HI, I'm an user of mediamonkey. I like it, but I read all audiophile must have installed foobar...
I recently buy a second hand Lynx L22 soundcar, not instaled yet, and an Ear Purist HD150 Mapletree Audio Design Headphone Amplifier.

Please, give a couple of objetive reasons for change to Foobar. Is there a sound quality improve? Both use the same (bass.dll) replay library?

s2.

Sound quality? No change.

foobar2000 is the Swiss-army-tool, nay, the 72-piece wrench/socket/thingamajig toolbox that will not only play your files, but also replaygain 'em, ABX 'em, masstag 'em, with an extensive (and I *do* mean extensive) array of plug-ins (aka Components) to alter how it looks like, how it operates, etc. etc. etc.

But if you desire sound quality... there is no difference of sound quality between foobar2000, MediaMonkey, Winamp, or <enter your media player here>. Any difference you perceive to hear is just that: your perception (in other words: The Placebo Effect™)

you can customize foobar to have it do and look excacly how you want it.

But Mediamonkey has replaygain and a powerfull tag tool, and just out of the box. Foobar need a lot of time to customize...
I think the sound of Mediamonkey is the same of Foobar since both use bass.dll, other players used another library perhaps sounds different.
What about ASIO and K-MIXER. Any differences between Mediamonkey and Foobar?

I've been a long time user of foobar2000, and have switched to using MediaMonkey a few months ago. I have advocated foobar2000 as the most capable audio player for Windows for some time, but most folk I know just aren't interested in using it because it looks bland "out of the box" (and I do know what kind of customisation is possible, but only fanatics are goiung to bother), and is difficult to configure. I still think it's the most capable player I've seen, but it's not a mass-market product.

MediaMonkey is not a perfect alternative: watch out for the ReplayGain functionality as MediaMonkey only does TrackGain and not AlbumGain. I'm about to write a script for MediaMonkey to carry out AlbumGain.

MediaMonley also has tidy integration with iPods and other portable players (I know about foo_pod - I used to use it, but MediaMonkey's implementation is tidier in my estimation).

MediaMonley does not currently support WavPack, which is a pain for me as it's my preferred lossless format. It does support FLAC.

I can't comment on whether there's an actual difference in sound quality between the players (maybe the dithering componentry?), but I haven't noticed any on headphones or speakers.

In short, I now use MediaMonkey for everyday requirements, and foobar2000 for more challenging requirements.

I'm not saying MediaMonkey is *only* a media player, heh In fact, I use both MediaMonkey and foobar2000. Heck, even Winamp now can replaygain (although it is still wanting in tagging dept.)

Agree. Which is why I recommend MediaMonkey to my non-geek friends, instead of foobar2000. If they happen to see me using foobar2000, I'll just say, "Um, it's *really* difficult to set up" and they return blissfully to Da Monkee.

Any properly coded library, i.e. complying with the standard, should sound the same.

@LadFromDownUnder: Hey, when you finish the AlbumGain script, let me know! You're a member of the MediaMonkey forum, no? And about WavPack support, can't you copy Winamp's Wavpack input plugin into MediaMonkey? (I use only OptimFROG for lossless, so I don't know).

I just wanted to point out that foobar2000 does not use bass.dll. Still, there should be no perceivable sound quality difference (especially for lossless formats).

I have copied the WinAmp plugin as you suggested - thank you! All I need is encoding capability now...

I am a member of the MediaMonkey forums (as of today) - same name there as here.

Slighty off-topic:
I did some trawling of the MediaMonkey forums for ReplayGain and volume levelling: It's been brought up a few times (just do a search for "ReplayGain"), with varying solutions. The biggest obstacle I see for ReplayGain working in MediaMonkey is that the tags created by ReplayGain under foobar2000 seem to be ignored by MediaMonkey! It writes its own tags (which no other players seem to read) and only reads its own tags. I will have to investigate this a bit further before I build anything, but this is a tad annoying if it is the case. I will PM you when I have made any decisions or progress.

I've read the bass.dll was used in foobar...
what library use?

is the use of ASIO recommended? is the sound quality better?

Hi guys,
I just wanted to say that I already wrote a MediaMonkey-script that converts track-gain into album-gain a while ago. You find it here: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic...49&start=15 (just use Teknojnky's fixed version)

By the way: In some days a first alpha of MEdiaMonkey 3.0 should appear which supports Replaygain out of the box.

Big_Berny

It was said in this thread several times that foobar is difficult to configure - but that is not true if you start working with the DefaultUi wich is considered to be ugly just because it is simple. If you look in the preferences of a clean install you will see that there is no more to configure than in other players. Maybe the Titleformatting is difficult for new users but exactly this feature and the possibilty of unlimited tagging is the reason why foobar is superior over mediamonkey when you come to things like (masstagging)/renaming.

The next step will lead you to ColumnsUi. Learning how to create a layout and to set background/text colours of the panels is not that hard. So why people are talking about hard configuration? You can be fascinated about foobar because of its features (replaygain, masstagging/renaming, secure ripping, tagz, ...) or because you are excited about the screenshots in the foobar gallery thread. And here the problem starts: people who are not interested in the features and who are even not able to create a simple view in album list are forced to use one of the most non userfriendly plugins ever (to avoid a misunderstanding: i like terrestrial plugins).

By the way: I like MM too and i am eager to see what version 3 is going to bring