Decent MEDIA player that scrobbles?!?!!?!!!!!!!

[alan nagsworth]

WINAMP IS A COCK. The other day it just stopped displaying stuff in my media library, every time I refreshed and rescanned it just said there was fuck all there, so it is officially a cunt. I reinstalled it with the new version, and now the piece of shit won't even open, it just says an error has occurred and it has to close - well FUCK YOU man!!

Real One seems alright so I gave that a go and the scrobbling plugin doesn't fucking work, and so help me god I am not going back to WMP, it's a flaming shit heap and I hate it.

I've been looking to get a top notch media player for a while (willing to download in such means that are classed an "unlawful", all recommendations welcome) so I guess this is as good a chance as any... I need something which scrobbles to Last.fm and something which has a decent media library with search capabilities and album art support, if possible?

Help me, I'm dumb and helpless!!

[ThickAndCreamy]

Sounds like Itunes is perfect for you, I've tried numerous media players and Itunes always comes out on top. The only trouble with it is that it doesn't play FLAC, but I've converted my CD's to Apple Lossless so I sorted out that problem.
It scrobbles, has individual play counts, easy to navigate and free, can't go wrong with it.

I would advise playing videos in WMP or VLC media player though.

[Sovereign]

Songbird, the Mozilla version of Itunes, is pretty nice. Its not fully developped though, still a few niggles, but basically its a mixture of Firefox and Itunes, so you can simultaneously cruise about the internet looking for cock whilst sorting out your Carcass albums.

[alan nagsworth]

I've already got iTunes and it makes my eyes bleed. After the hassle I frequently get when syncing my mate's iPod, I don't think I could take it seriously. Also I think the media library is pretty terrible!

SongBird looks nice... so I'll give it a gwan and see what gwans. Ta for the help so far dudes.

[Vitalstatistix]

I urge you and everyone else to get Foobar2000.

It's a lightweight and 100% customisable music player with a constant stream of user-created and supported plugins.

Once you get the hang of the tagz language, and you sort your layout (the hydrogenaudio wiki and support forums are your friends), you won't believe you ever fucked around with winamp or itunes.

My current set-up has album-art and lyrics display (with in-built search and retrieve), full searchable library, playlist functions, file converter, burning capabilities, and iPod manager!

[alan nagsworth]

Songbird was going great until it simply refused to install any add-ons whatsoever because of some bullshit 203 error. Machines are not compatible with me, no matter what client I use there's always some shitty unthinkable fuck-up waiting to shaft me. It's not even letting me play CDs - FUCK THIS SHIT.

On to Foobar I guess. This better be as good as you say it is VS!

[Vitalstatistix]

Check the config screenshots thread on the forums for an idea of how far you can customise it. This is my current layout, and I'm still very much a beginner.

Spoiler alert

[close]

It takes time to work out but it IS worth it!

[Uncle TechTip]

I urge you and everyone else to get Foobar2000.

OH! I was about to suggest this. But you are right. How did I live for years without foobar and its global hotkeys - I can control the player no matter which app I'm in. And the Soundtouch plug-in is marvellous, I can fully control tempo, rate and pitch to speed up and generally alter songs according to my mood. (If I'm awake I like to put on some nice pop and speed it up 7%)

The only downer is the lack of a library feature, maybe there's some plugin for this but I had to switch to leaving around 10 playlists open with various tracks. Now I never need to shut it down.

[alan nagsworth]

Okay I've got it looking similar to yours now vitalstatistix, which is how I'd like it, it looks nice. But how do you get that specific 'media library'-style panel under the album art? All I can seem to find is a standard Filter panel which displays just the Artist and has no search function. Search function is what I'm after!

I know you suggested the help forums but my god I am impatient and I've already wasted 4 hours plowing through shit media players today.

[Vitalstatistix]

Errrm, it took me fookin ages to work out how to work it out, and I didn't really know what I was doing, but...

Basically, there's two main 'User Interface Modules' - "Default User Interface" (which is easier to set up and comes with the initial download) and "Columns UI" which all the user-created plug-ins work on. Choose either under 'Display' in preferences, but you need to DL the columns UI dll if you want to use that.

Confusingly, I use the default interface because it's easier to set-up, but I also use all the groovy columns UI plugins like lyrics and art using "dockable panels" - which faciliates using columns plugins without running columns.

As far as I remember, the media library view you're talking about Nags, is one of the default plugins, entitled "Album List". Try view - layout - enable layout editing mode, then click away on different areas to add or replace panels and tabs.

[thugler]

Itunes is horribly slow, but still seems to sort things more easily for my uses. I tried to use Foobar for a long time, but just so many things needed customising and modifying for it to work anywhere near to how I wanted. Basically I want it to do Itunes already does, but without any screwing around, and more easily. I don't use FLAC so that's not a problem to me either. I really spent a lot of time trying to make it work how I wanted, but never managed it.

Still hate Itunes though, it's so clunky. Songbird may be good in a while, but not really yet.

[Don_Preston]

Showing my Muso ignorance here, but who or what is a 'Scrobble'?

