foobar indeed.
Here's a brilliant post by Rick Segal about "Dial Tone" software. So. Spot. On.
If you read slashdot, you know that whenever the discussion of mp3 players comes up, somebody always mentions foobar2000 as the crown jewel of mp3 players. "Winamp's a piece of shit, foobar uses standard Windows controls and it sounds way better".
(A sidebar to this discussion is "why do you care about 24-bit resolution when you're listening to lossily compressed 16-bit audio through a soundblaster? You like giving the decompression artifacts more room to play around in your noise floor?". Whatever.)
A few months ago I switched to foobar to see if I liked it. I'm still using it, but I can safely say I hate this piece of software. Not exactly because of the software itself, but because of the mentality surrounding it.
I wanted to install a "track info panel" plugin, so I could see the current song title and playback time in something besides the 6-point status bar. That involved these steps:
- hunt around through forums for 5 minutes to find the right thread with the download (the forum has "search flood control" enabled; imagine if Google forced you to wait 30 seconds between each search you tried)
- download; drop the DLL in place
- can't find any way to enable it in the UI
- realize through forum searching that maybe i need to be using a later beta of "columns_ui"
- go to download the latest version of columns_ui
- discover that the columns_ui author has started posting his plugins as 7z files (I guess zip was a little too ubiquitous)
- start downloading the 7z installer, then ask myself "what the fuck am i doing?". leave everything as it was before and consider going back to winamp out of spite.
It's the agony of most open source projects, without the open source!
Gasp! Did he just call open source agonizing? Listen to me: I can do things with computers, in my sleep, that 99.9% of the world -- hell, 99% of computer users -- can't do. I've suffered through building software from source and banging it into working shape for 15 years. I am true geek. If I can't easily make your stuff work, your project is hopelessly fucked.
The geeks on slashdot, the zealots on Linux newsgroups, they don't understand this. Because they're hobbyists. For them, software isn't a means to an end, it is an end. They enjoy simply tinkering with software.
Me? I am so sick of downloading tools, only to get tangled in an endless cesspool of dependencies and outdated readme files. It doesn't have to be this way: Firefox proves it. Attention fellow programmers: other software can be like Firefox.
If you look through the most popular foobar UI configurations, you'll find a bunch of people configuring their mp3 players to display bitrate with every song. I tell you, these people are not listening to music. These people are fucking off. These people think that transparent xterms are cool.
(update: here's a gigantic 8-step guide on installing foobar. See? I'm not kidding.)
So, back to that Rick Segal post:
In general and as a very broad comment: People want comfort not thrills.
[...]
Make them rock solid. Dial-tone. Fit like an old shoe. This stuff just sends many geeks over the edge but it is, unfortunately, the human condition.
Amen. The last 20% might take 95% of the project, but without the last 20%, who cares?