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Topic: Foobar beginner - (Read 7405 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar beginner -

Hi, I hope this doesn't offend people but...I've downloaded foobar2000 because I'm using CDBurner and their Help section recommends downloading it to get something called "Replay Gain".  I only have the vaguest idea how to do that, but once I downloaded it, I'm still unsure of what Foobar is or what it's actually supposed to do.  To my surprise, the Foobar website offered no information of what it is or how to use it. 

Is there somewhere that this might all be listed, some guide or instructions?  Or somebody (some patient somebody) who can explain it to a techno-idiot?

What...what  do I do with it?  What can I do with it?

Thanking you in advance,

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #2 –
"Foobar website offered no information"

Quote
foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform.

Main features
Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
Gapless playback.
Easily customizable user interface layout.
Advanced tagging capabilities.
Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
Full ReplayGain support.
Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

foobar2000 forums
Forums

foobar2000 wiki
Wiki


If that's still too complicated, it's an audio player. It plays your music. The suggested ReplayGain is a way to analyze said music and attempt normalizing them in a way so you don't have to constantly adjust your volume between tracks (or albums) because one was too loud and the other too quiet.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #3 –
Thanks - I got that it is, supposedly, an audio player.  I also managed to find a reddit page that looked actually helpful (Foobar guide) which I admired because it warned: "Foobar is not easy to use. It is unlike other media players that will work out the box. It will take some learning."

I still can't work out what it is that supposedly sets it apart from any other audio player like Media Monkey, but from what I've seen I guess if I have to ask, I'll never know - I'm just too stupid for it.  I've even followed the instructions, downloaded it, added my "media files"  and...it doesn't play them.  It just says "Playback stopped".  There's obviously some technical aspect I've missed, some box I was supposed to tick.

In the meantime, I'm afraid I've only just noticed the line on the top left of this that says that "This is NOT a tech support forum", so I guess I'm in the wrong place.

I apologise for wasting everyone's time, but thanks for your replies.

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #4 –
I'm guessing not.

After a bit of searching around, I found a reddit page (Reddit Foobar Guide.) that looked like it might help, but I've followed all the first instructions and, after loading my "media files" (a collection of several thousand Vorbis and mp3 encoded songs) found that...it won't play.  The tunes are there, listed on the left hand column, but when I click "play" it just says "playback stopped". 

So far, when I asked what Foobar is, the one thing everyone has told me, patiently, is that it's an audio player.  I'm not sure how it differentiates from Media Monkey, which I use to organise and synch my music files onto my portable music player (a Cowon X7, if it matters) but I'd have thought the minimum a music player should do is play music.

I've also tried to follow the instructions to download a columns component.  I don't know what it's supposed to do, but figured I'd follow the instructions and see if it became clear.  I successfully downloaded it, copied it to my desktop and then followed the instructions to add it to the player, but when I click on "components/Install" the component doesn't appear anywhere for me to add.  I know it's on my desktop, but Foobar doesn't seem to recognise it.

So, I'm trying but...is there a minimum level of technical ability and knowledge that I'm lacking?  Is it that if I have to ask, I'll never know?

thank you for your time and patience,

ADam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #5 –
The "General" forum is the right place for how-to questions. "Tech Support" is for getting help with crashes or when the application does not start. Your question fits better into the how-to category so I merged your two topics here.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Adam K on
The tunes are there, listed on the left hand column, but when I click "play" it just says "playback stopped".
Add your files to the playlist. You can do that by dragging them from the album list (the tree view on the left hand side) or directly from Windows Explorer. Then click the play button or directly double-click a playlist entry to start playback.

A general hint about foobar2000 components (a.k.a. plugins): ignore them unless you know what they are good for. It can be quite confusing for a newcomer to figure out which component provides a certain feature. Or whether that feature is part of the basic functionality of the application. Take it slow and only install components as need.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #7 –
Thanks, foosion - that's a very helpful reply, and it works. 

I'll confess, it strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive, but...well, it works.  Not sure where I go from here - I mean, I already have a couple of audio players.  So, again - what is it about Foobar that's supposed to set it apart?

Thanks again,

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #9 –
Thank you  - that was an interesting if somewhat frustrating read, and I can't say I'm any the wiser.  I'm afraid I really didn't understand what some of the posters were talking about.

