I downloaded Foobar 2000 for Windows as a music player many years ago, and now there is a Mac version.

I'm sure I'm like many in not understanding much about how it works.

An example being that I didn't know it can rip a CD to FLAC. I'd been using EAC previously and was quite confused where it would put the rip. I'm sure there will be others who easily understand, but for me it simply isn't intuitive.

Neither is Foobar 2000!

But, it has a form of set-up for the destination file that is more intuitive for me, and so I'm not hunting around for ages looking for where my rip ended up.

One thing I was being plagued with was the playback order of my rips, sometimes it seems Foobar 2000 is doing it "automatically" or it's just luck.

I could not get it to playback the tracks of some of its rips in order, and I'd not set them to shuffle so it was a mystery.

I forget where I found the answer online, but here it is.

It needs to be told how to sort the music files, and sometimes that isn't transferred on ripping, so if you're stuck with it loading the tracks in alphabetical order instead of track order, this was the solution which worked for me.

Clicking Library from the menu, and choosing the configure option, you get a box titled "Preferences: Media Library."

You then see an option called Shell Integration, and clicking that opens its dialogue to the right, and in there is a field called "Sort incoming files by:"

I highlit what was already there and pasted the line,

%album artist% - %date% - %album% - %discnumber% - %tracknumber% - %title%

Then clicked Apply and OK.

It now plays in track number order, rather than in alphabetical track title order.

I suppose Foobar 2000 makes more sense to me than the badly written/illustrated human interface descriptions of dialogue boxes (batch files) of some music software. It must be difficult for a developer to select the most suitable DLL seeing there are thousands of them.

Foobar 2000 is no frills, and has a shell type feel, by which I mean a basic representation like DOS Shell which visualised DOS 3.1 onwards (circa 1989). Some might believe you have to be a developer to be able to use it.

I both agree and disagree. The reason I can say that is because I worked in the confusing world of DOS and batch files -complete with- early Windows dialogue. I never really understood how the early bastardisations between DOS, modem language, and Windows and/or DOS Shell based databases held together, but that was the earliest representation of today's online shop. That's how we ordered parts.

Compared with that, Foobar 2000 and its no frills presentation, has a particular logic that, with more practice, I think I could really get on well with.

Apart from that, it grabs audio data from a CD, requiring nothing more than a basic laptop CD reader (as most can), and Foobar 2000 defaults to Free Lossless Audio Codec v.5 (FLAC 5), and anything from Chris Montgomery is good enough for me ( https://xiph.org/ - https://xiph.org/ ).

Plus Foobar 2000 has a load of add-ins to make other filenames play, such as Monkeys for .APE, and FLAC can be converted to WAV.

All free, and is simple to use.

It has a good ripper and music converter, that can convert to most music files, even some I've not heard of before. The online support can be a bit hit or miss as it's done by users mostly, don't get me wrong you do get answers but sometimes it can take a long time. I have had problems with it but that has to do with going over to windows11 (my advice don't move to Windows11) It use to give you cover artwork with your rip but for some reason when your file moves over to the music folder it doesn't move over with the file, that's if it goes to the music folder at all, it sometimes moves over automatically and you can't find it.

Can you post a screenshot of your dBPoweramp ripper's page with a CD loaded and ready to rip?

SORRY I can't, this is do to me not being very good with computers, I have had loads of problems in the past and sometimes I've come to this forum for advice. (I just thought I'd let you know) again sorry.

The important bit is to define the location where you want to store things.

If you do not define the filepath you end up with the haphazard method of ripping you've described in the past.

Look at the filepathfor my files ... it's the bit marked path

\\NSA310\music is a place on my network, so all the rips go to that location, with the properties shown in the naming field.

This is a constant, so I never have to hunt for the containing folders and the stored files.

The files always go to \\NSA310\music, and appear in the artist folder that gets created when you send the first rip there.

You will need to be consistant with the artist name - if you have a folder with The Beatles, and then rip the next CD you rip as Beatles, another artist folder gets created because there is no "The", which makes things more awkward to find for playback.

Foobar is something I've been using a long time and my computer audio player of choice. That said it does have some quirks. One of the ways I was able to get it to be more user friendly is by downloading someone else's skin and config. That person made an instruction manual for setting up and operating the player in his config which helped immensely. Even so I discover new quirks and features with the program all the time. There are tons of plug-ins for the program.

Where I ran into trouble is when the developer of the config stopped being able to update the skin/config. As Foobar updated its software and plugin developers updated their plugins, I ran into some issues. Some of those issues I was able to resolve and others I could not. It still works better (for me) and my large music collection than other alternatives so I stick with it.

If I was a brand new user or not very patient I might use something else. I used to use JRiver, for example, and a lot of people like that program. When they run a discount it is not too expensive and I think you can still get a free trial. There are also programs like MusicBee that are pretty popular.

For CD ripping I use dBPoweramp and have moved over it from EAC for about 4-5 years now. I think it's a great program.

Foobar is a very powerful tool and media player, but not one for those that enjoy flashy gizmos.

Here's a screenshot of my config. This is how I sort the files for playback. Usually it's automatic if they are properly tagged.

Now, certain types of file tagging can really throw things off. Foobar has a built in tagger or you can import a plug-in that will do the job.

However, a much better solution, IME, is the free MP3Tag program.

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

With this program you can customize tags any way you want, though it does take some experimentation to figure out all the features. For song naming, if you tag the songs as something like "01 - Artist Name - Track Title", that will solve track playback order problems on a lot of programs/devices. Important thing is the number be in that format "01, 02, 03, etc."

Get the file tagging and library location and structure sorted out form the off and everything works swimmingly well.

lfc jon wrote: My bad. I have just read this article a bit more closely and it seems Graham's needs are more to do with playing digital more that ripping. dBpoweramp is a ripper and converter.

Yep, but how the files are tagged at the outset starts with ripping. Different ripping programs usually have a different tagging scheme or settings that can be changed.

Correct on both counts.

Otherwise FB2K is great for my needs.

In EAC it asks where you'd like the file to end up. By navigating to it, it gets the path, \\NAS-xx-xx-xx\Documents\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Music and the new folder in my music titled as the album I'm ripping, and...

It completely ignores it!

But if I paste that lot into the Foobar 2000 dialogue box, after ripping, I find it where I wanted it.

Perhaps EAC doesn't like the directory depths?

One day I'll get round to shifting it

Currently the only entry is a WAV file, but at the end of the track rip I expect it to have post rip compression applied and for the file to become a FLAC.

I don't allow anything to write on the NAS, so it's possible the NAS sees EAC as a user without write permissions.

The breakdown point for me seems to be that the initial rip (to WAV) is not being read back from the NAS, which in turn means that EAC cannot compress the file to FLAC.

If I'm not mistaken dBPoweramp deals with the compression from a cached file, rather than the one written to the location.

EAC works fine to a location on the local (ie the computer it's installed on) machine, so an external HDD connected via USB would work just fine.

EAC has issues pulling the file back in over ethernet from the NAS to apply the post rip compression.

It can't apply post rip compression.

It will rip the CD tracks to WAVs on the NAS, but it can't then use those WAVs to perform a post rip process.

You get what you pay for 

This time it was fixed by the code:

%albumartistsort%|%date%|%albumsort%|%discnumber%|%tracknumber%|%artist sort%|%path_sort%

(from  https://gist.github.com/javajawa/1382990 - https://gist.github.com/javajawa/1382990 )

File

Preferences

Shell Integration

And copy and paste the code line in full to the field called "sort incoming files by"