Whilst it does not quite go back to the command line, my feeling about audio players, as I realised the other day, is still rooted in the days when processors were a lot less powerful, and any unnecessary graphics stuff really could cause glitches. Hard though I find it to say, the Windows family of operating systems has improved enormously over the years too.
Even though I admit that the prejudice is outdated, I still like my audio player interfaces to be simple. As a matter personal taste, I dislike GUI designs that try to look like a chrome-plated jukebox, and I wouldn't be wild about a wood-boxed pre-amp look either! It is only very recently that I have even allowed "album art" onto my monitor!
Also based in an outdated prejudice is my dislike of media management systems, or library software. It dates back to my early rips in WAV format and, even when I started using FLAC and ogg, I was even later to realise about tags. My music is organised in directory trees: why would I want any other software to "organise" it? That prejudice was extremely reinforced by early experiences with such software actually changing file names etc according to what it thought was right. That is not what I wanted!
Those with collections of thousands of albums can probably see the gaping holes in my viewpoint here. The mental jury is still out: as I increase my digital library I might well start to see the point of using library tools. Until then, I am keeping it simple, and also keeping it so that the data structure is player-agnostic.
A move to Linux, a few years ago, meant leaving Foobar behind. At that time (not now), it was also hard to find
gapless music players, and I was also forced, by a Firewire interface, into using JACK (the Jack Audio Connections Kit).
That all led to my first post-linux favoured audio player:
Aqualung. I remained happy with Aqualung for a long time. I remained happy with it until I started to acquire higher-than-44.1k bit-rate music. There is nothing wrong with how Aqualung plays different bit rates, but JACK has to be started and run at a fixed bit rate, and (completely subjective and unmeasured) find something wrong in the way that Aqualung
converted bit rates.
That led me to
DeadBeef. It does what I want, in the way that (for now) I want it. It's sample-rate conversion does not remove life from the music. Gapless playback goes without saying, of course.
