foobar2000 vs Quod Libet

Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.

Foobar200 has over a hundred components to choose from that add UI functionality, decoding support for various formats, etc.

Foobar2000 natively supports MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CD, Speex, Opus, and support for additional formats can be added with plugins.

Through the use of a plugin (of which there are three popular ones), users can get bit-exact sound output straight to their DAC or soundcard. While not something every user will use, for audiophiles this is a pretty important feature.

ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.

The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.

Foobar2000 provides an extensive search to look through your library. It supports special queries to only look for certain tags and other conditions and is incredibly fast in doing so even with over 20k of songs in your library.

It was made in order to be as respectful to music as it can be.

Foobar works well with Windows Media Center IR remote controls with virtual mouse functions; also with wireless mini-keyboards.

It has one of the fastest monitoring abilities. Only couple of seconds passes between adding a file into monitored folder on external NAS and it appearing in the library.

Grouping files by folder structure is an important feature especially when files don't have proper tags.

It has by far the best scanning of large music libraries containing couple of thousands of files.

Foobar 2000 has powerful theming support.

Browsing a site like DeviantArt will give you hundreds of skins (that have been made by other users) to choose from.

Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.

The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.

Includes dynamic range analysis, integrity checkers, equalizers, and visualizers, such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters, and X-Y (Shpect Lissajous) displays.

I'm old enough to have a lot of music where whole albums are worth listening to. This is also essential when the composers created music where the flow from one song to the next is part of the art of the album. E.g. on Queen's ANight_at_the_Opera_, the first song -- Death_On_Two_Legs -- is a very hard rock song with very pissed off lyrics. The next is _Lazing_On_a_Sunday_Afternoon, which is a very lighthearted amusing song. The contrast is wonderful. Also many artists have one song flow into another and breaking them up by using random on a song basis really breaks the music. Plus shuffle prevents repeats until the entire playlist is done. If you want, you can select individual songs and the are shuffled as if they are the entire album. It's harder to describe than to do:
configure play mode to shuffle albums

If you're like me -- and I know I am:
add library to list
play

But you can be more selective:
select albums (or songs if you only like a few)
do {
play_the_shuffled_list(list);
if (mood("not in for the current"))
skip();
if (mood("change_the_list))
change_the_list(&list);
} while !shuffled_off("mortal_coil");
die("happy");

Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.

Quod Libet gives the user the necessary tools to edit and organize their library from within the app. There is support for tags as well to help you quickly find the music to fit your mood. To help you sort through large libraries, you can use the filters which help filter by genera or other search perimeters.

Quod Libet offers many plugins including Last FM sync, lyrics support, and iOS sync.

Quod Libet has powerful search syntax options, which are very useful for creating smartlists or querying a big music collection.

Despite very good library management capability, Quod Libet is easy to use. The base music player doesn't have too many features, making it a breeze to use. However, if you want to go deeper you can install plugins. These plugins can sometimes add complexity, but it's up to you what you do or don't want.

Sonos, Squeezebox, ...

Quod Libet has multiple viewing modes, including Folder (File System) hierarchy view. The only other program to have a good folder view would be Sayonara.

There are a few controls that allow the user to change how the player looks.

Fully functional and takes up little space on the hard drive.