I used a modded Foobar2000 for so long that being forced to use the base one on MacOS has taught me how fucking garbage it is.

I am so sick of OSS software, lmao.

Yes. Foobar2000 itself isn't OSS, it just happens to depend heavily on mods that are FOSS/OSS and get uploaded to its component repository. Whether Foobar2000 is OSS or not was not the point I was trying to make: it was that people ship an honestly dogshit base product and then expect mods/OSS/etc. to clean it up and make it actually usable.

Foobar2000 is unusable at its base. Being forced to use that base because my platform is woefully unsupported -- even if I could hack up all the OSS mods with the available Foobar2000 SDK -- means I get to experience all the shit I was able to patch away through the power of OSS. I would rather pay for software developed by people competent to do the job than whatever zombie amalgamation I keep getting from OSS/FOSS offerings.

It's my fault for depending on extensively modified software to fit my purpose. That's on me. I need to get more shit that's ready-made off the shelf. I don't have the lifespan to keep doing surgical additions and removals and checkups on my technology. There is better shit I need to be doing with my time, and fixing up my music library for the 50th time ain't it.

In the meantime, though, I've just not been listening to music nearly as much as I would otherwise. The quiet has been noticeably bad but it's nothing I can't find some youtube video to patch over with.

a big problem with the FOSS economy, is that a lot of people want to ignore, or avoid, the entire FOSS economy. nobody wants to hold it to account. all that matters is the code, right? as long as the code is being written, being maintained, then it's good, right?

it leaves tooling in a quandary, whereby any attempt to right the economy in the direction of production, rather than consumption, leads to questions that ultimately boil down to "any method of making either money or backing, other than strictly volunteer work on the code side, or donations by 'the community' to offset 'operational costs' or 'servers', is bad."

your GNU slash Linux kernel and operating system, collectively, have nearly a billion dollars of investment, if not more, into them since 1992, and that's not counting productive, paid company hours by hired consultants or technicians who ultimately contribute code to the kernel. that's just the raw cashflow being spent to support the project in terms of, in addition to servers/domains, the structure of services, mirrors, engineering, information security activity, research, commentary, documentation, project governance and foundational outgrowth, legal support, product integration and build automation.

the code itself, there's numerous analyses and papers on the "person-hours" cost with thousands of factors in play, I'm sure; but the non-code parts, the things you don't download, are what holds it together. it's far more than the depersonalized 'operational costs' of 'servers and domains'.

a major reason for this continual wave of investment, was the adoption of Linux, rather early on, by businesses who, among other things, were frustrated with the ongoing UNIX licensing fiasco, the weird play by Microsoft to kill UNIX through their E-E-E strategy with XENIX in the 80s-90s, and the "server" status-quo of "pay Sun or Digital some thirty thousand dollars for a 'solution' in a box". the fact that you could buy a compaq proliant and throw Linux on it and have a server for 1/5 of the price of other "solutions", was a direct competitive advantage. could you have done this with 386BSD? absolutely, and some did - but in the 90s, the use of non-commercial UNIX, or BSD of any kind, was legally tumultuous until USL v BSDi settled in 1994 - already years after Linux began to take shape in the rack/small-server realm.

without all that, then yes - it would probably be no different from someone's Nebraska bedroom code project.

i can't think of a better way to emphasize how money makes good software than to avoid using the native music player on the platform made by the richest company in the world, which got that way because of their music player

Because I came from a different background that was already using Foobar2000. I got comfortable with the mods and the FOSS I had wrapped up around the freeware to make it a good experience for me, and it came crumbling down.

For what it's worth, iTunes and Apple Music are also less of what I wanted because of how its Music Library works. I share music between the Linux half and the Apple half of this laptop (Asahi and MacOS), and I also have my music on an internal network-copied folder. With foobar, the music library (after you beat it into shape) used local/relative paths, without hand-editing any data files so while I was an exclusively-Windows user I could just copy the foobar folder alongside the music and it worked everywhere, with my playlists and customizations identical between machines. Stream playlist? There. Equalizations? Preserved. Edited names? There. Lyrics? Saved. And so on, and so forth. That made it less work than whipping up WinAmp or Windows Media Player or iTunes or RhythmBox or any of the others I tried.

I used to do this previously with iTunes, when I first started collecting music to keep on a physical disk device. But iTunes started [a] copying to a local folder first (something I already disabled and do out of habit, because I literally do not have the disk space to copy all of my songs and files every time) and [b] using absolute paths in its music library format, meaning even if I installed iTunes everywhere, I could not use shared folders that may/may not exist at different paths but have the same "relative structure" for my iTunes library. Also during that long time ago I would literally go in and regex-edit my iTunes library XML to make the paths relative and stuff like that, but it became too much of a hassle to maintain that for a long time. Foobar was awful at base but once I got the "music folders" bit working and the relative paths online, it transferred between machines easily. The customizations came after that as a necessity of keeping that bit of the feature set alive!

... And then it all broke apart when I stopped being on Windows-only.

So now I'm just sort of here, thinking that at the end of the day I'm going to have to duplicate the applications, or figure out a way to share the iTunes libraries, or just pray I can find another music player that's cross-platform that I can pay money for. A lot of people have recommended Strawberry, I'm getting the arm64 build soon to put it through the ringer. We'll see how that goes, I guess.

As a Side Note

I've had, forever, an urge to use icecast (or something similar) to set up a personal radio station I could use from a computer at home. That would solve a lot of this problem, but I suck at software maintenance and often break stuff. People gave me tips but I kept wrecking things, so I haven't tried in a while. Maybe one day I'll be able to set up my own personal music station where I get to control everything, and thus never have to deal with the issue ever again. (So long as I have internet, which... is another issue, but alas.)