I like foobar2000. It's the best player ever.
Say your words.
First version of foobar that I used was some 0.2x version and even then it was love at first sight (I instantly made it my default player, bye bye Winamp). I just loved the simplicity and the fact that it was already by then really customizable and - the perhaps the biggest reason - it actually looks like it belongs on my desktop as it uses the standard Windows GUI, which was the thing I had been searching for ages.
The interface is great, it lets me scan everything with ReplayGain, and it has a really, really nice SDK.
It is highly customizable, supports many many formats out of the box, it's not overloaded with crap, it plays music...
because it sounds great.
I use foobar as my primary player since 0.3x version. When I saw foobar for the first time, I was disappointed by it's ascetic interface (I love nice skins ), but this simplicity is the power of foobar! Few weeks later I found some very useful plugins, I learned string formatting techniques, and today I would not change foobar to any other player!
I love foobar!!!
I use it because of the large playlist window!
I use Columns UI to make it look exactly like I want!
In players like WA if you wanted all the info I have in my playlist! you would have to make a large playlist window and you could not make it look as good!
Formatting String is a cool feature!
Other things:
The DSP system
Memory use
Format Support
TABS as playlists
All the nice settings
--
Neksus
The three most important reasons are:
-Formatting strings (the default UI is still my favourite)
-Replaygain
-The ability to customize everything.
I also appreciate what I experience as a the focus on quality, in the sense that everything is well thought through. Even things that seems to work just fine are improved further (e.g. speed of Replaygain scanning) and hackish solutions is avoided (as far as possible I guess). Nifty features like playlist tabs are great, and there are quite a few useful plugins too. It's all those little things in addition to the three main reasons that makes me enjoy it so much. It has had a great impact on the way I listen to music and I would say that it has enhanced my listening experience. I have also had alot of fun making formatting strings and now looks for foo_looks. So it goes without saying that I don't agree with this statement:
foo_looks is a crap
IMHO it's a great plugin for it's use, and my case that is as a now playing/"remote control" feature.
foobar is great because:
* Small memory footprint
* Formatting strings
* Gapless playback
* Tabbed playlists
* Replaygain support/scanning
There are a lot of reasons to like foobar, these are just the reasons that make me love it the most though.
Non-bloated
I use it because I like
* the interface
* global hotkeys
* the amount of options
ALL OF THE ABOVE!!
Honestly though, Foobar2K is the only program where I'm extremely eager to see updates - not because of a buggy nature - but because it seems that with each update (core/component,) Foobar just keeps getting better and better.
My system specs can handle any bloated multimedia managers thrown at it, but Foobar stands out because of it's intuitive configuration, album management, small footprint, and above all else, interface-configurability (upNorth and Neksus are the ones to thank here.)
... plays music.
(Serious answer. Other players do that but they also p*ss me off in various ways. Foobar2000 only rarely p*sses me off, so it's my favourite player).
There, the author can use my line aswell:
"Foobar. Plays Music. Won't p*ss you off [as much as other players]"
I can't think of anything right now, but nothings perfect. Umm. i'll get back to you
Beacuse my girlfriend won't let me use anything else.....
1) Best Sound
2) Best GUI when used with Foo_tunes
3) ReplayGain
4) Best Sound
And the most important, Best Sound
"Foobar. my girlfriend won't let me use anything else"
yeah that's an even better tagline.
Seriously girls seem to like foobar, from my (limited) experience. Not sure if that's praise or criticism (flame suit on )
Girls dig cats, and guys dig llamas.
Girls dig cats, and guys dig llamas.
that's a good one
i switched cause i really never liked winamp. i always had it minimized and didn't care for vis or skins. Plus, having the playlist right there with play buttons and global hotkeys is nothing to pass up on. FORMATTING STRINGS!
Yup, I like foobar2000. It's the best player ever. It has no skin support (foo_looks is a crap), so what? Some ppl don't like it just because of this.
Anyway, it rules.
Say your words, ppl.
1) Great SDK so I can make crap I enjoy making
2) Great plugin architecture so I can choose which crap to use
3) Active forum which I don't use to pan the crap I don't use
i love...
* custom shortcuts/hotkeys
* string formatting
* eye-saving interface
i dislike...
* low documented sdk
* not open source
Because for some reason concert traders have standardized on NOT tagging files and NOT putting the song title in the file name but rather putting the setlist and other info in a text file. Foobar can (with an extension) tag and name the tracks based on the text file.
no bloat
no ugly overly graphical skin
kernel streaming
and just about everything else
being the opensource/beta junkie i am, i tried fb2k back when i heard about it (around 0.5) and instantly deleted winamp.
all i ever used in winamp was the playlist view, with a few choice plugins to enhance audio quality and remove gaps.
this was all in fb2k and more - it's the perfect player for people who just want *MUSiC* and not some ugly bloaty skin.
i'm getting more and more of my friends into it lately. it seems to be the player of choice for people who are really into music
I think the thing I like most about it is the minimalistic interface combined with the incredible flexibility of use.
It's just a (highly customizable) window with some nice DSPs. What more do you need?
I still use Winamp, because I'm addicted to the Adapt-X plugin (http://capricorn.lunarpages.com/~chrono5/content.php?page=products#adaptx), which allows me to run DirectX plugins. I'll have to take a look at this foo_colvolver thingy I've heard about, to see if I can make a fingerprint of my current DirectX plugin settings and apply them to Foobar.
Edit: yay, foo_convolver works, this thread finally converted me to Foobar! Bye, Winamp, it's been fun...
my reasons:
0) perfect interface - love not being forced to have buttons or a seekbar clutter up my screen. The only look I touch personally is the interface from the first release.
1) supports everything (aside from dinosaurs like VQF) 'out of the box' or by adding a simple .dll file
2) powerful diskwriter -only reason I upgraded to 0.8 actually
3) ideal for those who are keyboard-centric
one minor gripe, nothing big though:
has an installer from 0.7 on (APE 3.98 support was the only reason I upgraded from 0.6), much preferred the .zip versions and manual file associations. At least the installer is unobstrusive and avoids the 'write 500 registry entries' syndrome like some programs out there.
All of the above...
I love Foobar because it can do everything related to playing music.
With this program I can replaygain, tag, convert and search for my music files, all in one place.
And I can configure everyting I want.
It's one of the programs keeping me from switching my main operating system to linux.
pro:
- low memory usage
- foo tunes (it's great!)
- dsp
- formatting
- available components
About foo-looks: it could be a good feature, but I don't need it simply because I'm using foobar scripts for BlackBox :-)
Yup, I like foobar2000. It's the best player ever. It has no skin support (foo_looks is a crap), so what? Some ppl don't like it just because of this.
Anyway, it rules.
Say your words, ppl.
Wow that was totally rude and inconsiderate. foobar2000 is free and so are all of the plugins so the least you could do is show some appreciation.
1) kernel streaming/ASIO
2) low memory usage
3) replaygain
4) foo_convolver
5) the formatting playlist!!!
6) native mpc
7) dithering
i can find more
simply it's the best PLAYER!!!!!!
THE BEST!
i have used musicmatch, winamp, quintessential... and one day a friend converts me 8 months ago
alléluiah...
1) formatting strings, for playlist (thx upNorth) and albumlist
2) uses Windows GUI by default
3) Replaygain
4) global keyboard shortcuts
5) good choice of 3rd party components!
the reason is
1.look simple to use
2.full power
3.wonderful quality of sound
4.less system resource
5.better used in old computer
everything looks like professional.
SO I LIKE IT
Beacuse my girlfriend won't let me use anything else.....
1) Best Sound
2) Best GUI when used with Foo_tunes
3) ReplayGain
4) Best Sound
And the most important, Best Sound
sounds better?
how? proof?
I use it cause its clean, simple, 40GB of music can be organized. can convert from ape,flac, mpc to mp3 (mp3 player) quickly. good tagger, good renamer
Main five reasons among a lot more :
1. Flexibility of the playlist,
2. Native support of a lot of audio formats,
3. Tagging capabilities & flexibility (APEv2),
4. ReplayGain,
5. Not bloated.
Edit: typo
Beacuse my girlfriend won't let me use anything else.....
1) Best Sound
2) Best GUI when used with Foo_tunes
3) ReplayGain
4) Best Sound
And the most important, Best Sound
sounds better?
how? proof?
FYI: Best = There's nothing better but there can be others that are equal. In this special case: "Best sound" *can* mean "Many other players may sound the same, but no player sounds better for sure". Problem solved I guess.
Made FOR people with ears BY people with ears.
Best = There's nothing better but there can be others that are equal
best ( P ) Pronunciation Key (bst)
adj. Superlative of good.
Surpassing all others in excellence, achievement, or quality; most excellent: the best performer; the best grade of ore.
