When comparing Deezer Music vs foobar2000, the Slant community recommends foobar2000 for most people. In the question“What is the best digital music player software?” foobar2000 is ranked 1st while Deezer Music is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose foobar2000 is:
Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Available to customers living outside the US
The Deezer music streaming service is available in 182 countries. There are 192 countries on this world, which means Deezer is available in all but 10 countries.
Pro Huge collection of music
The Deezer music streaming service has more than 73 million songs, which makes Deezer one of the largest music catalogs available now.
Pro Built-in lyrics
Deezer comes with a lyrics feature where users can see the lyrics when the selected track is playing.
Pro Personalised radio
The Deezer music streaming service offers a radio-like service called Flow which plays random music based on your favorites.
Pro Outstanding CD quality (with Elite Service)
For those that subscribe to the Elite Service ($19.99/mo), the bitrate is hi-def CD-quality 1,411kbps at 16/44.1 kHz.
Pro Available on a large number of platforms
Deezer (with a premium subscription) is available on a wide range of devices such as those running Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, smart TV and a web app. You can see the full list here.
Pro Great choice of Musi Mixes
You can download mixes and save.
Pro Can download and play selected music offine
Pro Inbuilt music ID feature
Pro Add your MP3
You can import an MP3 file to listen as a normal song and add it to your playlists.
Pro Browser Deezer
If you use Deezer on PC you don't need to download it, as the web version is the same as the desktop app.
Pro Also for podcasts
Deezer has started to include podcasts in 2015 for a few countries, and has since expanded it to all countries and with a dedicated section offering 160K podcasts.
Pro Lightweight
Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.
Pro Functionality can be extended with components
Foobar200 has over a hundred components to choose from that add UI functionality, decoding support for various formats, etc.
Pro Supports a wide variety of audio formats
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.
Pro Plugins can be used to bypass Windows mixer to output a bit-exact signal
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.
Pro Highly customisable
Pro ReplayGain support
ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.
Pro Internal search is a beast
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.
Pro Advanced layout
The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.
Pro Good quality
It was made in order to be as respectful to music as it can be.
Pro Good compatibility with Windows Media Center IR remote controls and wireless mini-keyboards
Foobar works well with Windows Media Center IR remote controls with virtual mouse functions; also with wireless mini-keyboards.
Pro Compatible with Microsoft Media Center (MMC) remote controls
Pro Fast monitoring of the folders
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.
Pro Grouping by folder structure
Grouping files by folder structure is an important feature especially when files don't have proper tags.
Pro Easily handles large music libraries
It has by far the best scanning of large music libraries containing couple of thousands of files.
Pro Variety of skins available
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.
Pro Built-in support for Windows Media streaming
Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.
Pro Transcodes all supported audio formats
The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.
Pro The many add-ons (components) available
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.
Pro Random/Shuffle on an album basis.
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");
Pro Lots of themes made by foobar users.
Pro MP3 player management
Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.
Cons
Con Doesn't pay artists enough
Deezer pays artists significantly less than other similar services. As of March 2018 it was paying $0.0064 / play, less than Apple Music and Google Play, half as much as Tidal ($0.0125). Not as bad as Spotify or Pandora, but could certainly do better.
Con Sometimes skipped songs occurred
Some songs skipped even if you are a premium user.
Con No settings to configure “Flow” to work as advertised
Flow is a great idea, but it fails to work as suggested. The idea is it listens to what you like and adds suggestion tracks. But mostly it just plays your track over and over, and pops in a random track, usually nothing you like. They need settings and better algorithms for it to work.
Con No Linux client
Compared to Spotify it has no native Linux client available.
Con Can only listen to 30 second song clips without a subscription
Con A lot of songs are cut at the end
Many songs are not played until final chords, and many others are of very low quality records, showing audio distortions. This is frustrating.
Con Not easy to skin
Out of the box it looks like something out of win2000. It is also very difficult to skin for the normal user.
Con Provides little in terms of hand-holding
Advanced tasks such as skinning and installing components may be a bit intimidating for beginners because they require knowing your way around the computer, not just the player.
Con Outdated Plugins
Many, many plugins are outdated and not maintained for years, leading to stability issues with a lof of them. A rather complex SDK and missing sufficient documentation makes maintaining or creating new plugins unnecessarily hard.
Getting to that neat GUI setup you've seen somewhere is probably impossible because of that.
Con Locks files and folders, making it hard to manage them
Several parts of Foobar lock files and folders in a way that they cannot be file-managed (move/copy/rename/delete) easily in the program (and externally). With the waveform plugin it's even worse. Cannot delete a file until the waveform is fully scanned.
Con Cumbersome start-up
Foobar2000 requires a bit of work to get it up and running.
Con The previous button doesn't work in random playback
You are unable to go back to a song when using random playback.
Con Breaks existing components every few updates
Makes it very hard to keep a customized version of Foobar running smoothly without worrying about non-working components.
Con Periodical unexpected shutdown
Con Not 'easy' as in plays stream services/ podcasts etc.
May be asking too much, this app is PERFECT for the 'hardcore'.