Correct, it is suboptimal to just run Foobar2000 in wine without additional configuration to get the best sound quality.

https://github.com/sammoth/foo_out_pulse

This component will allow Foobar2000 to bypass wine's audio stack by directly connecting to PulseAudio's TCP protocol.

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I’ve consistently used mpd for years, with a client that has changed over the years but that, for now, is Cantata.

VLC for most audio, PCM from sound card to the amp that does the digital/analog conversion, to Dolby 7.1.

mpd and ncmpcppcppcnc... (something like that) although that is usually for my locally stored music files and podcasts.

Recently I've been almost exclusively listening to somafm a lot through 'soma', Space Station Soma or Deep Space One are not my usual taste but I love to have it on in the background while playing around with code, it doesn't demand your attention and is quite relaxing. I was actually intending on posting something a couple of days ago but seemed a bit frivolous so while I'm here:

I'm currently looking through the code and although by no means at ease with a lot of it. I was particularly pleased with myself this morning by stumbling on the fact that I could send commands to /proc/{PID}/fd/3 which I could script as a cron job to mute at certain times to remind myself when it was time to meditate... admittedly a small discovery amongst what I have have learnt while reading and playing with the code but it did please me anyway... Thank you David Woodfall, should you be out there, a brief trip into the code to change the codec for recording (which I found out to be configurable in the UI) has turned into a really interesting lesson in scripting in general.

For just playing back music in Slackware I use 'mocp'. Haven't seen it yet in this thread. I like it because a terminal is always a keypress away, and mocp is pretty basic to control with the keyboard.

I've got my music library on an nfs server so its shared across a few machines. One is an old Eee laptop running basically just mocp, connected to a proper amplifier and speakers. The laptop is either used directly or over ssh. Works fine for this, but its pretty underpowered for anything else.

Also I have the same library shared over plex so a browser can connect to and play anything easily from there. I use that more for remote playing, or sharing media with friends. Plex also interfaces nicer with kodi on my TV.

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I've been dabbling with cmus. I've more and more grown to like terminal programs over gui's.

mplayer + smplayer

audio , video , streams .. i use it for all.

Never heard of it, thanks! But since post #35 it is my new terminal based player, now playing some Neil Young...

I stream through mpd with a nice cli frontend based on perl-tmux-fzf-ncmpcpp : clerk
You can find it here : https://github.com/carnager/clerk/

Used to process that with a pimped RPi 3B+ reached with ssh on laptop or phone but can't have a real lan these days and I have to use bt speaker (thanks to pipewire, daemon and fellow slackers that did help !)

Note that I really like go full random on my library witch has 1 month non stop music (including different versions of same music )

Under pipewire built against jack ..
playing a song in mocp (alsa) is a good way to crash aqualung (jack) when playing.. (not happening with qmplay2)

xmms when I use destkop
mplayer for cli

mpg123, ogg123 or mpv. On other systems I've used flac123 but haven't installed it on slackware yet.

Have played with mpd a little but didn't like the clients I tried. Was thinking of writing my own. Was thinking it could be an exercise in learning either Smalltalk or Objective C + gnustep. Since that will never happen, thank you to the people who mentioned mpd clients and the person who uses dmenu to select songs.

Speaking of mpg123, here's a neat blog post about how much more efficient it looks if you watch its syscalls than another command line players I wouldn't have thought would be that different:

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/mplayer-ktracing

I also use mpd daemon, with the ncmpcpp frontend. Along with several keyboard binds set to resume/skip/pause etc (which work in both my window manager and tty's)

Allows me to pause a playing track, reboot, then resume from the previous track position with one keybind. Also allows for seamless playing of music when leaving the X server and dropping to the console.

Audacious for CDs.

On my installation of 14.2, I found some stock GUI media players didn’t launch CDs. Since Slackware has several stock media players, I didn’t even try to troubleshoot, I just tried them all and picked which I liked best.

Another plus of Audacious is that, out of the box, it displays album and song titles in non-English Latin script, all the diacritics, correctly, where some of the other media players replace those with symbols.

I haven’t tried listening to music in -current.

TKS

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My nearest neighbors are over 200 meters away, so they aren't really an issue. My roommate is sometimes a concern but headphones solve that.

Also I suspect that you think "600 watts?!? That must be LOUD!" and while it is true it can get quite loud, the reason for power is not sheer volume but rather headroom, clarity especially on lightly or uncompressed material. It is also important to recognize that a 100 watt amplifier is not 2x as loud as a 50 watt amplifier, It's about 12-14% louder due to the logarithmic nature of sound pressure level and human hearing. If you are listening to material and using an average of say 5 watts, peak transients can demand hundreds of watts or they will breakup into distortion. This is especially the case with Solid State amplifiers.

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