Most satisfactory, suitable, or useful; most desirable: the best solution; the best time for planting.
Greatest; most: He spoke for the best part of an hour.
Most highly skilled: the best doctor in town.
adv. Superlative of well2.
In a most excellent way; most creditably or advantageously.
To the greatest degree or extent; most: “He was certainly the best hated man in the ship” (W. Somerset Maugham).
n.
One that surpasses all others.
The best part, moment, or value: The best is still to come. Let's get the best out of life.
The optimum condition or quality: look your best. She was at her best in the freestyle competition.
One's nicest or most formal clothing.
The supreme effort one can make: doing our best.
One's warmest wishes or regards: Give them my best.
+ Title formatting
+ Converter
+ Masstagger
+ Replaygain
+ Gapless playback
+ supports many formats
+ no skin
ReplayGain, SSRC, Kernel Streaming
Port it to Linux and there will be nothing to dislike!
The lack of dynamic playlists is why I haven't chosen foobar2000.
Rob
It's simple, but yet powerful.
It fits great in Windows GUI.
It has great systray integration.
It's incredible l33tness.
Nothing more to say.
1) flawless *gapless* replay of my LAME archive.
2) ASIO. allowing the SPDIF out on my M-Audio card to work properly, and thence feed my treasured dual-18-bit *multibit* Audio Alchemy DAC (I guess kernal streaming would also work).
I need absolutely nothing more from a player.
RF
1) out of the box best sounding player IMO
2) tabbed playlists
3) native file support for everything! I love .cue's for all my ape single file cd rips
4) customizable UI, simple yet powerful
I like foobar because:
It's playlist-centric, rather than whatever one would call Winamp. I have a lot of tracks, and I want to work with them all, not just look at the pause / play / skip buttons.
Conversion.
ReplayGain.
MassTagger, especially with the "trader's friend" plugin.
Format strings. They aren't perfect or anything, but I can do pretty much everything I need to with them.
APEv2 tags.
Did I miss anything?
I initially loved it because it takes up the least RAM ever. I've come to love it for lots of other reasons--the fantastically flexible DSP and the sheer usefulness of the diskwriter, for instance.
Why do I like foobar?
1. Formats: supports my new fav format .mpc (musepack) out of the poverbial box.
2. I don't look at it other than when I'm changing the playlist around, and I tend to run through long strings of entire albums, so it plays nicely in the tray.
3. Memory.
4. Replaygain!
5. See 4, and hug k-14 headroom while you are at it
My reasons :
+ playlist capability (I always load one playlist containing my whole 17,000 audio files collection, and another with the same playlist minus some albums I don't like at the moment). Winamp would usually crash at no more than 1000 files.
+ native MPC
+ masstagger & massrenamer (scripts, access to freeddb)
+ APE tags native support (allows all kinds of custom tags)
+ playlist formatting (combined with APE custom tags)
+ replaygain
+ foo_pl_hopper (jumping from one album to the next, just using my remote control, is just great)
+ "copy names" function (customisable!)
(edit :
+ tabbed playlists
+ gapless lame playback)
A few cons only:
- not so good looking GUI (aliased fonts & buttons, no check boxes)
- default volume control (no GUI controls, waiting time when turning it up or down)
- not so intuitive menus (Preferences)
- (seemingly) buggy progress bar
support lots of format
small
less memory
teh pow4r
that is all
I like small and simple ... I can use it that way with confidence that if ever I want to make things complicated, that too is possible.
For shuffle-random play music while I work, there's nothing better.
Powerful tagging system (with personal fields generation / displaying / sorting: I need them for my music), and large playlist window.
I love the fact that it is so flexible and configurable. I love the fact that as well as being a great audio player it also does related tasks such as masstagging and audio conversion so well. I love the fact that it is continually being improved and yet doesn't seem to get bloated, just better.
I do think it's a slight shame that files such as database.foo, foobar2000.cfg and the .fpl files are in a binary, non-readable format. I can understand this might be necessary for performance reasons but I would love to be able to take two copies of such files and compare them side by side in a difference tool like Beyond Compare. Perhaps the ability could be added to export and import the preferences and database as text files? But anyway that's a minor issue.
I guess overall I just feel that foobar2000 is a really well-written, stable and useable piece of software.
Why have I chosen foobar2000?
Because guruboolez somehow convinced me to have a try.
Because I'm worth it.
Because I'm worth it.
LMAO!
hmm...
Replaygain
convolver
SSRC
ABX
disk writer
all i need is the ability to play the sound from avs files and it'll be utterly perfect. i'd write the plugin myself but i'm not a programmer...
i love foobar2k b'coz of its...
* powerful simplicity
* design/logic behind the player
* fantastic user-interface (great songlist w/ infos, tabbed and it feels very responsive)
* replaygain support
* flexible format strings
* masstagging plugin
* many useful/different plugins (foo_osd rocks beside some others)
* multimedia keys support
* partly open source/gnu (freedom to change)
* great community
i'd like to see a linux port and maybe real columns in the list.
a big thank you to all the developers!
maybe real columns in the list.
This is already possible with:
Columns UI by musicmusic!
musicmusic's foobar2000 page (http://members.lycos.co.uk/musicf/)
--
Neksus
maybe real columns in the list.
This is already possible with:
Columns UI by musicmusic!
musicmusic's foobar2000 page (http://members.lycos.co.uk/musicf/)
thanks! i'll check it out..
Really, nothing to say more.
my favorite ui is foo_ui_columns, it's very flexible thing, and also with Azrael config, you have to see that if you haven't.
you can download it here:
http://columns.outerspase.net/ (http://columns.outerspase.net/)
Simplicity is all!
i dig its simplicity ... and its power. they are like one and the same. as many, i also love columns ui ... and i vote that it replace the existing ui
i think though there are some things that need working on, but considering it's not even one version (0.8) old, it's pretty solid.
my hitlist (i may have mentioned some of these elsewhere):
1) the ability to control foobar components from the playlist ... that way different playlists make certain things behave differently (this was something tossed around for winamp 3)
2) a more customizable interface ... i'm putting together a flash movie that i think will explain this ... and i know when people see what i'm talking about, they'll totally dig it. it breaks elements like seekbars, visualizations, playback controllers, etc. into individual dlls ... so if you don't like the default seekbar, just replace the original dll with another. why rewrite the entire ui (foo_std_ui vs. foo_columns_ui) if you just want to change one element. this may make foobar a little slower and use a bit more resources, but i think the sacrifice will be worth it. plus ram is dirt cheap now, so go buy some more. you're helping the economy anyways.
EDIT: it appears that there's an 0.8.1 out now ... happy 0.8.1 birthday foobar!
I have choosen F2K because:
- It is small, fast, and needs few memory.
- The GUI is simple and features the native Windows look.
- Reads lots of file formats.
- It's free.
I use it on all my machines and I really love it
Pluses
- Interface (with UI Columns !)
- Global shortcuts
- Replaygain
- Masstagger
- The equalizer is very accurate
- All settings (dithering, outputs, ...)
- Some VERY cool DSPs (foo_infobox, foo_dsp_continuator, foo_freedb, foo_ui_columns ...)
Minuses
- skips on some older machines (I have an AMD Duron based PC for instance, it's impossible to use Equalizer + Continuator DSPs without skippings in the sound - too bad)
- no localized versions (It's not a problem for me, but this software will never be popular on no english speaking countries until this problem is fixed)
Marc
1. It does what I want it to do.
2. It doesn't do what I don't want it to do.
That's all.
1. It does what I want it to do.
2. It doesn't do what I don't want it to do.
That's all.
Haha END OF THREAD right there!
It is highly customizable, supports many many formats out of the box, it's not overloaded with crap, it plays music...
exactly
Not my main player. I need (expandable/colapsable) directory support in the playlist. Pretty much like albumlist plugin, but in the playlist itself. Albumlist is kinda crappy, IMO.
I'm addicted to Foobar. Here's what snagged me and even prompted me to uninstall my other players:
Tabbed playlists
Tagging and freedb interaction
Scriptable everything!!! Esp - tagging
SUPPORT FOR JAPANESE!!! This was my biggest gripe with winamp
Why do so many audio players try to look like stereos? That's what I love about Foobar - it actually lets me DO things with my music. If only burning didn't require Nero...
Let's see:
I love it because of more reasons each day. When I originally tried it (many versions ago) I was hooked because the MAIN thing I was looking for was a player with the ability to full screen the playlist and be speedy when navigating through hundreds of songs. This alone orginally did it for me. Now, whenever I get the time, I mess around with all of the other goodies it has to offer and I am finding that it can do things I was never aware of! Also, it sounds great, with the special installer I was quickly able to play anything...including some of my old Amiga MODS and C64 SIDS, and the damn thing doesn't skip the songs when I perform other PC tasks...like some players I know!
i choose foobar, because winamp couldn't properly play 32bit-float-files.
