I personally can't live without foobar. While I agree sound quality in foobar2000 under emulator is definitely not the best, but foobar2000 in windows, audio quality wise, rivals Steinberg's wavelab. Not to mention that it is free.
iTunes? Oh.. Phleasee.. iTunes is not even comes close. I hate iTunes quality. Every single tune missed its mark. It's a complete garbage compared to foobar2000. I have to install wavelab on my mac to match my experience on Windows. But playing music on wavelab is a pain in the ass. A heavily beefed and tuned winamp is still a better one, but still a far cry compared to foobar2000. Foobar can generate exactly 1:1 bit precise output. I can even play dts file as wav and stream them to my receiver perfectly. iTunes messed it up BADLY. Only white noise came from iTunes, Mac or Windows.
Lacks album art? LOL. What kind of album art you want? You can program it inside foobar. Want to automatically download art? Or maybe you want a flipping front and back cover for every 1 second? LOL.
Ok, so, now, I am here looking for foobar2000 replacement, native. These are what I need in a player:
1. Automated programmable tagging. I have 3 file name format system. (%genre%/%artist%/%album%/%cd%/%track%. %title%) or (%genre%/%artist%/%album%/%track%. %title%). %cd% is for multiple cd albums, and omitted if it is single cd album. The player have to be smart enough to include cd number if it encounter 5 folders deep, and omit cd number if it labels song 4 folders deep without id3 tags. Wav can't have id3 tags. So I need player to be able to replace standard tagging with on-the-fly tagging. Then radio has /radio/genre/artist/title format. Or collaboration album should have format as /genre/album/artist1,artist2 - track. title. Also I need it to fix all irregular tag, such as featuring, feat, ft all must be replaced to ft.. I also need to separate one line artist such as keyword "and" or "with" must be removed and parsed as multiple artist song.
2. Ability to rename file and move them to respective folder and filename. artist must not be like artist1 and artist2, but should be renamed to artist1,artist2 when I tag it.
3. SQL-like query playlist. For example, I want to find song that has "love" in it, I can type query, and that player must find all of them within my library according to my query. It could be partial, using AND, OR, and LIKE operator. Within file name, folder, or inside id3 tag.
4. upnp/dlna compatible server/player and controller. Able to control other dlna device, play stream data, or be controlled from my dlna peripheral, and stream audio to my dlna peripheral.
5. Able to encode/decode on-the-fly to and from multiple format, multi threaded, and able to move encoded/decoded files to respective folder and rename them. For example, I want to encode to my itunes, I should able to encode my files at /home/prd/music/genre/artist/album/cd1/01.title.wav to /Volumes/Data/itunes/Automatically add to iTunes/artist - 01.title.m4a complete with correct id3 tag. Or move a ripped song such as /home/prd/music/rip/sky.fm/artist-title.aac to /home/prd/music/radio/genre/artist/title.m4a and tag it accordingly. Or rip my CD with AccurateRip, then move the WAV result to respective folder after checking CD's title from internet.
6. I hate waiting, thus, I want the player to organize, and tag all my library under 10 seconds, and has less than 3 seconds load time with those library.
7. And most of all, 1:1 bit perfect output to my equipment. I need my DTS audio library. High quality encode/decoder, and wavelab output quality.
8. small memory footprint. Foobar2000 only use 8MB at most. 10-15MB still okay.
9. Programmable grouping. I like grouping by custom specification.
10. Programmable column. I need to find last access date, folder name, etc to manage my music files.
So, find me a player that can do those on Mac. Those are something that I can't part with foobar2000. If you can find one with those quality, I'll move.
