Help me ditch iTunes... looking at Foobar2000 or MusicBee

uncle_rufus

uncle_rufus

uncle_rufus

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As per the title I've had enough of iTunes being crap so it's time to finally get rid of it... From searching on here and elsewhere it seems MusicBee and Foobar2000 are likely candidates, but some questions...

I don't want to accidentally screw up my iTunes library for now while I'm testing these players... are they non-destructive in that sense or will letting them loose on my library re-arrange everything etc. like iTunes would do?

I still own a few iPods, and it seems they are too recent to rely on the methods knocking about to sync with them using some .dlls from an old iTunes version, so I'm thinking of trying to keep iTunes purely as a program to sync with... Anybody out there doing this and have any tips or pitfalls I should be aware of? For one thing I don't think iTunes updates its library dynamically so any music I add or move around will screw up or not appear in iTunes... I can't decide how much of a problem that is :confused:
 
I did see MediaMonkey as well, but was put off by the free/pro model they were using... I'm not bothered if the application I go with can directly sync with the iPods, so long as there's some way of syncing the too - I don't really do it very often; maybe change my gym playlist once every few months and sync my big iPod every half a year or so when I might have a significant amount of new music...

My main irritations with iTunes are how slow it is - at one stage I wanted to be able to keep my Music on my server and point iTunes at it, but it's performance is totally atrocious for that (and to be honest even when the files are all local)... The other things that constantly bugs me is how inconsistent it can be with the tagging sometimes - I'll spend ages carefully making sure tags are correct and then randomly a few weeks later it's decided that a random individual song from an album is actually on a different album with exactly the same details, and merging the two back together can be a total nightmare!
 
I've tried loads of them, the best three for me were MusicBee, Songbird, and Foobar2000. I use MusicBee now and see no reason to change. It does everything required.

Foobar2000 is simple, but the playlists kept messing up for me. I spent hours organising everything, and it all garbled itself. It did this twice, which was enough for me to leave it in the weeds!
 
Just to give you another perspective - if you ditch the ipod too and get something standards compliant you can pick any media library software you like!
 
uncle_rufus;30490875 said:
I did see MediaMonkey as well, but was put off by the free/pro model they were using... I'm not bothered if the application I go with can directly sync with the iPods, so long as there's some way of syncing the too - I don't really do it very often; maybe change my gym playlist once every few months and sync my big iPod every half a year or so when I might have a significant amount of new music...
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Looking at the Gold features you should be OK as iPod sync isn't listed. http://www.mediamonkey.com/information/gold/

There's no reason to worry about the free/Gold model if you need iPod syncing. :)
 
Hmm, I guess I will have to test them all out and see... Will let you know what I think!

Getting rid of the iPods as well is an option oneday I guess but despite hating iTunes itself I can't deny that the iPods have been the best portable players I've owned (out of quite a few)... however it's likely things have moved on since then (quite a few years ago now) and the offerings from other companies aren't quite so crap...
 
I tried Media Monkey and Foobar when I was looking at a new player. Ended up with MusicBee and tweaking it to my liking. I find it superb and it really has a wealth of features.
 
KIA said:
http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/ won't destroy the library, but does lack the traditional sync feature.
Click to expand...

Ooo neat - this appears to work nicely for my needs! Thanks :)

mrk said:
I tried Media Monkey and Foobar when I was looking at a new player. Ended up with MusicBee and tweaking it to my liking. I find it superb and it really has a wealth of features.
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I didn't dislike MusicBee for what it's worth, and it looks and feels a lot like iTunes (only from several versions ago before some of Apple's more questionable design changes... runs better too!)... but once I'd had a glimpse of Foobar I just couldn't go back... I can see how it's not for everyone but personally I love being able to customise the bejeesus out of things... Hopefully I won't run into the problems mentioned by Acme above (okay so far)...

Currently been working through the library with Foobar fixing the tags which, considering I always thought I ran a fairly tight-ship in that regard, were absolutely shocking! It seems that iTunes hides an awful lot of the tags from you; and yet it presumably still uses them behind-the-scenes... this likely explains those bizarre issues where a random song keeps splitting itself off into what looks like a standalone album despite all the tags appearing to be correct..

Have also discovered the "super-hidden" files that Windows apparently creates in Music folders - completely invisible to many programs even if you're set to show hidden files - things like Folder.jpg, thumbs.db etc. which I only realised were there when setting up Foobar's "file operations" to batch rename the whole library according to the song tags, and spotting that it was encountering these other file-types.

Once all that's done and the library is "clean" so-to-speak, I'll mirror the library onto my server - want to see how well Foobar handles that - with iTunes I tried several things but it was always totally impossible; massively slow even by iTunes standards, horrible behaviour when multiple devices were accessing it at the same time... total garbage. If Foobar handles this okay I think it's perfect!!!
 
I don't know if you've tried MusicBee v3, but v3 offers even more customisation over the v2 of old.

This is what my one looks like:

MusicBee3_1.png


And the Album Cover only view is also very good:

MusicBee3_2.png
 
Yeah it was just the latest one I tried so v3... I like what you've done with it (pretty similar to how I set it when I was messing around)... the album cover view is pretty much identical to most recent versions of iTunes... and actually your first shot there looks a little like the better earlier versions of iTunes (and as it happens is arranged pretty similar to how I've done it in Foobar)
 
I'm a huge foobar nerd but rarely recommend it because most people are distinctly unimpressed with the lack of eye candy on first install. :p

It's good to see people discovering its usefulness by themselves.
 
marc2003 said:
I'm a huge foobar nerd but rarely recommend it because most people are distinctly unimpressed with the lack of eye candy on first install. :p

It's good to see people discovering its usefulness by themselves.
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Happy to oblige! I can see that point of view - it's not the prettiest right out of the box and requires a little work and thought to get the most out of it...I love the amount of options it has though...

The one thing I'm trying to do though is now that I've been through my whole library and tags etc. I've finally gotten around to doing the Genre tags properly (i.e. a semi-colon delimited list of individual tags, so "Rock; Pop" "Industrial; Metal" etc.)... thing is I'd like to be able to have a filter-by-genre type panel which allows for combinations of tags... (e.g. currently if I want everything tagged with either "rock" or "pop" I can use the filter to find all of "rock", add it to a new playlist, then find all of "pop" and append it to that playlist.... but what if I want only things tagged with both "rock" and "pop"?). I'm sure it's possible; I could imagine writing a custom generator of the filter that would gather all the tags and make a list with composite tags (i.e. if it encounters a track tagged with both it'll add a genre called "pop-rock" automatically which meets the above requirements)... Haven't looked into it yet but as a self-confessed foobar nerd, any ideas? :)
 
I'd recommend Facets for filtering: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_facets

It has a full documentation page here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components/Facets_(foo_facets)

You'll need to familiarise yourself with layout editing mode to add it to a layout: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Layout_Editing_Mode

Now you can use ctrl+click to select multiple genres at once. If you did for this for "pop" and "rock", it would select all tracks containing one or the other. If you only wanted a playlist that only contained both tags, you'd have to type in the search box

Code: 
genre HAS pop AND genre HAS rock
 
Neat - sounds like just what I needed! I'm still curious if I can tie that to something like I describe above (i.e. populate a Genre list with composite genres which are ultimately aliased to this Query syntax)
 
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