I didn't choose foobar2000, it chose me...
well, seriously...
It has everything I need, one of the biggest points being the main window...
Meh, not feeling too poetic, and this post in totally pointless... well, man has to try his best
I have tried many audio players over the years. What most attracts me to foobar2000 is the elegant default ui and the control given me by having all those options availible to be set by me, instead of what some developer thought at-the-time would be best for me to use. It will play anything, and with the very best cutting edge technology around.
The developers seem to care more about the music than making it look less like a computer and more like a fancy stereo. Though I will say a dancing-lights plugin would be fun sometimes.. or at least an update to bubbla! The merging of light and sound fascinates me and computers are really good for that sort of thing. Unlike stereos.
- mpc, aac, flac playback out of the box
- replaygain
- diskwriter
- nice gui
- and gazillion of other reasons.
foobar 2000, eh?
It does stuff.
And some of its users make me laugh.
Plenty.
well i don't like having to make/find a new winamp skin everytime i theme a new desktop, and i use litestep to skin the front end anyway, so i just needed a powerful playlist manager and good sound. foobar has both of these things.
Well, I've been a supporter of Winamp for several years. I've heard about Foobar2000 for a while but several days ago, I decided to download & try out Foobar & I love it. Last Saturday, I got rid of Winamp in favor of Foobar2000. First of all, this program isn't full of crap like Winamp is & best of all, Foobar is more stable than Winamp & uses less memory. The Winamp versions which I have used are Winamp versions 2 & 3 but I don't like Winamp 5 cause it's full of stuff which I would probably never use. This is the main reason why I like Foobar. Foobar isn't full of stuff which I would never use.
But the main reason why I got rid of Winamp (version 2.91) is that it would lock up frequently & it wouldn't allow me to stream audio from the Internet (it would lock up when I stream).
I have been a user of Winamp since I got to know about it (about 3 years ago), I loved the skinning-possibility...that's what I liked.
Now I am more of a geek, and I continued to use Winamp, til version 5 came, it was buggy, slow, and froze many times a day....
Then I got my broadband, but only on my slow computer, we haven't fixed network yet, it is only 300 mhz. I tried Winamp, but it was way too slow for my computer, even with classical skins.
I remembered Foobar2000 from when I tried it 1 year ago, but then I hated it, it was soo ugly.
I downloaded it, and first I hated the playlist-formatting, but after a few days, I had downloaded a few formattings from that formatting site, and then I loved it. I loved how you could have multiple dsp plugins at the same time, not just one as in Winamp.
I have programmed in C++ earlier, but it never went anywhere, I just wrote a few console programs that did nothing fun, but I started with foobars playlist-formatting, and then I was caught. I installed Foobar on my fast computer, even though it can handle Winamp.
+:
Great sound quality
Always looks like mine WindowBlinds theme
Advanced Title Formatting
File Converter
FreeDB
All the great plugins
Not eating resources
Nice and helpful people on the forums
Highly customizable
Starts in like 3 seconds, Winamp starts in 20
Tab-playlists
Recording
-
No video playback
I'm also a converted Winamp user. WA 5 is a bit buggy and Foobar uses less memory.
The only thing I don't like about Foobar is that I still haven't gotten my media keys to work, wich worked well with Winamp.
I'm sure I could have come up with more good reasons for loving Foobar2000 But here goes;
- Plays everything I need it to play
- Gapless MP3's with newer lame
- lightweight
- Replaygain
- Powerful (mass)tagging support
- No crappy skins, but conforms(?) to the standard Windows UI
- Crappy skins through plugin
- Great diskwriter for easy transcoding (I transcode a lot from flac -> ogg for my portable)
Things I miss
- Plugin to boil tea... I drink a lot of tea
Thats about it...
This seems to be like a hymn to FB2K!
Ok...my pro's and con's:
+ the careing community (THX to all of you)
+ the typical things like DSP's, quality, simplicity
+ I used it for quite some time now without complications!!!
+ components or in other words...plug-in's (without it Foobar would b dead!!)
------------
- no simple/advanced mode for newbies: predefined settings (i.e. eq, formatting strings)
- terrible "Preferences" window; from the point of usability
- NO useful documentation/help/description of SDK or components AT ALL
- it's supposed to be most flexible but some ideas are just called BAD (like cover art in ID3)
- standard icons..uhh kiddie style! [sorry but doesn't really fit the simplicity concept]
---i like it---
JD
//edit: one more con
I don't use it because it can't handle DirectX/VST plugins.
There isn't Adapt-X like plugin for foobar2000, or any direct support.
I can't live without "iZotope Ozone" plugin, without it, all sound is "crappy".
Every other is absolutely perfect!
ok, after using Winamp for - well, it's so long, I don't remeber - ..., I changed two days ago to Foobar 2000. I already experimentated with a little bit with title formating and other options... and now Foobar is my (default) audio-player! Here my first impressions:
+ simple, understandable, logical design
+ Album List - better than Winamps library, because of:
+ title formating / strings. Now I'm able to sort my Albums in the Album List by year ([1992]Opiate, [1993]Undertow, [1996] AEnima, [2000] Salival, [2001] Lateralus, not AEnima, Lateraus, Opiate, Salival, Undertow ) and I can see the remaining and the elapsed time of the played song at the same time...
+ fast
+ free
+ often new releases, as I observed it
+ playing shoutcast
+ tabbed playlists
and so more things that I just don't remember now
Anyway, there remain some things that should be improved, are negative, are missing:
- ugly interface. Well I don't want skins. But these Icons (play, stop, etc.) and this visualizer (grey on grey???!!!) are horrible.
- there should be more buttons - e.g. open / close Album List or Options-Menu in the toolbar. I tried foo_tunes, but don't like it somehow
- maybe it should somehow be possible to integrate the album list into the main window. I use it very often. So have it nearly always opened. I don't need the playlist to be as wide as my screen. There is enaugh space for the album list.... Hope you understand what I mean!
A wolf in sheeps clothing. What I mean is, foobar looks so simple/streamlined at first sight, but when you look deeper, you realise how powerful it realy is.
- ugly interface. Well I don't want skins. But these Icons (play, stop, etc.) and this visualizer (grey on grey???!!!) are horrible.
- there should be more buttons - e.g. open / close Album List or Options-Menu in the toolbar. I tried foo_tunes, but don't like it somehow
Try ui_columns by musicmusic, if you haven't tried yet. This component supports real columns, different foreground/background colors for visualizer and this plugin is alot cooler than foo_tunes and less crappy.
For now here (http://members.lycos.co.uk/musicf/) version 0.1 is available, but there're links for 0.1.1 beta version on ui_columns forum thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=17881&view=getnewpost) at HA.
why i love Foobar2000?
+ > kernel streaming, strong ATH noise shapping dithering
+ > masstagger, rename files, and freedb
+ > simple formatting string
+ > few memory RAM usage
+ > musepack and vorbis native core
Try ui_columns by musicmusic, if you haven't tried yet. This component supports real columns, different foreground/background colors for visualizer and this plugin is alot cooler than foo_tunes and less crappy.
For now here version 0.1 is available, but there're links for 0.1.1 beta version on ui_columns forum thread at HA.
I had tried it before... Now I tested it again. Chagend the colours of the visualizer. And somehow these columns are quiete good, though the simple look of the playlist was ok for me... And columns are very ugly, when I listen to a http-Stream, because then nearly all of the columns are empty or there are questionmarks... For now I will use cloumn_ui...
And it was quite difficult to change the colours of the paylist (216216216|555555555$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(103,136,201),$rgb(028,062,125))|$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(103,136,201),$rgb(103,136,201))|$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(204,208,212),$rgb(103,136,201))) now... I'm not a programmer, it was not easy for me to get my blue (stolen from Winamps default skin...)... But thanks for your hint, yandexx.
It would be really cool, if they would implement the album list into the main-window, as it is discussed in the thread you gave a link to...
I have yet to find a better tool. Nothing I know comes close to it.
Clean, simple, fexible and powerful.
Enjoy!
foobar is THE BEST.....with my 5.1 setup nothing can touch it.....with all the DSPs and 24 fixed point with dithering.....it's hardcore....and the playlist formatting and everything u can customize!!!!! theres no reason for anything else!
I agree to JEN, it is more powerful than it seems to be, the orginal title-formatting looks like crap.
It sounds better than winamp with my 4.1 setup, even better than winamp with the sound enhancer that takes 45 % cpu, foobar takes 0% for me (!!)
I don't use it much at present. I may switch to it eventually. Right now I mainly use it as the swiss army knife when I'm trying to do something with a tune and I don't have any specific program to do it.
