MusicBee

[StevOz]

The bees knees of music players.

Even Ruby could figure this one out.

http://getmusicbee.com/

At first I tried Foobar 2000, it is meant to be the most configurable music player around and it most likely is, though it was that feature that frustrated me so much I gave up on it.

So then I found da bee and it's treat to use.

 

[Shooby Doo]

Thanks for the heads-up on this. I still hadn't installed a music player on my new PC and was going to get win-amp, but thought I would give this a shot and I really like it so far. I'll have to dig deeper into the settings and plug-ins and see what it can do.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

yea, does this thing have good visualisation plugins (animations that play during the music) and does it hit the shoutcast network?

now that winamp is a dead project, guess i’ll need a replacement...

 

[StevOz]

Yes it has got some built in visualisations and I installed the Milkdrop visualisation plugin which works a treat. Just be sure to follow the instructions in the link and as it says apply the latest patch, which just upgrades MusicBee to the latest version, after which I had no problems using it.

It has radio stations though shoutcast needs to added manually it seems.

http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=12109.0

 

[StevOz]

Yeah and for visualisation is not milkdrop da crack!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i have the version of milkdrop that came with the 4-yr old release of winamp. extra sweet when i have the projector running.

 

[StevOz]

i have the version of milkdrop that came with the 4-yr old release of winamp. extra sweet when i have the projector running.

:)

 

[StevOz]

Still working great here even with my 7 year old rig updated to the latest windows 10.

Interesting to see the lag from PC to TV in the camera shot, mind you that is a 3 metre HDMI cable, not that I've ever noticed it before.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

I had a weird issue with an HDMI splitter and cables a year or two ago. At the cantina / karaoke place, we were trying to output a laptop feed to one monitor for the singer to use, and another on the wall so the audience could follow along.

It would sort of falteringly work, then somehow be too much strain on the laptop, which was an older model IIRC. The laptop-owner said that it probably wasn't powerful enough to drive both monitors sustainably, but I'd never heard of that issue before. He's not much of a techie, either.

I wound up doing some light research on HDMI cables, and it sounds like there's a range of standards and compatibility issues. Seems like potential headaches galore.

Btw, your place looks cozy, but you need some art on the walls!

 

[StevOz]

Mmm, actually to play FP or VP with no lag at all I need to set the display to the 1 monitor in the display settings, even when the TV is not on.

 

[StevOz]

Just looking out the window and seeing art in motion right there.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

MusicBee is my player of choice. It's fantastic for building playlists. Although the cursed Itunes player still has the best visualizations. I often play my music on MusicBee while running the vis on Itunes.

 

[fourbanks]

i'm still with Winamp 20 years now

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i'm still with Winamp 20 years now

I went back to that as well just for Milkdrop, and every once in a while to hit the Shoutcast network.

I remember it got bought up by (...a Danish company?) and the site relaunched with essentially the same version as before, but at least it's clean and still does everything I need.

The main issue for me is visualisations, though. Not just built-in ones like Milkdrop, but there used to be an active community of WinAmp devs making new ones all the time. That was a real blast to play around with.

Ugh. I should really research this stuff afresh one o' these days.

 

[StevOz]

Just got MusicBee up and running on the new PC.

New improved MilkDrop 2 viualiser installed, it's the bees knees!

MilkDrop 2 - Visualizer | MusicBee

The 2007 update is called "MilkDrop 2" but is the same program. All MilkDrop 1 presets are compatible with MilkDrop 2. However, many new features were added. Foremost, the addition of pixel shaders allows dozens, even hundreds of complex instructions to be executed for every pixel on the screen...

getmusicbee.com

 

[AnonTet]

I need to check MusicBee again. I need it to be portable, and if it get features that are important to me like support vst3 plugins (they crashed MB a lot when I tried last time), mass renaming, split 1 file rips into individual files using the .cue, renaming the files themselves by using the tags, ReplayGain calculation and scripting to customize the FE to display what I want, like LUFS.

Example in the screenie below. Obviously if milkdrop3 is running that's full screen so I can't use it much when I'm using the PC which is pretty much all the time.

 

[GeorgeH]

I have an old iPod classic so I have to use an old version of iTunes to sync music to it. Otherwise, I use Foobar2000 on my PC although I can play music with iTunes. If you have the right plugins installed, Foobar converts music to different formats also. It seems to do better conversions than other programs.

 

[AnonTet]

Got to try MusicBee again and no working DLNA/UPNP, still. This is a deal breaker as I use this to stream music to my amp quite a lot.

I love MB interface but I still feel it is like having a fancy jukebox / music library and I need a bit more.

@GeorgeH

Actualy it can't convert anything if you don't have the comand line tools do to so the same way it can read any audio format but not by default. It just acts as a frontend so if you want to convert to flac you'll have to have flac.exe somewhere. It can also save your presets which means that after teh 1st use, if you saved them, you just need 2 clicks to convert to that format.