There's an interesting history about digital cassettes and why they were quickly taken off the market...
DCC? Well, new formats with backwards compatibility have rarely been that successful.
I might have to give this a listen. "Balls on accurate" it says. I'm a foobar fan myself mainly because the vast majority of pc using audiophiles are. Sometimes doing what everyone else does has it's perks. Foobar is like the mustang of the audio community.
Well, I hope you had more reasons than "everyone else uses it". Several years ago Fb2k was ahead of pretty much everything, with textbook-level processing, gapless playback, Replaygain (read and write) support, kernel streaming support and extensive customization options. (Keep in mind that Foobar's author was a former Winamp plugin developer who was dissatisfied with how things worked in that player, so he decided to roll his own in about '02.) It certainly hasn't gotten any worse. The support policy still sucks though.
What I use:
Music library - Foobar2000 1.0.3
Video, PVR timeshift recordings - VLC
Radio recording archive - Winamp 5.3.5
Web MP3 streaming - MPC / MPC-HC