My main objection is that it starts out overly simplistic and takes way too much effort to make it actually have a useful interface. Okay, configurability = good, but I think foobar takes it a bit to extremes in this aspect.
If it looked good and was more usable from the inital install, I might use it more. But the interface to a new user consists of a list of songs that you put into it and a few buttons. Not even a EQ or volume control or anything. Look, I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel and design my own music player here. Give me a nice interface that does everything I want it to do. Make plugins have logical locations in the menu hierarchy instead of being all over the map. Organize, man. It's just too chaotic for everyday use and I don't want to spend all my time changing the way it works.
I researched in Trillian as well.
About the components problem: I edited my post...but
Foobar exists of components so the headline "Components" is rather imprecise because you'd expect ALL comps to be gathere there or not?
(It's really difficult to put myself in a 1.timers place!)
What is more important; to sort the prefs by origin or by function?
JD
i was only thinking of "general" components listed under components in prefs. input/outpus etc. are already handeled different, as they are more "part" of the main functionality.
regards; ilikedirt
I have one main gripe against foobar, It almost destroys the whole good impression I got of the program, why oh why does it strip the the tags you don't write to? That annoys me alot, I understand why people want it do it, but why not let the user choose, instead of forcing him to strip the tags?
AtW
- no bloat no unnecessary visual gimmix
- modular
- replaygain, some plugins I need
- I know the dev loves his product an I am heard if I report things
Try ui_columns by musicmusic, if you haven't tried yet. This component supports real columns, different foreground/background colors for visualizer and this plugin is alot cooler than foo_tunes and less crappy.
For now here version 0.1 is available, but there're links for 0.1.1 beta version on ui_columns forum thread at HA.
I had tried it before... Now I tested it again. Chagend the colours of the visualizer. And somehow these columns are quiete good, though the simple look of the playlist was ok for me... And columns are very ugly, when I listen to a http-Stream, because then nearly all of the columns are empty or there are questionmarks... For now I will use cloumn_ui...
And it was quite difficult to change the colours of the paylist (216216216|555555555$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(103,136,201),$rgb(028,062,125))|$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(103,136,201),$rgb(103,136,201))|$if(%_isplaying%,$rgb(204,208,212),$rgb(103,136,201))) now... I'm not a programmer, it was not easy for me to get my blue (stolen from Winamps default skin...)... But thanks for your hint, yandexx.
It would be really cool, if they would implement the album list into the main-window, as it is discussed in the thread you gave a link to...
see here, columns ui formatting strings database (http://foobar.nub4life.net/columns/)
There you will find winamp-look(s) and many other simple and very advanced configs to import into columns UI.
why oh why does it strip the the tags you don't write to?
I write APEv2 and ID3v1 with foobar2000, and all ID3v2 tags are left alone. Neither modified, nor deleted...
Discussion about preferences redesign split to here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/showtopic/22584).
why oh why does it strip the the tags you don't write to?
I write APEv2 and ID3v1 with foobar2000, and all ID3v2 tags are left alone. Neither modified, nor deleted...
If you don't install id3v2-support, that is true in my case too, but if i do, I loose the tags, besides, that still leaves the problem of writing the RG-info to the id3v2-tags without stripping the APE-tag.
AtW
@ATWindsor:
But all sane people use either Apv2+ID3v1 or ID3v2+ID3v1, don't they?
Sorry, I couldn't resist, because IIRC you said in another thread that you wanted all three tag types. Thus it occurs to me as a self inflicted problem, caused by, at least to me, unnecessary redundance. The purpose of my last post, was to point out that your claim wasn't the whole truth, that's all. I also expected the ID3v2 plugin to cause it, as I don't use it myself.
I understand your problem though, and as most things in foobar can be configured to suit personal preference, even if everyone else might find it useless, that's not the case here.
Btw: As this is off topic, I won't discuss this any further in this thread.
I'm YAWC (yet another winamp convert). Been on winamp for well, nearly 6-7 years now and figured it was time for a change. After seeing SO many screenshots of foobar on neowin.net I figured I might give it a go. I really like how it fits in EXACTLY with my theme. Also, the past few winamp versions havent exactly been 'compatible' with my machine, with 5.03 basically not working at all.
The only real 'beef' I have with foobar would be the lack of a media library as such (like winamps). I'm used to having my music seperated first by artist, then by album, but being able to combine multiple albums should I choose to. I may swap back to winamp at some stage, but for the time being i'm loving this new app on my pc
The closest thing to the Winamp media library in foobar would be the album list or foo_dbsearch.
If you use foo_dbsearch, you can do something like this:
If you want to search for 1980s music, you'll just search for %date%=1980, then if you can't decide what to listen and want to go for some genre (ie Rock), you can just add there %genre%=Rock (so the pattern would be %date%=1980 %genre%=Rock). If you still can't make your mind and use for example the %rating% tag, you could still add a %rating%>4 to get all 1980s rock songs that you have rated over 4 It's maybe not as easy as Winamp's media library, but I find it even more powerful. And also remember to use quotes when the search has multiple words (so you should use %album%="From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah", not %album%=From the Muddy...).
Oh, and to search for music made in the whole 1980s decade, you could use either %date%~198 (yes, no zero there) or %date%>1979 %date%<1990
I used to musicmatch jukebox, the I switched to Media Jukebox but I found it to be a little resource heavy as well as not free. Then someone pointed me to foobar2000. Ever since then it has been my favorite audiplayer. Reasons:
+Plays EVERYTHING i've tried to play with it, aside from video.
+Customizable in everyway imaginable.
+a great community of nice people if you have any trouble.
+and simply because it kicks a--!
Downsides:
-a stereo to 5.1 upmixing dsp would be nice.
-would be usefull to be able to play dvd or other media.
-a somehow improved albumlist or watch folder thing would be nice, can't say I ever use it now.
All in all I don't see myself using anything else in the near future for my audio needs.
I just discovered fb2k today. For me the big thing - actually, the deciding thing - is the memory footprint and low resource usage.
I do graphic design, which chews up system resources like crazy. Any program that isn't design-related has to be as lean and clean as possible. There's no Outlook or Office on this system, and I even swapped out Norton's bloatware for something leaner.
I have a licensed version of MusicMatch, but it's such a hog that I never use it. I finally got tired of working in silence, so I went looking for an mp3 player that can just load up a few hours worth of music and play it without getting in my way... It looks like fb2k is going to do that just fine.
However, I do wish that it had some documentation or a readme file geared toward the audio-idiot. Audio is just not one of my areas of competence!
I use it for the .shn and .flac support. It rules!
What I would like to see is better options for configuring the columns. I find "foo_ui_columns" very difficult to understand.
[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']Thanks for foobar![/span]
I like Foobar because all of the things mentioned before plus one thing
IT LOOKS GREAT
..wouldn't change it for anything
Before it i used winamp and Quintessential (most visually stunning player i ever seen)
I started to use foob from version 0.7 beta 2. It's best `coz:
1. It is tiny and fast.
2. Other players sounds too bad on my HUGE speakers (Estonia 70W - made in USSR)
3. Good Multimedia Keyboard support
4. Lots of useful plugins!
- It's easier to handle than these skinned players with small buttons and distracting color shemes
- And what's more important it's very versatile
- It's small and starts up fast
- It's the best audio player around
Well that i love most about foobar is its philoshophy.
I started using foobar as my main player when it didnt had even a seekbar. But i knew what peter was thinking on how an audio player should be, and that was enough to make me stay. Stability and performance at top' not sacrifising them for skins etc0. Every feature of it has great functionality, simply cause is made to play music in a correct way free of the commercial bloatness of nowdays.(btw its meticulous seekbar now its the best as the most of its features).
Now i m not even thinking of other players, IMHO foobar overwhelms them all, at least to the way i use an audio player: listening music at home. Also there many people outthere considering the same about foobar the time that one of its greatest features,its open architecture, is yet unexplored.
All the above evangelize only good days to come for our favourite player!!cheers :)
Clean simple and it works.
oh and its not microsoft.....
Simple look, but inside is very powerful, stable, generic tag editor(i love it!!!), and many more...
It's my default audio player
I've been using foobar 2000 for a while now but I would have to admit it's a very "get your hands dirty" sort of player. For the first few weeks I had foobar i was going nuts with it, tweak this, tweak that, what does this do, what does that do, whoops shouldn't have done that.
I can still remember trying to learn how to change the way the playlist looked, I must have stuck my head in the fan numerous times to figure that out, but when I got it right I was pretty proud of myself, like taming the beast. Once you figure the logic behind the display system you understand that it's for maximum control, you can pretty much display anything with it.
The main feature that made me turn from winamp to foobar was the replaygain feature and the ability of foobar to utilize it on pretty much every format it can play.
