Ditto for foobar, it's complete but not obnoxious and tends to focus on what's important. It's probably the one thing I miss when using my (OSX) laptop, OSX players seem to be either obnoxiously turdy (à la itunes) or exercises in minimalist style which end up inconvenient to use.

I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though, and that seems to be Ted's main concern.

My only annoyance with it is that (AFAIK) there still isn't a 64b version of it, though that problem is so common on windows it's hardly worth mentioning.

> OSX players seem to be either obnoxiously turdy (à la itunes) or exercises in minimalist style which end up inconvenient to use

I miss Audion, from the folks at Panic (makers of Coda & Transmit):

https://web.archive.org/web/20120524030742/http://www.panic....

It had a similar spirit to Winamp, so much that AOL/Nullsoft looked into acquiring them. As did Apple before iTunes existed, as documented in The True Story Of Audion:

https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

I liked using VOX for some time because of its FLAC and BS2B support, but dropped it because of iTunes Match and Apple Music convenience. Now I see they introduced a FLAC digital locker too, but the price is steep.

https://vox.rocks

> I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though, and that seems to be Ted's main concern.

It's ancient software pretty much, written to be efficient on computers several generations back; should be fine as long as it hasn't had any major rewrites since then.

I recall using foobar2000 after becoming disgruntled with the UI bloat of Windows XP's builtin Media Player circa 2003, and it was already lean back then, so I don't have any worries that it will be fat now.

I have been using Swinsian on macOS for the past few years and it handles my 120GB library very well. http://swinsian.com/

It is probably about as close to ideal as one can get on Windows. The codecs themselves are of course implementations that have been reasonably optimized and at the end of the day the audio framework in Windows is the limiting reagent for further power efficiency gains.

> I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though,

foobar is pretty efficient. Here it handles MP3 decoding and spectrogram visualization with only a few percent of a CPU.

Or the foofab inspired "DeaDBeeF" if you are using Linux. http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

The teenage memories of hours spent tweaking this lovely program... Was the software I missed most when I went the Apple path.

https://github.com/quodlibet/quodlibet is sometimes mentioned as a cross-platform foobar2000-like

I love Quod Libet, at home on Linux and at work on Mac.

Same for me when I was moving to Linux; missing a music player as good as foobar2000 kept me from changing for quite some time. In the end I settled with Clementine which is pretty good, but my music listening actually decreased quite a bit because of the change, strange as it may sound.

Not nearly as customizable as Foobar, but in case you're wondering if there's something better than iTunes, then Swinsian is a fantastic alternative macOS music player: http://swinsian.com/

Specially the UWP version, It has support for playback in connected standby

If I could I'd read foobar source. It's a gem in ux, perf, size. Rare.

I just wish this would get the tiniest of UX improvements. It's quite unpleasant to use especially on a touch screen.

The way to go with foobar is to download a premade UI you like. Sometimes the installation process is a little convoluted, but nothing compared to customizing its UI yourself from scratch. Back when I used foobar a lot, my go-to UI artist was br3tt on DeviantArt, I don't know if he's still active.

Nowadays I listen to music off my phone, and on that platform BlackPlayer is as close to perfect as a music player gets.