I’m killing foobar

My music application of choice for a few years now has been Foobar2000. You’ve probably heard me rave about it’s amazing features and smooth shit.

foobar deleted my playlists

It just deleted my entire collection of playlists. See the screenshot, see how the list of playlists stop after “Nick Skitz”, well, after a couple more compilation playlists it then went on to alphabetically sorted playlists by artist. I have a large music collection and a wide variety of artists. These “artist” playlists then had albums sorted by release year in them.
It isn’t the first time my playlists have spontaneously decided to delete themselves either, oh no. It’s done it on at least three occasions that I can think of. One that I blogged about. Previous times I’ve been in a happy-enough mood that I shrug it off and painstakingly rebuild my entire collection of playlists.
Not this time. Today I had a most full-on class, came back with a splitting headache, my room is incredibly hot for some reason, I have the window open and bugs are crawling in. Not happy, Jan.
So I’m saying a big “Fuck you” to Foobar.

I did some googling to find a decent open source MP3 player that has a powerful playlist engine. Apparently iPods use playlists to store their music or some bullshit because all I could find were MP3 players that sync with your iPod. Considering I don’t own an iPod, and don’t plan to replace my awesome iRiver at any point in the near future with one, these programs were useless to me. One of the programs I found wasn’t even a step up from Windows XP’s Sound Recorder program. Yes, the one that comes with XP.
I eventually bit the bullet and surfed on over to WinAMP’s corner of the web to see what progress they had made on their product. Not a lot apparently.
One of my biggest requirements is an easy to use, powerful playlist engine. I don’t want to save playlists as .M3U or .PL or .PLAYFUCKINGLIST, I don’t want to have to organise files and overwrite them when I make changes to the playlists. I want the program to do it itself.
Obviously it’s going to save the playlists to files, but I wont see them. They’ll be there, but I shouldn’t know about them. This is what made Foobar so awesome. Except for the part where it deleted them all. You click “new playlist”, you name it, you drag your music in to it and it plays. You can re-arrange your playlists by dragging them around, you can arrange them however you wanted. It would save the playlists in your Application Data folder, and would create another file that would store information such as playlist names and what order they appear in my playlists panel. Simple and powerful, and perfect for what I used it for.
Winamp boasts that it’s playlist management is great. Sure, but it got nothing on Foobar. You can’t even re-arrange your playlists in the media library. You can’t sort, you can’t drag, you can’t do shit. You can’t even click on the “Title” column to sort by title. You can click it, they made it clickable, but nothing happens. And what makes it worse is, like Windows Media Player, it doesn’t remember what branches you had open and closed in your media library. I’m a hardcore playlist user, so I don’t want Local Media, or Rip & Burn, or History, or the Online Services branches open every time I open Winamp. If I close those branches and only have the Playlists branch open, I expect only the Playlists branch to be open the next time I open Winamp.
So great playlist management? I don’t think so. Fail.
Edit: Turns out you can re-arrange your playlists via the sidebar listing, rather than the actual library entries in the centre. So it’s gets a +1.

Doing some googling reveals that quick-shutdowns or whatever you call it is the cause of the Foobar-deletes-playlists problem, and due to the programmer’s dislike of the quick-shutdown feature, apparently refuses to fix the issue. Stepping aside the arrogance of not fixing the issue, what’s not to like about quick shutting down? It’s when you press the power button on your PC and having the system close everything and shut down. Remember I’m on a Windows machine here, so if I hit start and then shutdown, I’m going to have wait until Windows declares that it’s now safe to shut down, after it’s gone through and checked everything has shut down properly. And if it finds a rogue process that hasn’t shut down, what does it do? Well it doesn’t kill the process, and it doesn’t shut down, so your stuck in this limbo mode. In limbo mode you can’t open programs because “Windows is shutting down”, and it doesn’t shut down because something’s obviously still thinking away. I once told my PC to shut down and went to sleep, only to wake up in the morning and finding it still waiting for a process to close.
This is where quick shutdown is awesome, because it just says, “Oh, you’re still running. Tough shit bro, the user wants you dead. Right now!” and it kills every process and shuts the fuck down. Like I bloody want it to.

Now that I think about it I’ve been having a LOT of issues with Foobar recently. Bad Allocation errors and Runtime Errors all up the wazoo.
I think moving on from Foobar will make me a much happier person. Or now that my playlists have deleted themselves, I can take the time to re-install Foobar, re-configure my plugins and re-create my playlists. Maybe then everything will work peachy. But I doubt it. Foobar is failed me too many times. Why should I be assured that if I re-install and make everything nice that I won’t come home one day and find my playlists missing again? I have no assurance that that wont happen.
Whatever happened to programs just working?