All I can say is, Peter, my hat is off to you sir, well done.
or as we say in New Zealand, Cher Bro
ONLY because of the ability to replaygain all music files.
drawbacks: no volume slider, no good database
Add something...
Drawback:
- The context menu let me headache...
- Diskwriter can't use ACM codec...
to be continiued...
Becoz it's free and nearly perfect, so i won't expect too much.
I switched from Winamp to Foobar2k because of power, speed, stability, customization ability, and I think it looks great.
Foobar is great.
Like most here I was a Winamp user.
I asked them to implement multiple playlists so that I could see which playlist I was listening to or working on but they did not ! (so they lost me)
Then a young gilr told me about Foobar and I use it all the time (even though it hangs up on my machine ( a crappy 3 year old AMD Duron 800 with ME and 256Meg of Ram)
Like many others I feel Foobar could have a better (more interesting) user interface to start with.
And some help screens or info on how to make it look good.
A volume control would be great !
And help screens with all Preferences pages.
As an occassional music user I do not know what things such as DSP or columns are, yet everyone mentions them !
Great work.
I tell all my friends about it.
Regards
Digby
NZ
The first version of fb2k I tried was 0.586. At the time I fired it up once didn't see much and kept using Winamp.
About half a year later I downloaded 0.7.6 to develop an input plugin and have been hooked ever since
My favorite features are:
- ReplayGain
- Masstagger/renamer
- Formating Strings
- The Random Button, this works great when I'm not sure what I want to listen to.
Well, I have FB2K installed, but don't use it at the moment as my primary player. Why? Equaliser CPU usage.
On my PII 333mhz music machine, the EQ takes up a full 15% of the CPU time (on top of the ~11% it takes to decode the MP3/OGG tracks). It'd be great if someone would point me to, or put an option for, a "fast" EQ that sacrificed some quality for a speedup (I'm well aware that the Shibatch EQ eats most others for breakfast quality-wise). By comparison, XMPlay (http://www.un4seen.com) can decode tracks at 7% CPU and the equaliser is an additional ~4% on top of that, meaning it takes less than half the CPU usage of Foobar for media playback overall.
Other than that it's a good player; very versatile indeed, especially the mass-tagging/file-arranging capabilities!
(P.S. Hi to the other NZers in the thread above...!)
-windows gui
-masstagger
-if any function is not useful to me, i can easily turn it off
-replaygain
-im able to listen almost every type of file
-afaik the best sound, comparing to the players ive used..
it just roxx
:B is playin: Limp Bizkit - Clunk [Three Dollar Bill, Yall$ #08]
Well, I have FB2K installed, but don't use it at the moment as my primary player. Why? Equaliser CPU usage.
On my PII 333mhz music machine, the EQ takes up a full 15% of the CPU time (on top of the ~11% it takes to decode the MP3/OGG tracks). It'd be great if someone would point me to, or put an option for, a "fast" EQ that sacrificed some quality for a speedup (I'm well aware that the Shibatch EQ eats most others for breakfast quality-wise). By comparison, XMPlay (http://www.un4seen.com) can decode tracks at 7% CPU and the equaliser is an additional ~4% on top of that, meaning it takes less than half the CPU usage of Foobar for media playback overall.
Other than that it's a good player; very versatile indeed, especially the mass-tagging/file-arranging capabilities!
(P.S. Hi to the other NZers in the thread above...!)
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=245826"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Try using foo_convolve with an equalized impulse.
Try using foo_convolve with an equalized impulse.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=245861")
Thanks, that's a good suggestion -- the CPU usage is down from ~26% overall to ~20% overall now; it's strange how the convolver is a faster equaliser than the equaliser itself .
For anyone else: Start with the FB2K "special" installer that inclues the "foo_convolve" plugin, or just download the plugin separately. Take the Unitpulse2K.wav impulse (download from [a href="http://www.sjeng.org]Garf's site[/url]). If you're really worried about CPU usage, you can trim it down to 512 or 1024 samples in length from the default 2048 using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) and save as a new 32 bit WAV impulse (I trimmed to 512, which may give a quality hit, and I kept the pulse in the middle; it may better to use a 'Dirac' style impulse with the pulse at the start?).
Either way, load your WAV impulse in FB2K, select the Diskwriter preferences, and *enable* the "Use DSP" box, as well as your EQ preset. Right-click, run a conversion to another 32-bit WAV file, then disable the EQ, enable foo_convolve, and load that converted WAV file as your impulse. Voila!
Psynapse (below): I didn't notice much of a quality difference, but then again my current equipment isn't of "golden-ears" quality...
Try using foo_convolve with an equalized impulse.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=245861")
Thanks, that's a good suggestion -- the CPU usage is down from ~26% overall to ~20% overall now; it's strange how the convolver is a faster equaliser than the equaliser itself .
For anyone else: Start with the FB2K "special" installer that inclues the "foo_convolve" plugin, or just download the plugin separately. Take the Unitpulse2K.wav impulse (download from [a href="http://www.sjeng.org]Garf's site[/url]), and if you're really worried about CPU usage, trim it down to 512 or 1024 samples in length from the default 2048 using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) (I trimmed to 512, which may give a quality hit). Save as a new 32 bit WAV file if you're editing it (I kept the pulse in the middle; it may better to use a 'Dirac' style impulse with the pulse at the start?). Finally, load it in FB2K, select the Diskwriter preferences, and *enable* the DSP and Equaliser. Right-click, run a conversion to another 32-bit WAV file, then disable the EQ, enabled foo_convolve, and load that converted WAV file as your impulse. Voila!
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=246005"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
this sounds terribly involved. does it actually produce a significant improvement in sound quality or cpu usage?
First.
It can play Ogg-FLAC!
As far as i know, Only two palyer, one Directshow coder/decoder can play Ogg-FLAC, they are foobar2000, Sound Player Lilith (http://www.project9k.jp/), And this Illiminable Ogg codec (http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/).
Second.
It can correctly play and display list of chained ogg vorbis stream.
Other player will treat it as a one big audio file only.
This is mostly in comparison to Winamp (my default player), managing a mp3 collection of ~17000 files.
Pros:
+ Conforms to the normal Windows UI (ie no skins)
+ Gapless MP3 support
About Equal (mentioned because these seem to be the selling points of foobar):
* Resource usage. With the full playlist loaded and a decent set of UI options, foobar doesn't come in much lighter on memory than winamp, and seems to take a little longer to start up.
* Stability: I haven't experienced any crashes with either.
* File formats: While this doesn't affect my main library (I've standardised on mp3 for consistency), if I get a rare file in some other format somewhere on the net, someone invariably seems to have written a winamp pluggin for it.
* Tagger: The foobar tagger isn't something I find useful at all, since I use an external program for most of my tagging. For one off typo fixes, the winamp tagger is just as useful as the foobar one.
Cons:
- Preferences dialogs are a UI nightmare
- Doesn't support displaying the art in id3v2 tags (all my files are tagged as such, it's the only way to ensure art maintains its association with the mp3)
- No dynamic playlists
- Only way to do artist -> album -> song drill down appears to be a floating album list window, rather than something docked with the main UI
- Sometimes has clearly the wrong choice for default settings (eg APE tags as default for mp3 ahead of de-facto standard and widely supported id3v2 tags)
- Most importantly, it intimidates me in that I feel it might mess up my file tags at any moment. The complete lack of documentation, second class id3v2 support, and cryptic configuration dialogs just don't inspire confidence that foobar is a program I want to be using on a music collection I've spent hundreds of hours ripping and tagging.
I try foobar every now and then, but go back to Winamp every time. I think it has potential, but it really needs some heavy work done on usability before I can consider it as a serious choice.
I hope this will be taken as it was intended: as constructive criticism to the developers of what they need to improve to win over converts to a program they've obviously worked very hard on.
Pros:
+ Conforms to the normal Windows UI (ie no skins)
+ Gapless MP3 support
If these are all the pros of foobar2000 for you I also don't see the need to leave winamp. I understand that it is hard for a user who is used to winamp to change to foobar2000 but why should he do so at all if there's no real incentive?
All the cons you listed are either none to me or I don't agree because these are the features which make foobar2000 some kind of unique (i also think that the preferences dialog is great because everything is at its logical place though there may be some arguable points).
The lack of documentation probably makes it hard for users who don't know anything about audio but for those the basic features (playing audio files) are easily accessible and they don't have to go through the preferences at all. For the advanced users every function in the preferences is labeled with its correct name or has some basic documentation included (Tagz scripting reference). I don't see the need for further documentation since some basic trial and error is more productive than reading a documentation IMHO.
Regards,
The Link
I began to use FB2K since version 0.6 just because FB need less system resource than WinAMP. I dislike WinAmp since WinAmp 3 for it used too much system resource. What does WinAmp want to be? I only need a player which can play the music when I am working. Of course, it's better with high quality.
