I've been using linux since Sunday night (less than 3 days ago), and I've learned a lot, but I'm still not an expert by any means. I got just about everything I consider essential set up and running, except for a media player. The media player I used when I was on Windows was called foobar2000. It is hands down the best audio player ever. Nothing even comes close. Since foobar is windows only, I am going to have to install wine.

I installed it from a package a few days ago and I got it working. The only problem was the sound being very fuzzy and choppy. I found this post on wine's bugzilla that basically spells out my problem perfectly. A few post down, it has a .diff file listed that I already downloaded, and a few registry entries, when which I've already installed. Now how on earth do I go about applying the .diff file to the source and recompiling it? I know I have to get the source using cvs, as described here, but then what do I do? I don't even know where cvs put the source after I downloaded it? I tried looking at cvs's manpage, but its like 32902384 pages long, and I'm quite going mad because I'm not understanding a 5th of it all.

Could an expert walk me through it?

Do you have the cvs source downloaded? It should be in the directory you have run the commands in. Enter the wine/ dir and then run something like
patch -p0 < patch-x.x.x.diff
where patch-x.x.x.diff is name of the patch file (use it with full path if it's not in the same directory).

oh, uuuhh, I can't remember where I ran cvs.... But I do know I ran it, and it showed the files that it was copying over. How do I go about searching for it?

Then when I find the source and run that patch command, do I just do a ./configure, make install, or something different? Or will there be a Readme file to tell me how do do it?

Foobar2000 is a pretty decent player, I'll pay that a mate but how far have you looked for a linux replacement? I use MPD + gmpc and while gmpc is slightly less featured, there are other clients that I'd pit against foobar any day. Wine is messy, take a look at mpd and it's clients to see if one takes your eye.

A note because MPD is "different" from most media players so you don't get confused. MPD uses a client-server model. MPD itself is a server, it can't do anything really unless you send raw network packets to it. gmpc, kmpc etc are clients that connect to it and provide a pretty UI for you to use. These two look like they might do for you.

http://havtknut.tihlde.org/software/qmpdclient/
http://pympd.sourceforge.net/

The second poster seemed to have the patch instructions down, so I'll also say you should look for a replacement media player. One thing Linux certainly does have is variety. A few popular ones off the top of my head are amarok and xmms, but you can check out available software at places like:

www.freshmeat.net
www.sourceforge.net

Heck, it looks like there are native clones of foobar2000, and that's just from a simple quick search at sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?forum...of_search=soft

Remember that Wine will probably max your CPU, and that is a high price to pay just for a music player

should help if you have a recent locate database. If not:
but it taskes some time.

Yes, the standard way.