Maybe I'm coming at it from a different direction:  I don't play my music through my computer.  In my office, where I have all my ripped files stored on an external hard drive attached to the PC I used to synch it to my music player, is an old but perfectly good stereo with a CD player, plus all my CDs.  Downstairs, is our household stereo, with an old amp/tuner and a fantastic newer marantz CD player and a mixture of my own CDs and my girlfriend's.  For my own personal use, I have my Cowon X7, which I listen to on the move (where I listen to most of my music these days) but I never play it through my computer, and as far as I can tell from what people are saying, this is what it's for.  Is that right?

It would be nice to do playlists, but try as I might, Cowon X7 doesn't do playlists without a degree in computing and several different pieces of software (one of which, I believe is foobar). 

So, if I don't play my music through my PC, don't really care what the interface looks like, am not skilled in tinkering and customising....is Foobar for me?

Again, I apologise if I sound obtuse or contrary.  I don't mean to be, I'm just really curious and always up for a bit of software that will make life easy for me.  But, so far, Foobar sounds like it would make life much more complicated!

Thanks again,

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #10 –
I think your requirement is to make all your songs sound more or less at the same perceived loudness.
You have searched about it and found replaygain. Searched for a software for that and found foobar2000.
But unfortunately foobar2000 doesn't look like what you expected, so you are wondering how to use it and what makes it different. This is what I can guess from the posts above.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #11 –
> I don't play my music through my PC [...] is Foobar for me?

I'd say: definitely not. The usual use case, at least for me, is that I am at my PC a lot (whether it's gaming or browsing or working), and I want some music to play, so I want a simple player that just does the job. Your case it a little unusual, since you were looking for bicycles and found a car.

But aside from playing music, it does a bunch of other things, like scanning and applying Replaygain, and ripping and burning audio CDs. There is other software that also does those things, so you don't particularly need foobar for it.

I find it strange that people say "Foobar is not easy to use. It is unlike other media players that will work out the box." because quite frankly, it works perfectly fine out of the box without the need for technical learning or tinkering or whatever. It's as if people think you need to program your own playback controls and library manager from scratch!

Right after installation you'll be prompted with a layout preset selector, and most include the library as a panel, so if you point it to your library, all your music should be visible immediately. Maybe there's a hitch in that process?

Foobar beginner -

Reply #12 –
I guess it depends on what you expect and how you approach the software. If you consider fancy looks and integration with a whole bunch of online services to be essential features of an audio player software then you might indeed be disappointed by a default installation of foobar2000. If you then search for ways to alleviate these shortcoming and come across a guide* telling you to download and configure a dozen different plugins then you might get the impression that foobar2000 is hard to use.

*: If you are lucky this guide tells you why you need all these plugins and what the different settings do. Even then you might be overwhelmed by the cryptic looking pieces of text you had to copy into all those different places. There are really powerful and flexible third-party plugins but this sometimes comes at the cost of a rather complex configuration.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #13 –
Maybe this will help.

Each of your music files probably has "tags" in them. These hold information like artist, title, album, track number, and so on, and maybe also some embedded cover art. Your player uses these to tell you what song is playing, and to show you the index of songs.

It's also possible for each file to have ReplayGain tags ... once added to the file, these tags will tell your Cowon X7 (or certain other players) how much to adjust the volume (and in which direction) during playback, so that the average volume is exactly the same from song to song ("track gain") or album to album ("album gain"). You still get to use your volume knob; it's just that you won't have to reach for it every time a new song comes on.

There's no room in most of those files to increase the volume at all without distortion, so the ReplayGain tags will usually be telling your player to turn the volume down a bit, with loud recordings being turned down more. They'll be turned down to about the same level as most pop music CDs were like in the '80s, before the "loudness wars" started.

All you need to do in order to add the tags to your files is load an album's worth of files into your foobar2000 playlist window (several ways to do this), highlight them all, right-click on one, and from the ReplayGain menu choose to "scan selection as a single album". Make sure that these files getting scanned all came from the exact same CD or digital download, and are not from different albums or even from different releases of the same album. Otherwise you need to use "scan per-file track gain" instead.