Q: Tell us why have you chosen foobar2000 [...]?
A: There was no choice! foobar is the only functional audio player I know.
Just coz it's the best player ever.
Replay gain support for all file types is one of the deciding factors for me. The masstagger is great. Columns UI is great. A lot of customizable features. Small community with developers of third-party plugins who communicate with users. Dedicated development with a clear direction. Much more that I can't think of now. All in all, my fave player.
My main reason for using it is being able to group and sort albums in the one playlist. What's better, having all your albums neatly grouped and sorted (Foobar) or just thrown in a mixed bag sorted alphabetically (Winamp)?
Oh, and it's high customability gives me something to do on a boring night.
The only negative thing I have against Foobar is that it's plugin/component database isn't as large as Winamp. I was trying to find a FTP plugin to upload my currently playing song to a server, and couldn't find anything (well, I found a few but they were either taken down or not what I was looking for). Winamp had a million plugins to do this alone.
Because e-music.com sells gapless MP3s, and Foobar can read them gaplessly.
foobar2000 - the way it's meant to be played
- Simple UI
- Lean
- A bit of Geek Charm
- No skins
I hade the fortune to start with music on the PC through Foobar .4, CDex, and Ogg Vorbis. It's all Iv'e ever used (except for oggdrop) and every time I've looked at alternatives I've come right back.
I forgot to add something that Foobar can't do:
- make country music sound good.
Sounds better than anything else and very flexible.
Another converted Winamp/Windows Media Player user. (Actually, WMP is still pretty decent for video, but that's about all I use it for anymore.)
I like Foobar for its stability, and how much fun it is to work with. You can make it look however you want, and do whatever you want. :-)
And now I love it even more because I just figured out how to use it to pick up radio feeds!
OK, I'm a ditz.
I am using foobar since v.0.3x and i am completely satisfied with that uber-program , because i don't need skins or any kind of overloaded interface to listen music. Another great advantage of foobar is it's ability of customisation, without the need to be a hacker.
"Keine Macht dem WinAmp"
Yup, I like foobar2000. It's the best player ever. It has no skin support (foo_looks is a crap), so what? Some ppl don't like it just because of this.
Anyway, it rules.
Say your words, ppl.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=199199"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Highly customisable, tabbed playlist, not bloated and finally, foo_sid <3
- J
i like foobar2000 because of it's simplicity and low memory usage. Winamp was great when it was in the 2.91 phase, but when 5 came out with the new skins/video support it totally ruined it's light-weight nature. That void's been bridged with foobar2000.
I'm sort of split...
I use both FB2K and Winamp (in windowshade mode).
Foobar2000 is excellent because of its massive configuration ability. I've had fb2k for over 6 months now and I'm *just* now figuring out how to display everything the way I want it. I originally got it because I needed mpc and ogg support, and I found I could redo tags and even mass rename files. That and it's small memory footprint and I was extremely happy. With Toaster, I'm almost estatic.
My only real problem with fb2k (and it may just be that I've set something bad) is that I can't keep it playing for a long period of time. After about 5 hours, the tags and screen "freeze" in the middle of a song. Foobar still plays, but nothing moves. I am still able to do everything, though, so I stop and play again, and it work for another 5 hours. It's the only reason I still use Winamp. Otherwise, I'd use Fb2k minimized to the taskbar and use Sysmetrix to control fb2k.
Non-bloated
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=199268"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Exactly. I've always been a minimalist at heart and love Foobar for this very reason. The degree to which it can be customized is scary; it makes foobar millions of times more functional than any other player while at the same time it makes it a million times less bloated. It's a wonderful combination made in heaven.
FB2K is very compact and has infinitely superior playlist handling to other players, thats the thing that hooked me up first. Later I discovered the insane amount of costumizations, and incredibly well made plugins, supporting basically every format out there, and a lot better then any other player.
Ten reasons I just came up with off the top of my head:
1. It encodes and decodes a huge variety of audio formats, thus removing the need for other transcoder programs
2. It supports APEv2 tags in more-or-less every audio format, which allows me to use custom tags to store information I am particularly interested in
3. Its Masstagger is the most advanced tagging engine I've seen, so I don't need another tagging program
4. It handles a very, very large number of audio files without a hiccup
5. It has a small footprint in terms of disk space and memory use
6. It is extremely configurable, particularly in terms of formatting strings
7. It plays my music cleanly, without errors, gaplessly and accurately
8. It has an active, helpful and interesting community
9. It is extensible by use of component plug-ins to the point where you can add even more functionality to the program
10. It has a very fast playlist find
I seem to end up suggesting foobar as the answer to many, many questions on other forums. For example, someone asks 'How can I transcode from APE to OGG?' and I'll simply answer 'foobar can do this.'. It's the same with tagging questions, music collection management questions and a million and one other things I probably haven't encountered yet.
arty
1. Tagging heaven (masstagger, tags from freedb.org)
2. ReplayGain heaven.
3. Size heaven.
4. Memory consumption heaven.
5. Configeekuration heaven
6. Playlist + Foo_temple + fading dsps for parties...
7. Modular
8. Community, who all in all knows whats important. Binding to the ogg and lame community.
FUCK BLOATWARE
FUCK DRM
GO FOOBAR
I use foobar as an active filter, the channel divider (http://blokoss.perso.cegetel.net/foo_dsp_channeldividerF.dll) and
dsp crossover (http://blokoss.perso.cegetel.net/foo_dsp_xover.dll) components are very precious for me. I remember the first time i saw these components on work, i couldn't believe my eyes and ears! imagine a sound as pure as cristal and the possibility to play with the response curves of your speakers as you would do with a 200€ active filter. This is one of the many reasons why Foobar is strongly implanted on my audio system.
How I came to find foobar:
So about three years ago I got really into the video game music scene (and still am into it) and I needed a good audio player to play the game formats. After many hours of trying out homemade audio players for these formats, I went to www.download.com and found foobar2000. Freaking WOW, foobar can play nearly all of game music formats (but not yet USF) and it can convert them to wave so I can burn them to cd's! Not only was I ecstatic about the game music compatibility, but the versatility of foobar is amazing. I'm always learning new stuff that makes foobar even sweeter. Thank God for people like kode54, googer, and foosion who make so many cool components for foobar!
P.S. - a german friend has informed me that "foobar" is another word for F$%@
P.S. - a german friend has informed me that "foobar" is another word for F$%@[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=292314")
Send your friend to [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar]Wikipedia[/url]. "F$%@" is not a word, though to me it looks like it could be a Perl program.
The word is FUBAR, I think. Used in armies alot (?)
The word "foobar" has been discussed more than once on these forums. If you are interested in that topic, try searching the forum (might be a bit harder than usual ), or follow the above Wikipedia link; there you'll find almost anything that you might want to know about the word "foobar". I don't think it is necessary to continue that discussion here.
Leaving aside the question of sound quality (I sometimes prefer Apollo Audio Player or J.River Media Center), I like foobar because it's always growing and you can never know wich new quality features you'll get the next time you browse the sites, this is quite appealing to me.
Greetings from Italy
Gringo
All i want is something that can play music. no skin crap. organization crap. no cd burner crap. no crap. just music, lots of formats, and that all. Foobar's installation was so configurable that I was able to make my player as barebones as i wanted.
Foobar is great for all the reasons already mentioned.
My only gripes are that I wish there was a better media management or media library system and that the documentation was more centralized than it is.
I love quite a few things in foobar, I suppose a few would be:
- Customizable.
- Almost everything can be put on global hotkey.
- Colums_UI allows me to make it look how I want to be, simple and pretty .
- It now supports MilkDrop.
- Tabs can be used for playlists and all those panels.
- Format support.
- Gapless playback
That's about all I can think of at this moment in time . But all-in-all it's a great program and I'd recommend it to anyone who is compitant at using a computer. The ONLY thing that ever has put he off is the lack of a kind of media library, but even that is managable. It can search well, it can generate playlists based on artist or genre, or even both. Playlist Tree aids also in this, along with that wonderful Database Explorer.
I love it for many reasons, all given by others.
I HATE it because (the fact that) I cannot run it on my Linux box. (avoiding WINE)
yes, but foobar does not have a shade mode like winamp and also does not have an equaliser. i say all these because i have tried foobar only 3 times and i am not aware of the plugins etc...
and as for memory usage, it shows 27.020 at the task manager. so? it is even higher than winamp 5.08.
I'm using Foobar2000 for "flexible Tagging".
I have designed a system of Freestyle Tags for my personal joyride with
Foobar2000 like %similarto%, %subgenre% and a lot of Special Tags for indexing
CD-Boxes, Bootlegs and Live-Albums and many more attributes of an Album or
a bunch of single-tracks.
