I use and love Foobar2000, but I certainly agree that out of the box it lacks polish. There’s some great skins like this[1] that make it look amazing, but it can be a hassle to setup.

Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.

But anyway, get Foobar2000 it’s great overall :)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiar...

I would love to theme my fb2k but most themes I came across were basically saying "here, download this zip file containing 10 massive unsigned dlls sourced from various people" and that doesnt sit right with me. Especially when its not even on the official website but some 20 star github repo.

I wish macOS had a really solid Winamp/foobar2000 music player. Most now are all about managing a library (no thanks, I have a filesystem for that!) or integrating with cloud services.

I appreciate this perspective but I loathe using the filesystem to manage a music library. If a music player doesn't have a well designed and highly functional music library I most likely won't use it. Most are half-baked though, unfortunately.

You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.

I'm curious what your objection for organizing music in the filesystem is. Even music players packed with library management features need the files to exist somewhere, so organizing things intuitively on the filesystem seems a good starting point. The alternative, I guess, would be importing them into some non-navigable structure like a binary blob? I would think maintaining a persistent index of all the metadata is all you need beyond the individual files.

I keep my files well organized on disk, but I am also particular about how names are both shown and sorted, and rely on careful and comprehensive tagging instead. For example, I will not name folders "National, The" or "Beatles, The", or "Petty, Tom", but when I'm looking at my music I want The National to be filed under N, the Beatles under B, and Tom Petty under P like I would arrange on physical shelves. The compromise is that all the "Thes" land together in the filesystem, but are shown the way I like them when I go to play music.

I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.

I always kept mine under {first letter}/{artist}/{album}/ Where "first letter" in, say, "the Beatles" would be "B", not "T". I had a separate folder where artists that started with a digit would go. Another folder for the occasional glyph. e.g. µ-Ziq.

yes. i use vox but its still not as great as the windows options

When I started mixing and matching songs from different albums to create "mixtapes" (playlists really) for myself, I did a deep dive into ReplayGain (because songs from different albums won't have the same levels). While Winamp had decent ReplayGain functionality (adding RG tags as well as reading them), Foobar2000 was the best.

Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.