You'll get a results window where you can make sure everything looks good, then you can click a button to add the tags to the files.

Transfer the files to your X7 and see how they sound. Quieter and consistent, hopefully.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #14 –
I would suggest that a huge part of foobar2000's functionality (at least it has been in my case) is playing around with and exploring the program yourself, rather than looking for a guide to tell you what to do.

Like dhromed said, foobar2000 does quite a lot of things "out of the box." The trick is figuring out which of those things are relevant to you, then customizing the program to suit your needs.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #15 –
Hello,

Thank you all for your replies and apologies for not acknowledging them sooner - I only got one notification yesterday, but couldn't reply.  I'm afraid I haven't got foobar set up on this machine (well, I'm at work and they're funny about that sort of thing) but I will probably poke around it a bit and see what I can do with it.  I hadn't realised that it actually ripped and burnt CDs.  One of the answers posted said that it "supported" burning of CDs, but I'm afraid I was a bit too literal and didn't really understand what that meant.  I must go back to foobar and see - it wasn't apparent, but that may be part of the stripped-down charm.

If it burns and rips, does it do CD text?  I just, for the first time, actually paid for a CD burning/ripping program to compile CDs for the car, but then found out about CD text - this program didn't have it, which is why I started using CD Burner to actually compile and burn the tracks, but couldn't normalise the volume like my old Nemo used to.

Quote
Your case it a little unusual, since you were looking for bicycles and found a car.


Thanks, that made me laugh - I guess it might be true.

But I will play around with it for a bit and see what I can get.  I might be back with more intelligent questions, or not at all.

Thank you again,

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #16 –
It's still unclear whether your goal is to find a software for a particular functionality or only curiosity to explore about foobar2000.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Adam K on
If it burns and rips, does it do CD text?  I just, for the first time, actually paid for a CD burning/ripping program to compile CDs for the car, but then found out about CD text - this program didn't have it, which is why I started using CD Burner to actually compile and burn the tracks, but couldn't normalise the volume like my old Nemo used to.
Foobar doesn't support CD text but can apply replaygain during the burn. I've used CDBurnerXP that supports CD text and also can apply track replaygain. It's a free download as well.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #18 –
Well, it seems I've come full circle, then - I started out with CDBurner XP and wondering how I could get all the tracks on a CD I'd compiled the same volume level. I searched a CDBurner forum and found a reply that suggested the only way to do this was via foobar.  Now I find, thanks to this answer, that there actually is a tab that has to do with Replay Gain, although I suspect I've ticked the wrong box somewhere along the line.

So, thanks again for everyone's help.  You've been great.

Adam K

Foobar beginner -

Reply #19 –
As a newbie here myself, let me offer some thoughts in support of the OP.

I have been ripping my CDs to FLAC for years now. Originally, I used WinAmp, which worked ok, especially for CDs I made from my LPs (which must have everything entered manually). I have been using a simple folder system to organize my music, and it works very well for me on my PC and on my new Fiio X1 DAP. Currently, WinAmp does not seem to want to rip anything on my new PC, which I bought last year, so I've been looking for alternatives. WinAmp currently appears to be dead, and from what I can tell, it is not available for download. That's OK with me, and I am ready to move on (it had some irritating behaviours).

Some acquaintences suggested I try MediaMonkey instead. It has turned out to be extremely frustrating to manually label CDs for ripping with MM and I have all but given up on the program for that purpose.

So, here I am trying out Foobar2000. So far, so good. Maybe it doesn't have all the functionality of MM, but I really don't care; it seems quite streamlined, straightforward, and intuitive. I succesfully ripped my first CD to FLAC and manually labeled everything.

The problem I have with Foobar2000, MediaMonkey and the like, is that there seems to be no step-by-step guide for beginners. Maybe I have missed such a resource for Foobar2000, but with MM, there are wikis and resources that tell you all the great things the software is capable of, but very little explaining HOW to do things. What I need is a guide for beginners--a user's manual (Foobar2000 for Dummies!)

Nearly everybody on these forums seems to be very advanced users who have no need for such things. That is great, and I appreciate the help. However I think there is a knowledge gap here. I am unfamiliar with a lot of the jargon, and would like a resource that explains it all as well as HOW to carry out certain steps. As it turns out, poking around with Foobar2000 and trying things has worked pretty well for me so far.

