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Foobar2000 on iPhones?


I'll do my best here to not rant about the alleged "ease" "convenience!" "ecosystem!" and / or "just get a Mac!" chorus through the years.  But it's going to be hard.

Because I have just spent 2 hours with Apple tech support to no avail, trying to simply transfer a file from an email to my phone.  This was the goal:

1) Download Foobar2000 to my iPhone  (Seems to work...)

2) Download and test an MP4 music file from an email to my iPhone.

(Anywhere within my 100 GB's of free space would be fine but even this step was like putting a man on the moon.)

3) Get the Foobar app to find / locate / see and play the file.

After 2 hours, the only thing Apple was able to propose was for me to

a) reactivate my files folder / icon and to
b) download GarageBand to create a folder to receive the file.  

At last, I was able to at least see the music file in the GarageBand folder, and click on it to play, but not through Foobar.  It seems you cant drag and drop files onto the free space of IOS, but actually need a specific app and file structure to open anything and everything on an iPhone?  Maybe its time for a Samsung.

All I am trying to do is to have a lean, mean, quick playlist capable machine where I can playback WAV or other audio files, with or without access to WiFi or mobile data, without heaviness and restrictiveness of iTunes, my iTunes library, and / or any particular iTunes account and while using less battery.

I know Foobar is popular around here so thanks for any thoughts.





cwlondon
cwlondon OP
1,210 posts
 
glennewdick

A suggestion from the Foobar forum if this might get us started (?)


Re: Deliver Us from iTunes (First Post / Windows Loyalist)
- Connect your iPhone to your Windows PC
- Open foobar on your iPhone and start the FTP Server (under Tools -> Utilities)
- You can now browse the ftp server from Windows Explorer and copy your files in foobar music folder

HTH.

Alessandro
glennewdick's avatar
glennewdick
1,666 posts
 

I have no intension to stream music with my Iphone, I do have the Tidal app on my Iphone for when I have nothing else available as well as an Audioquest red DAC i use occasionally when traveling. But other then that there are many better alternatives.


Hell buy a used Andriod device and use it for music got to be better then the iphone for ease of use.


I truly miss my Windows Phone. lol  

rocketfish
3 posts
 
Thank you for forwarding the tip from Alessandro, it was spot on. I will not stream music or use iTunes so it was a pleasure to see how easy it was to establish connectivity to the iPhone using foobar2k's FTP utility. Of course I had to download and install the foobar2K software on the iPhone first. Best part is no USB cable needed to establish connectivity. Once selecting the FTP option under Tool --> Utilities, I was quickly given an IP address for the iPhone on my local network. It looked something like (FTP://192.168.1.###) where ### represents the last three digits of the IP address.

It was not as easy (but not hard either) figuring out how to use Windows 10 file explorer to copy file from my music library to the newly connected iPhone. The iPhone needs to be setup as a Network Location or a FTP Drive. I found this link helpful:

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/map-an-ftp-drive-windows. There are many other sites that provide instruction on how to map an FTP location in File Explorer

Once this mapping was done I could navigate to my music library on the PC and easily copy folders (containing music and artwork) to the foobar2k Music folder on the iPhone. The copy was pretty fast, and since foobar2k plays so many different formats I didn't need to convert any files.  Thanks to foobar2k for making this so easy to do.  
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