Foobar2000 displaying these "non standard"-Tags in ColumnsUI and offers
me much more possibilities using the Database in Combination with Albumlist,
DBexplorer and creating Special-Reports out of the Database quickly in
DBexplorer. Thanks for Quicktag which helps me to personally tag my stuff
and home-recordings.
In a few days i will coming up with a Tutorial on german AudioHQ-Site. Actually
only a simple description of the word and idea of Flexible Tags (http://www.audiohq.de/index.php?showtopic=775) exists there.
IMHO Flexible Tagging, Personalized Tagging or better "Freestyle Tagging" offers
the most Possibilies to indexing an archive. iTunes and most of the other
database-oriented Software with their limited "standard report engines" didn't
meet my requirements because they use only the limited "out of the Box"-Tags.
So i decided to go with Version 0.7x of Foobar2000.
Only Foobar20000 offers this sort of indexing, it's a sort of "unique selling point".
Formerly i was a satisfied Winamp 2.x user before replacing Winamp with
Foobar2000 in 2003.
yes, but foobar does not have a shade mode like winamp and also does not have an equaliser. i say all these because i have tried foobar only 3 times and i am not aware of the plugins etc...
and as for memory usage, it shows 27.020 at the task manager. so? it is even higher than winamp 5.08.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=293450"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
you sound a bit misinformed about fb. and is memory even an issue these days? besides, you can control exactly which plugins get loaded, so minimize memory usage
Man, foobar rocks, fun to mess with
and best of all (i'm a resources freak) its LITE !
Thanks
replaygain, masstagging (guess by filename) and the CLI transcoder did it for me.
I have to rerespond. I now use nothing but foobar2000. With the winamp api emulator, I can now minimize fb2k when I need to and use Sysmetrix to control it (all I need while minimized is the basic abilities, especially pause). It now looks and acts the way I want it, and I've learned so much from both fb2k and the forums that I'm now ready to tackle the restructuring of my music files and the vast power of fb2k's database. So if nothing else, fb2k has made me a more conscious music collector. That alone, in my opinion, is well worth all the initial hassle of learning TAGZ (which is easy to learn, btw, if you have any programming/logic experience), searching for plugins, and dealing with crashes.
Edit: Oh, fb2k does have an equalizer, heavymetalwiseone. Do a little more searching in the DSP.
[...]dealing with crashes.[...]
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=296868"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
You must be using the wrong plugins.
I now use foobar because I suspected winamp to make my system crash.. And with the use of this reader, I have found more and more interesting functions with a huge and very sympathetic community, which is very active and adds marvelous components to the basic installation.
I've already converted some friends to the "god" foobar, and I think that without the sound itself (which hadn't a real improvement when I changed) the abilities given by foobar make it really a must-have software.With all the things that I'm learning about this software, I'm jumping from good surprises to other good surprises.
Edit: The masstagger is really powerful, I organized more than 9000 files in less than a day, the freeDB is ... incredible (I was to lazy to tag my files when I encoded my files and it has allowed me to tag properly them afterward).
Channel mixes manages perfectly my subwoofer, making a richer sound, more dynamic.
But, even the 3rd party plugins site is quite hard of use, not always simple to find a great plug-in. The Tagz documentation is not as important as it could have been.. On the other hand, the foobar community is always helping people with formatting problems (it's really nice to have such support).
First post!
I downloaded Foobar2k about a year ago and decided to get rid of it after a while, but then yesterday for some reason I decided to download Foobar2k again. Now Winamp is gone. The main thing for me now is the small memory footprint, as my computer is aging...
I just wish I knew how to customise it better, but the columns UI config I downloaded yesterday suits me fine for now. One day I might have to make a custom one in photoshop and ask someone here to make it for me......
PS The icons in foobar2000 are the best around!
I just wish I knew how to customise it better, but the columns UI config I downloaded yesterday suits me fine for now. One day I might have to make a custom one in photoshop and ask someone here to make it for me......
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300400"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
It takes as little while to learn, but it's satisfying having your own config, even if (as in my case) it's simple or if you've just modded someone else's to meet your own needs.
PS The icons in foobar2000 are the best around!
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300400"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I agree.
My perfect player has atleast 3 functions in the main GUI: play,pauze and volume control. foobar misses 1/3 of the functionality .
I go for winamp
well, with volume control, you can solve the missing part :
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....opic=28665&st=0 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=28665&st=0)
I don't understand peoples obsession with volume control. As I sit here typing I am in reach of six different location (three software/ three hardware) where I can adjust the volume control. I only really need one. I'm assuming everyone knows how to add the sound icon to the taskbar, or how to operate the volume control on their speaker/amp, or am I missing something?
I don't understand peoples obsession with volume control. As I sit here typing I am in reach of six different location (three software/ three hardware) where I can adjust the volume control. I only really need one. I'm assuming everyone knows how to add the sound icon to the taskbar, or how to operate the volume control on their speaker/amp, or am I missing something?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301452"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
...and ReplayGain eliminates most needs of a "volume control".
I don't understand peoples obsession with volume control. As I sit here typing I am in reach of six different location (three software/ three hardware) where I can adjust the volume control. I only really need one. I'm assuming everyone knows how to add the sound icon to the taskbar, or how to operate the volume control on their speaker/amp, or am I missing something?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301452"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
...and ReplayGain eliminates most needs of a "volume control".
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301454"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Sometimes I want to put foobar to play anything in "background" so I want sometimes just put foobar to lower volume.
Why I use foobar2000? It has just about everything, it dooesn't eat CPU cycles nor memory.
I like foobar because it could be highly customized.
But in China, another player, called ttplayer, which doesn't have English version, also be used widely. That player also use little memory, lower CPU useage. But more important, it supports display lyrics, and search missing lyric through internet automatically.
You can try this player if you can read chinese.
download it here:
http://ttplayer.91.com/index.htm (http://ttplayer.91.com/index.htm)
I'm not takeing advertising. Just to show foobar has a driving competitor in China.
foobar is great because:
* Small memory footprint
* Formatting strings
* Gapless playback
* Tabbed playlists
* Doesn't try to shove ads down my throat
* More stable than 10 or so others Ive tried
* excellent support here on the forums
Thanks to all who have worked on it over the years.
...and ReplayGain eliminates most needs of a "volume control".
Sometimes I want to put foobar to play anything in "background" so I want sometimes just put foobar to lower volume.
Exactly, since i became used to replaygain, i only use volume-control for changing the *general* volume (i.e. do i generally want the music to play at high or low volume?). But 95% of the usual reasons for adjusting volume (loudness difference between tracks) is gone.
I think most people who are new to fb2k and miss the volume knob, are not aware of the above - they expect that they have to constantly adjust the volume, just like with other players - but with replaygain, there is no need to.
Besides of that, i find it much more easy to:
- long for the volume knob which is mounted right in front me
- adjust it
instead of:
- grab the mouse
- hover the mouse to the bottom of the screen to display the taskbar
- click the fb2k-symbol to open the fb2k-window
- adjust the mixer volume pixel-by-pixel and "by proxy" (by using the mouse instead my fingers directly)
- click in the window which i was using before changing the volume, so that it comes back into focus
Without a volume-knob in reach, i would still prefer a keyboard-shortcut, because it is just faster and more direct than digging out the windows-mixer.
its free, plays most everything after install, no reboot, NO SPYWARE, has a bad ass comminity built around it, dev acualty help when you whanta make somthing or i fuck it up, it can be custimized billions of ways, it uses sooooo little resources, dont come with anything i didnt need.
sooo foo crew ull get to goto heaven for sure for creating this app and if i did have to pay some for it i would
tata
Triggz Out
I like and use foobar2000 because it is remarkably powerful, yet never feels bloated. Quite the opposite, in fact -- it feels very fast and responsive. Much kudos to the programmers. Other players feel like walking up hill through treacle on a cold day and the thought of using Winamp or WMP makes me shudder.
Some software is special. foobar2000 is up there with the likes of Raxco PerfectDisk, or nLite, CrapCleaner, Exact Audio Copy, LAME (v3.90.3), Sygate, etc. VITAL software!
There are far too many features to know where to begin appreciating them. But this is no cluttered player. I don't even know how they do it.
It's not perfect though. After uninstallation it can leave a lot of crap in your registry. What would be good is if we had some kind of registry cleanup option to remove dead entries. It's no big thing, especially since uninstalling isn't something I do often, only when updating to a new version. I like a cleanup in between.
I don't understand peoples obsession with volume control. As I sit here typing I am in reach of six different location (three software/ three hardware) where I can adjust the volume control. I only really need one. I'm assuming everyone knows how to add the sound icon to the taskbar, or how to operate the volume control on their speaker/amp, or am I missing something?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301452"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
...and ReplayGain eliminates most needs of a "volume control".
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301454"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Sometimes I want to put foobar to play anything in "background" so I want sometimes just put foobar to lower volume.
