all the world's a stage...
I'm a Computer Science undergraduate in my final year studying at Reading University. I like music, movies, photography, reading and if I can ever get around to it, writing. Also a fan of horror, sci-fi and fantasy so there's plenty of re/blogging on those areas.
I write gig/event reviews at From The Pit
Elsewhere on the web:
Many tweaks to this and web presence in general in the pipeline... when I get around to it.
Weekly Top Artists (via Last.fm):
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Avengers cocktails! :D
Makes me want to try them out!
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Facebook’s initial public offering has many people asking:...
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foobar2000: A better audio player
Yesterday I switched to foobar2000 and found it to be my favourite audio player. It has everything I want from an audio player: it’s light on system resources, can scrobble to Last.fm and supports media keys so I can easily play/pause/skip without needing to activate foobar2000. The UI is easy to customise to your preferences and there are various components that you can add for extra functionality. One of the components I’ve added is the lyrics component. I’ve changed the layout so that the lyrics window is docked into the main window rather floating separately.
I don’t use iTunes or WMP because all I want is to listen to my music. I don’t need all the extras. There are specific things I dislike about those two but I won’t go into it here.
For a long time, I’ve used Winamp for playing music. However, I started noticing how it was not lightweight and would slow, freeze and/or crash if I left it running. This in turn would slow down my system. This I did not like.
I looked at what I already had installed and started using VLC instead. VLC is one of my favourite programs. No more worrying about having the right codec. Highly recommended and you should try it if you haven’t already.
Anyway, VLC is much lighter than Winamp and does what I need it to do. Only down side is that it doesn’t support the media keys on my keyboard - its global hotkey settings literally will not let me bind the media keys. The only way to get it to kind of work is if I install mk2mp and even then it only works if the VLC window is active- which sort of defeats the point of using the media keys.
I did also look at Media Player Classic, which does support media keys but doesn’t scrobble. Personally, the Last.fm support is more important to me than media keys support, so VLC, it was.
But I have foobar2000 now and I’m not going back.
Screenshot was taken while foobar2000 was in use. I was listening to Tapping the Vein who are one the many bands I adore. Female fronted gothic metal, yay. Go have a listen on Grooveshark or find the band on Amazon.
