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Old 2008.04.13, 08:28 PM   #2
Glathannus
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: United States
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foobar2000 is my one-stop-shop because...

1.) Gapless playback (even on MP3s) has been supported years before iTunes or any other player decided to hop aboard that bandwagon.

2.) Practically all audio formats are supported, including several that VLC can't handle.

3.) Virtual/metadata normalizing of tracks throughout a diverse collection, with alternate modes for individual tracks or continuous listenings of entire albums. This feature is called ReplayGain, and the bigger your collection gets, the more important it becomes.

3.) All audio that's played on Windows, is supposed to be routed through a compoment called "kmixer" before you finally hear it, and kmixer has an audible impact on the sound. Kernel Streaming is a feature that lets you bypass kmixer so you can hear the music the way it was meant to be heard, which is a principle that should go hand-in-hand with anyone who takes lossless seriously. I've done listening tests and I can hear a difference between Kernel Streaming and WavOut, though it's more subtle than lossless versus MP3.

4.) The default layout is especially accommodating for long tracknames. The last audio-related thing I want to spend lots of time on, is modifying the layout of my player. Tabbed playlists are another huge plus.

5.) The "Diskwriter" (or format converter) is potentially more flexible than dBpowerAMP, if you want to put the time into custom-configuring individual commandline encoders. I only download and configure the commandline encoders for the small handful of formats/bitrates I believe in, so it really isn't that much time.

The only things I wish foobar2000 had, are Meridian Lossless decoding, and milkdrop. I've been messing around with the Pitch Adjustment lately, but that's more of an honorable mention than a numbered reason.
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