But, I think it would be great if there were a beginners guide to ripping, burning, organizing, tagging, and how to get things done.

My thoughts.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #20 –
Quote from: Adam K on
Well, it seems I've come full circle, then - I started out with CDBurner XP and wondering how I could get all the tracks on a CD I'd compiled the same volume level. I searched a CDBurner forum and found a reply that suggested the only way to do this was via foobar.  Now I find, thanks to this answer, that there actually is a tab that has to do with Replay Gain, although I suspect I've ticked the wrong box somewhere along the line.
If I remember right, CDBurnerXP cannot calculate ReplayGain. You'd still need foobar2000 to calculate and update the RG tags on your files. Then if you continue to use CDBurnerXP for burning, it will read and apply RG from those tags.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #21 –
Quote
If I remember right, CDBurnerXP cannot calculate ReplayGain. You'd still need foobar2000 to calculate and update the RG tags on your files. Then if you continue to use CDBurnerXP for burning, it will read and apply RG from those tags.


I'm sorry, I have absolutely no idea what this means.  It looks like I was a tad optimistic.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #22 –
Quote from: Adam K on
Quote
If I remember right, CDBurnerXP cannot calculate ReplayGain. You'd still need foobar2000 to calculate and update the RG tags on your files. Then if you continue to use CDBurnerXP for burning, it will read and apply RG from those tags.


I'm sorry, I have absolutely no idea what this means.  It looks like I was a tad optimistic.
I just wanted to make sure you didn't think CDBurnerXP would handle everything from the start. It can't scan your music files and tag them with ReplayGain info. That's what we're using foobar for. CDBurnperXP is only going to handle the volume leveling during the burn (based on the Replaygain info we've calculated with foobar)..

As I was typing this reply, I found the whole process pretty well outlined here:
https://cdburnerxp.se/help/kb/7

Foobar beginner -

Reply #23 –
foobar2000's target audience is not like that of any other software I've ever loved, and indeed, I have loved few like foobar2000.

From our perspective here in 2015, you are correct to conclude that there are few features which clearly set foobar2000 apart, but this is true of any given software package. The reality is that when foobar2000 does something, it's done right. Peter was perhaps the one person in the world who could keep it together enough to hackfix Winamp's terribly-designed plugin architecture. When Nullsoft made it clear that their focus was on glitz and glam instead of functionality, Peter chose to do his own thing instead. It was instantly the best audio player I'd ever used, despite the early lack of features.

foobar2000 is about doing things correctly, broadly construed. Its audience is highly-technical and enjoys delving into the intricacies of obtaining the kind of music-playback workflow that they desire. foobar2000 enables that, while at the same time, providing a framework in which to do it well, not just to do it. When I began using foobar2000 as my primary player was when the Masstagger component was released. Until foobar2000, there was no software that I could trust to tag with. I had tried every last program I could find, and they had all failed me or let me down at one point or another. foobar2000 worked and it worked brilliantly.

The no-compromise approach was recapitulated by its approach to MP3-tagging. It was a very long time until Peter even began to contemplate supporting ID3v2 as a first-party tagging form, because ID3v2 is an over-specified, under-engineered crapshoot with dozens of half-broken implementations. Instead, he used a better tagging form: APEv2. APEv2 is close to Vorbis comments, which is to say that it is simple and effective.

These days, when at my PC, my music player of choice is usually "play /mnt/drive/folder", as I've switched to Linux, but I don't bother with any other Windows software. Nothing does it as right as reliably as foobar2000, and this remains true today.

The biggest practical upshot to doing it right, and reliably is two-fold: 1. It's very, very fast. This will be the biggest differentiator with (dis)respect to MediaMonkey, which uses slow-ass, heavy relational constructs.  2. You can reason abstractly about what you wish to do with the confidence that you will be able to do it. Again, 2 seems awkward to contemplate today, but until the last few years, there were still very few audio players who could do this reliably, and foobar2000 has never done it unreliably.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #24 –
Thank you.  There's not much I can say to any of this, other than that foobar2000 is definitely way over my head, and obviously not for me.

Again, thank you all for your patience.