foobar2000 4+

I've always loved foobar2000 on desktop, and this mobile port lives up to its counterpart pretty well. The interface is simple and responsive, if a bit ugly, and it plays all my music in all the formats they're in. It even supports some video game chiptune formats like .vgm and .spc!

The biggest problem I have with this app is its playlist management. You can't multi-select songs to add to a playlist; you have to tap and hold on each track to add them one by one, which is a tedious process that takes an unnecessarily long time. I feel like a music player app in this day and age should be better than that. The album view also has this odd quirk where parts that were composed by different artists show up as separate albums, which can be a bit inconvenient.

Solid app overall, great for listening to saved music. Would recommend!

I downloaded this app several years ago, and never really used it to be honest, as it seemed redundant to the Apple Music app and I never really had any issues with it.

Fast forward and my living situation has temporarily changed. I would like to listen to my large music library while at home on my iPhone (organized over the course of MANY years through the desktop version of Foobar2000). However I only have a 32GB iPhone, limiting the quantity of songs I can sync at one time.

So I remember that I had toyed around with using the UPnP media server and renderer component on the desktop years ago but never ended up using them. I then turn both components on and find that the Foobar app is able to immediately access the media server and flawlessly playback (and download) my media library via WiFi. No issues or hiccups, just no nonsense playback of my media library from my phone.

I know there are several freemium media player apps out there that support network media libraries, but Foobar is free, works excellently especially for those with a very large library of media in assorted formats. That and it displays embedded album art without issue! There isn’t any Chromecast or video playback support that I’m aware of (like you can setup on the big boy desktop version), but that isn’t a big issue. Though component support would be awesome.

Just switched to iPhone and biggest frustration was getting music from my Linux system to the phone. Foobar2000 has a built in ftp server, which allows you to ftp into your phone from an ftp client on your computer (I used FileZilla on Linux). On the phone side, you start the ftp server using default anonymous login, and when you start the server it tells you the ftp address on your local network. From the computer side, open FileZilla ftp client and direct it to the ftp address found in your phone using the default credentials. In FileZilla, then locate your pc’s music folder and drag to the phone’s file browser and then just wait for the file transfer to finish. Then on the phone, disable the ftp service and rescan the music directory. Voila, now you have your own music on your iPhone. The hardest part was finding foobar2000.