me) that hate when applications sneakily rewrite your tags.
• Autoplaylists - These are basically the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, except probably a little more powerful. You can literally write your own queries that are actually quite similar to SQL. If you want a list of songs from the 90s that you haven't listened to in the past week, you can achieve it with: NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 1 WEEK AND (date GREATER 1989 AND date LESS 2000).
• Album art - Displays album art embedded in files or saved externally (folder.jpg in Windows).

It even lets me drag-and-drop songs into MSN. It's pretty much perfect for me. A few other features worth mentioning are gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts, and yes, it can scrobble to Last.fm.

The only gripe I have with it, is that it doesn't have built-in searching of album art, and it can't import album art downloaded by iTunes. For this, I had to download a separate application called Album Art Downloader (accurate name), which can search an entire directory for missing artwork (if you tell it to look for folder.jpg files). Once it's figured out what you're missing, you can get it to search various online sources (Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Discogs...) for artwork and automatically save it to the appropriate directory. The awesome part is, its possible to integrate into foobar if you download the foobar COM server component.

The thing that turns people away from foobar the most is how much time and effort that needs to go into configuring it to look and function exactly how you want. Since components are all made by third party developers, the options interface for most of them are all different, adding that extra level of complexity. Luckily there are plenty of people online in forums willing to help you out.

oh my god options

I guess my point is that if you're looking for that perfect player for your music, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. Most of the work is done for you, you just need to spend a few hours customizing it to meet your needs. It'll be worth it.

Comments

This is a story about how I often take the more complicated route when trying to achieve an otherwise simple goal.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an authentic retro 80s boombox that I got from my grandparents' basement. I thought it would be fun to record a bunch of albums onto cassette just for the novelty of it, so the first thing I did was look at what kind of audio input plugs it had. I found out that the only kind it supported was this weird thing called DIN which basically looked like a larger S-Video plug except it had 5 pins. I did a little research on this mysterious 5-pin DIN audio cable, and I found out that it's an old German standard that I guess has been long abandoned in North America, except used rarely for some brands of keyboards (the instrument, not the computer kind).

I figured my only option at this point was to find some kind of 5-pin DIN to RCA or 3.5mm adapter much like this one. I checked the obvious retailers, Best Buy, The Source, but nobody had the adapter I needed. My next stop was eBay. There were a small handful of people selling them, but all at ridiculous prices. After some searching, I actually found somebody from The Republic of Cyprus that was selling the exact adapter I needed, and for a reasonable price. I bought it, and it came to about $12 CAD after shipping. Then I waited.

Finally, yesterday, it arrived. I immediately ran upstairs to see if it worked. I set the tape deck to line-in mode, connected my Zune, and turned up the volume. I heard music. It was awesome. I grabbed one of the blank tapes that I had nearby, put it in, and pressed record. After about 30 seconds I pressed stop, rewound the tape and pressed play to see if it worked. Silence.

My only guess was that the line-in mode is meant to be used as kind of an auxiliary system, so you can use the speakers with another audio device... But it doesn't actually let you record using it. So then I was back at square one. Today at work, though, I was reminded about a relatively simple and common piece of technology that could help me. A tape adapter.

It was so simple, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. I've used tape adapters since I got my own portable CD player back in '95 or '96, but instead of this simple solution, I decided to order some archaic cable adapter on eBay from The Republic of Cyprus. So on my way home from the dentist today, I stopped and picked up a cheap tape adapter from Zellers for ten dollars (I had to laugh when the packaging said "compatible with iPods"... Oh, marketing). When I got home, I set everything up again, this time my Zune hooked up to the tape adapter which was inserted in the first tape deck, along with a blank tape inserted in the second deck. I pressed record and waited. After a few seconds I rewound the tape to give it a test. This time I heard music.

All this trouble was for nothing, though, because I'm assuming since the unit itself is so old, parts have been worn out and things don't move quite as smoothly as they used to. As a result, anything I play back in the deck ends up sounding just ever-so-slightly too slow. There is also a significant amount of distortion that can be heard on the tape, which pretty much destroys any enjoyment you can possibly get out of listening to music. On the plus side, I do now have a cable that lets me hook up my Zune or any other audio device so I can listen to it through the unit's speakers. The radio works pretty good, too. Now I just don't know what to do with 10 blank cassette tapes and a tape adapter.

Comments

I went to my grandparents' house with Billie today, and while exploring the basement we came across a genuine ghetto blaster from the 80s. I've wanted one for a long time, but random visits to Value Village always resulted in disappointment. I found a modern one that you can buy online, but there is no way I am paying over $100 for something that just plays tapes.

On my way home I stopped and picked up a 10-pack of blank tapes from Zellers along with a tape cleaning kit. I plan on creating a few mixtapes, as well as recording a bunch of classic 80s albums just to keep it legit.

To my dismay, the only line-in jack that it supports is some 5-pin format called DIN, and of course all modern electronics either use a plain 3.5mm jack or stereo RCA cables. So I have to find a place that will sell a 5-pin DIN to 3.5mm audio jack if I want to record directly from my PC or MP3 player. By the time I found this out, the only place open was London Drugs, but they didn't have it there. I'm going to try Radio Shack or The Source tomorrow.

I did get a chance to try out the radio, which sounds very clear and actually packs a lot of bass. I expected it to sound very flat and junky, but I was actually completely surprised at how good it sounds.

Oh, and IT HAS LIGHTS:

Comments

I wrote a script that reads Trent Reznor's Twitter profile, converts it to pirate-speak, and then retweets it on another account.

I give you: Pirate Trent Reznor.

Comments

Last.fm just released an experimental little application called Boffin, which scans your entire music library and creates a tag cloud based on all of the genres in your collection. It doesn't just read the genre tags for every song, though, it instead looks up every song of yours in the Last.fm database and creates a tag cloud using their own tags. So you don't have to worry about retagging all your stuff! The result is something very similar to the regular Last.fm radio, except it plays from your own collection rather than theirs.

Do I want to listen to only folk and punk? Yes please. You can read about it here or download it here for PC or Mac.

It also lets you export your tag cloud to Wordle, which I wrote about before if you remember. This is mine:

PRETTY NIFTY.

Comments