Foobar2000 is parasitic in the sense that many of the plugins that give foobar2000 its value are open-source ports of open-source software, yet the foobar2000 software that hosts the plugins is proprietary.
Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.
plugins were great. Measured the speakers at my desk (I built them). generated an inverse impulse response filter, and fed it through a plugin to do full frequency equalization. It was a fun project to play with full range speakers that had no passive filter network whatsoever, all done via software.
The problem (at least for me) is input format support.
Assorted foobar2000 plugins support every obscure tracker format, every obscure video game music format (.vgz, etc.), and then foo_midi lets you render MIDIs not just with Soundfonts but with whatever VSTi DLLs you like. Also support for music files in ZIP files as well as music files in ZIP files in ZIP files (don't ask). That's hard to compete with.
> Here in Unix I can just mount archives and disk images.
This is so true! And it's much easier than just having the music player support zip files. Especially for zip-in-zip like GP described. Can you imagine double clicking an archive and have it play, rather than simply do:
cd Downloads/
ls
mkdir tmp
mount-zip myfile.zip tmp
ls tmp
mkdir tmp2
mount-zip tmp/myinnerfile.zip tmp2
audacious --new-instance tmp2 --play
while killall -0 audacious; do
sleep 1
done
umount tmp2
umount tmp
rmdir tmp2 tmp
Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.