pwnt.be

What I neglected to mention when I wrote about switching to foobar2000 is its remarkable ability to handle media sources. That is to say, apart from being able to play music straight from archive files, it’s intelligent enough to kill gaps between tracks rather efficiently, which is pretty convenient for mixes that got split up into individual tracks. Ah, but any decent audio player can do that, right? I mean, after tweaking Winamp’s DirectSound plugin—written by foobar2000’s author, incidentally—, you get the same behavior. Ah, but there’s an additional perk. You know how loading an MP3 with a cue sheet into Winamp is a total bitch? To see track titles, you have to get mp3cue, which adds a mocked up secondary playlist window, that is only accessible using the mouse, rendering global hotkeys and the like useless. And that’s if you’re lucky. I’m sure there are plenty of other media players that don’t even know what a cue sheet is. Enter foobar2000! What my favorite player does is, it just treats the MP3 as an abstract source, much like an archive file, and displays the tracks from the cue sheet right in the regular playlist, meaning you get full abstraction. It really is both simple and spectacular at the same time. I want to marry foobar2000. It’s either that or spend a life of quiet solitude, anyway.