[samadriel]

Something to do with www.last.fm  I'm curious as to what the actual utility of it is...  Is it just a music-recommendy service?  I can't say it's told me anything very enlightening.

[Uncle TechTip]

Think it's the ability to upload what you're currently listening to and other cool features, he said in a grumpy fashion.

Sounds like there'll be a plugin somewhere. Is this what people want? http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/Audioscrobbler_(foo_audioscrobbler)

[thugler]

Showing my Muso ignorance here, but who or what is a 'Scrobble'?

It's a plugin for whatever media player you use which makes a record of what songs/artists you listen to, and does stuff with the information for you, usually via Last.fm

[Neil]

Yeah, you can use it to get recommendations and suchlike, but cock that, it's just basically a big list of stats of your music listening habits.  And it's really very nice to have a visual representation of such, and very interesting to look at what other people are listening to, or have listened to. 


I still love Winamp, but tend to find it fucks up every 4 months or so now, and I have to uninstall and reinstall a new version.  Might give Foobar another bash next time this happens, it's by some of the guys who originally made Winamp, innit? 

[mcbpete]

Check the config screenshots thread on the forums for an idea of how far you can customise it. This is my current layout, and I'm still very much a beginner.

Spoiler alert

[close]

It takes time to work out but it IS worth it!

I've been a long-long term Winamp user so my Foobar looks a lot more like this:

Spoiler alert

[close]

I love my Foobar.

[thugler]

I just tried, based on this thread to get Foobar working anywhere near the way I would want it to. And it's completely pissed me ofd once again, noone seems to have bothered to simpify anything, and the process of getting it to look and act how I want is incredibly convoluted and frustrating. Once again I've given up. No amount of screwing around will make up for it being fairly useless at recognising the tags of my music, which Itunes tends not to have much problem with, unable to sort and download podcasts automatically and have a library system as default.

I'm sure all this can be sorted out by fucking around for hours, but I just don't have the patience for it. I've already spent solid hours of my life just tagging things, and I'm darned if I'll do it again.

[lactating man nips]

I love winamp though it isn't perfect. I briefly tried Foobar before but like thugler I dont have time to dick around for hours trying to make it do what winamp already does. Are there downloadable customisations that other people have done to save us too lazy or stupid to do it all ourselves?

[alan nagsworth]

What LMN and thugler said. This foobar thing is damn annoying, god why can't their be a perfect media player. This is like bloody politics! And I hate politics! Any more recommendations people? Really wish I could go back to Winamp but this error seems to have permanently knackered it.

[mcbpete]

Are there downloadable customisations that other people have done to save us too lazy or stupid to do it all ourselves?

Here we are: http://www.fooblog2000.com/

[lactating man nips]

Thankyou mcbpete you are a lovely.

[alan nagsworth]

Heh ... erm... how do you, erm... install these things? I really am shit with FAQs and stuff. Thanks in advance, anyone?!?! :-D

[mcbpete]

You normally download them and the extract into the foobar\panelsui folder (providing you downloaded panelsui first: http://panels.fooblog2000.com/ )

Alternatively, you could also try (I'm not sure if it'll work), replacing the foobar.cfg stored in your Documents and Settings/<User name>/Application Data/foobar2000 with mine (obviously back up yours first): http://ilovecubus.co.uk/pete/foobar200.cfg

It'll probably needs ColumnsUI to work - Download here: http://yuo.be/columns.php

EDIT: Anyone know what's up with this site, I've been getting Network Timeouts all over the shop for the late 6+ months.

[alan nagsworth]

EDIT: Okay I figured that lot out but it's still saying I need to update the PanelsUI component needs updating even though it is the latest version. :-/

[lactating man nips]

From that sites forum

It seems there are significant changes in foobar2000 0.9.5.3 and higher.

See Panels UI topics will be closed or deleted without any further notice on hydrogenaudio.org

The last version of the Panels UI component was released on 2007-07-18. For reasons that have already been explained, foobar2000 0.9.5.3 introduced changes that make most Panels UI configurations no longer function correctly.

[alan nagsworth]

Bugger! Right I've found a version that pre-dates that version so let's give that a spin ...

[alan nagsworth]

Ok seriously this is driving me fucking insane. Ive followed the bastard thing to the letter, running the Panels UI interface and pasting the compononts in the components folder except the 2 which go into the main directory and my foobar is now just a custom playlist with a menu button at the bottom. I've also tried pasting those components into the Panels UI folder instead and its the same thing.

This thing is so fucking annoying, any further help would be greatly appreciated.

[lactating man nips]

Hey Nags i gave up with that panels ui thing. I've started playing around with this columns ui plugin which is another mod which adds more features, works with the latest foobar and is still being updated it think, http://yuo.be/columns.php . There are probably downloadable skins/interfaces for this plugin too. Im looking on the foobar forums to see what addons there are for it. Seems I do have hours to waste dicking around with foobar :s.

[alan nagsworth]

Good luck to you, that's all I can say! I really want to get this working as I have no other viable options in the meantime.