VLC vs foobar2000

VLC is licensed under the CC-SA v3.0+ and available on Windows, OSX, and Linux with source code available here.

VLC is an incredibly robust application but very simple on the surface. It makes playing music simple, yet still manages to give the user all the tools he/she wants in a music player.

Everything VLC needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed. This makes it one of the most hassle-free music players as it can play virtually anything as soon as it's installed.

Besides basic configurations, video player has an extensive amount of adjustable settings.

You organize your music into folders any way you want. Want to play an album? Drag and drop. No tags, no confusion, no fluff. Easy.

VLC includes keyboard shortcuts for most actions. The video player can be controlled with simple and customizable keyboard commands.

Yes. Lightest. Even better than the ones known to be light. Both when playing music, only a single song or when playing a video. Either in terms of Ram and Cpu. Compared with almost all, including the ones from Windows like mpc-hc .. or light ones from Linux like Alsa Player, Audacious, SmPlayer .

Blu-Ray playback support was added on July 13th, 2014. It allows playing back DRM-free Blu-Rays with the help of libbluray, libaacs and libbdplus.

Using sftp/ssh music (and videos) can be streamed from any server on the network to any device running VLC. VLC can also be used as a webcam for streaming and snapshots. Amazing all in one package

VLC has a large amount of extensions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.