I come from the times where winamp was the go-to music player.
Today, even in the age of streaming services I still keep a local music library organized in folders. So, just as others here in the comments I built myself an old-school music player as a hobby project to listen to my music offline. It's a 1 page html/js app, has full keyboard controls and also features a simple queue mechanism functionality
Check it out: https://nobsutils.com/mp
the only reason I've preferred foobar for many years is that I can have many playlists "loaded" at the same time. If Winamp's playlist panel had tabs (and a bigger font)...
I love it, I was looking for a simple music player like this! FYI Currently the standard bookmark shortcut `cmd + d` changes the theme instead of bookmarking the website :-)
foobar2000, IrfanView, Total Commander. The 3 apps I still miss after 15+ years of not using Windows (went through 10 years of OSX, now on Linux for probably 5 years).
There's just nothing like this trio on OSX or Linux.
I've used foobar2000 and irfanview when I was a windows user 20 years but I am struggling to figure out what these have that make them more desirable than comparable apps on linux.
I have all my image browsing / viewing / light editing usage covered with gthumb on Linux and rythmbox does it for me in term of music listening as it can play both my local files as well as net radios. I think kde users are naturally more into Amarok or Clementine but they are all probably fine enough. I have the feeling music listening is a problem that have been solved decades ago an all operating systems. Well with the exception of iOS apparently.
In the early 2000's I discovered Irfanview, and used it because it was lightweight and loaded jpeg's much faster than anything else I was using at the time - this was on a 133Mhz Pentium 1 running Windows ME with 56MB of RAM.
I also like Irfanview because:
A) It has every basic editing function you might need (crop, color adjust, blur/sharpen), great for ad-hoc one-off things. It has all these functions but loads just about instantly on my older laptop. For example, if I need to rotate a picture real quick, it's convenient to open it in Irfanview and just press L/R to orient it.
B) I like it for one-off converting pics from one format to another, and it's the only GUI program I've seen that lets you save as jpeg, but also specify the target size. So I can convert a 10MB PNG to a 256KB jpeg easily. I know this is trivial to do in Linux with the convert command but when, for example, working with pics from my phone, I'm already previewing it in Irfanview in the first place. Irfanview's save GUI actually exposes a lot of knobs for many image formats that I don't see on other programs.
C) If you want to extract images from a PDF, you can open the PDF in Irfanview and Irfanview will let you save out the individual images. At least for the PDFs I've tried it with.
D) The batch mode it has is decently implemented and is easier to use than Linux command line stuff for small jobs if Irfanview can take care of the need (less than 50 images), especially if the images are all over the place and not in one folder.
I'm so used to it I'll probably use it in Wine (if possible) if/when I actually make the jump to everyday desktop Linux, which Windows 11 may make me do finally.
i never got the hang of Total Commander; i only use the file browser on windows as the cli form is so terrible compared to bash..
irfan was fun though, i do like Emulsion even though its not really under development anymore
im currently happy with foobar2k via wine, havent yet loaded all my plugins yet but will eventually load up the 7.1 upmixer and test it out. if you have not used the later versions of f2k, its worth checking out
I haven't used it and you might already be familiar, but I've seen people mention fooyin[1] as similar enough to foobar2000 for them to make the switch. Might be worth checking out.
What plugins do you use? I cannot imagine to add even 10 plugins to foobar2K, especially now,when "exclusive" access to sound card is built-in and doesn't require WASAPI/ASIO plugin anymore.
i try to install them all and only remove ones that break or really bother me - its fun to play with things from time to time. in terms of which ones i use:
- decoders
- asio output, virtual audio cable setup as needed (but for the most part the output i rarely change anymore)
- DSPs, audio (i upmix to 7.1 depending on output; but not exactly a requirement due to equalizer apo), video stuff for funzies
- Network related stuff (control, upnp)
- theme related stuff though i think this is lacking for my use
- lots of tooling stuff (though ive slowed down on a lot of that as of lately)
I keep adding new features to my hobby project at https://nobsutils.com
It's a collection of various tools that run locally in your browser.
The latest addition is a simple color palette maker https://nobsutils.com/colors
It's a collection of small tools that run locally in your browser which, over time, I've built to serve my needs mostly. This has been living on my home NAS for a while. When I created the flashcards maker to help my 10 years old son prepare for a Spelling bee word quiz, it became popular with his schoolmates and I got some new drive to make it public.
Can you guys recommend an android app which can do simple edits (mostly data entry) on spreadsheet .ODS files stored locally on the device. Right now I use Collabora but UX is not the best and it feels very slow and unresponsive at times. MS Excel requires conversion to xlsx before you can edit and Google Sheets requires to upload to google drive so neither is an option. Any alternatives?
This is great indeed but IMO only tech nerds can really appreciate it. My son is 10 and he never really needs to deal with real files. Nowadays normal kids just go any given app to access their photos or docs or music or movies or really anything. The notion of copying a file has been replaced by sharing, renaming doesn't really exists when it comes to photos for example and folder structure (when available) is some form of tags and labels depending on the particular app. It's sad. What do you think, are files a thing of the past?
Files will always exist conceptually as a way of expressing data. The notion of sharing exists because of sandboxing and the need to exchange data between apps. This has been extended beyond just apps to sharing between multiple users or endpoints. Actual file naming for some objects has been superseded by meta data and tagging because it provides a better way of describing the thing.
The goal has always been to pull file management away from users. Because they don't need to know or care how the internal data structures work. So yes, in a sense file management is trending towards more of a need to know basis.