Why I use foobar2000? It has just about everything, it dooesn't eat CPU cycles nor memory.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=301844"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
hmm.. to come up with an alternative to that.. isn't there a preamp function (in the .9 beta) that allows you to amp RGed/Non-RGed files?
i'm not sure if you can link that to a global hotkey, but i'm sure the devs could fix that if it isn't the case
regardless.. i use it for non-standard tags, the awesome copy/paste tag info (i've recently started keeping lossless music, and am thus copying the old lossy filetags to the new files ), and the tagging functions in general
I specially like the way the new beta works. Some options that were a little obvious (like "don't ReplayGain files that already have info") have been defaulted to make things easier. I also love the new converter and ripper. Peter has really trimmed the program for this release! It works so much better now, and it was already perfect!
I started using foobar2000 after stumbling upon this site (I'm a long-time reader!). I thought it was quite good and I'm not usually put off by software which needs a bit of configuration. EAC also comes under that...!
I now like to manage whatever CDs I copy to my computer in WavPack format with embedded cuesheets so foobar2000 is basically my only choice. At least it gets me away from WMP, right?
I like the new beta quite a bit compared to 0.8.3, even for my limited uses. All I can say is keep up the good work! I'd like to see where foobar is when it reaches 1.0 and if it gains popularity in the 'mainstream'.
Because it has a lot of professional features like resampler, dithering, noise shaping, and good sound quality. And kernel streaming fixes my WDM mixer problem.
beside all what has been said before:
- it gives me the best overview of my music files (~5000)
- once configured, it's MY player
- i don't need visual gimmicks for listening music
- it has a fantastic community and support
i don't need visual gimmicks for listening music
Agreed! I like the simplicity of the UI as well as what I mentioned previously.
I've been using foobar since 0.31 and fell love with it instantly. Ever since, I've forced my little brother and my friends to use it!
Like said so many times before:
* Small memory footprint
* Database (great for people like me, who have a big amount of music files ~10000)
* Formatting strings
* Gapless playback
* Masstagging (one of the best things, imho)
* Replaygain support/scanning
* .cue support out of the box (I just love playing music from images with .cue)
* One can configure it to meet ones needs (formatting strings, columns, etc.)
* Community!
Nice to finally register, after being a foobar user for such a long time!
Since my earlier posts I've decided upon probably my main reason:
Fantastic integration with EAC, WavPack and (when I need it) LAME.
Matroska !!! Foobar is the only reliable player for this format.
--> Small and easily upgradable (.dll's)
--> I can Use it at school (!!!! fantastic news!)
--> Customizable (it looks as good as you make it, and it's functional either way)
--> audioscrobbler/ogg/wma/mp3 support.
--> all under one roof (IE: no windows like winamp, no annoying tabs like WMP)
--> I just remembered the main reason, WMP tends to fault and hesitate with a large media library, foobar does not, it's bloody fast.
Like:
- Low memory usage
- Simple interface, with option to enchance if you wish
- Wide range of formats supported by default
- Gets the best sound quality of out low end MP3's
- Tabbed playlists - gotta be one of my favourites
- Speed! Winamp: 10 seconds + stupid load up sound. Foobar: 1/2 Second, thankfully no cat meowing
Dislike:
- Losing tabbed playlists on upgrading throughout the beta versions
Thats it, it really is an awesome player, Foobar and VLC together makes for one hell of a multimedia workstation!
Jack.
+
- dynamic compression and a lot of DSPs
- Low memory usage
- Customizable layout
- You can set a shortcut for every action (and global ones too)
- Many plugins
- Supports a lot of formats
- Masstagger
- ...
-
- "Play audio CD" doesn't work with my notebook drive (closes down with an error)
I was using Winamp for many years but forunately i stopped using it now! It's not the revolutionary player it used to be in 2.x Versions anymore. Since AOL bought Nullsoft, many things changed in Winamp to... worse! They actually lost the point and kept adding crap!
Anyway, when I first installed Foobar in my system I saw it's minimalistic view and I said: "What's this? Is this the player that beats Winamp?" Well... I don't know why but it somehow attracted me and I started playing with it! Soon, I realised that it is the best player in the world!!! And no...I don't miss Winamp, Foobar offers me what Winamp did and a bit more and the best of all... it does it MY way!
Now I can really tag in id3v2.....
Only been using foobar for a couple of weeks, but I'm loving it.
Reasons for using Foobar are;
* Proper gapless playback.
* Proper CUE file support
* The simplicity yet powerful feature set
* I rip all my CD's as an image and CUE and i love the convert feature to extract single files.
What i would like to see in Foobar2000;
* A video playing plug-in
* Better CD burning
first i chose it, because of how few memory it uses. now i bloated it with plugins, which i don't want to miss any more. so at first i was after low memory usage, but know i enjoy all those great features it offers.
if you're only after low memory usage you could go with 1by1, which uses even less.
i can't live without those great features! most important for me:
* plays all formats that ever came to me (except real audio)
* masstagger, massrenamer, freedb masstagger
* great playlist managment (tabbed...)
* very custumizable
* scheduler
* diskwriter, converter
* enqueue (foo_temple)
* dithering
* replaygain
been using fb2k for more then 2 years, i like the it, couse its down to what you need, no 50mb gui, great tag/string support, dsp, the gapless and crossfader are both super..!!, custemize your copycommand ) you can get almost any data available in your display, you dont depend on tags or whatever, foldername, path, filename, all the conversions are there. And i can add almost anything written in comments above.
IT ROX...
- from joy, natch.
Just converted from WinAmp.
Fb2k can actually play to all my speakers. Fb2k gives the cleanest sound I've ever heard. It has a small footprint, etc, etc, etc.
I'm in love.
* Small memory footprint
* Database (great for people like me, who have a big amount of music files ~10000)
* Gapless playback
* Masstagging (one of the best things, imho)
* .cue support out of the box (I just love playing music from images with .cue)
* One can configure it to meet ones needs (formatting strings, columns, etc.)
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=334595"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
That's why.
I like foobar, cause it has highly customizable interface
I dont like only the difficult for configuration inrerface - I hate to write config strings who I dont understand. I think the foobar2k developers can make interface easyer for customizing, without so many manually edited config files and strings, more GUI based options.
I switched over from winamp years ago because I prefered foobar's minimal interface and ease of use.
Since then I've grown to love it's robust variety options and limitless customization.
Because it's fast, straight to the point (minimal gimmicks), newbie friendly and yet fully customizable, many features, and the first unicode-enabled audio player for Windows I can found...
sound quality, low usage of memory, highly customizable
because i like wasting my time customizing something that isn't really mine
firstly it was .cue support. i was a winamp hog for years and i kept going back to winamp after using foobar, but i've been 100% foobar for almost a year now! it just grew on me. so simple and fast!
low usage of memory
gapless playback
burning from any format
you can make it look however you want
smooth
has plugins that no other audio player has
Non-bloated
best answer yet!
Mostly because it looks the best. I have no special needs when it comes to music playback, so it comes down to visual appeal.
i like foobar because it isn't bloated like other popular players such as iTunes, WMP, Winamp, and others. it also has a nice interface along with a lot of plugins. i don't use a lot of em but nevertheless, it's a nice player.
Plays music.
It's quick, light, customizable, has a GIANT equalizer , lots of options to improve audio quality..
..Because it doesn't use cheap lame "skins", very lightweight, handles large playlists, and the biggest reasons, because you design it yourself! FLAC, musepack, WAVPACK out of the box! And did I mention tweaking, and freedom to the user.
Quintessential Player user for a fews years now from when I switched from Winamp. As much as I loved QCD, it was never updated and took a big chunk of my resources.
I have tried Foobar before when it version 8 but it never displayed ANY of my tags, so I thought I'd try version 9 which has proved to be very impressive. Its actually first time I have used a gapless player and its damn impressive and Foobars very small resource use is impresive too.
I guess from now on im using Foobar untill the next best thing comes out.
I used another player for a long, long time because it had a great set of plugins and I knew how it worked. I decided to give foobar another try when 0.9 came out & I'm so happy with it ...customization, hotkeys, tagging, transcoder, title formatting, tabs, album list/db, the rational layout of the preferences page-- pretty much the entire package including the default UI. Props to 3rd-party components developers too.
My old default player kept adding more & more unstable features that I didn't want and couldn't completely get rid of. Now I only use it for streaming .m3u and maintaining my portable media player. The only feature I really miss is middle-clicking a song to add to queue. Well, that and watching the cat watch visualizations, ha.
I installed 0.7 or 0.8 and I don't remember why I didn't stick with it. I think I was afraid of losing all my ID3v2 tags.
@OnPoint: if you add your media to the foobar db they'll load a lot faster. When I load my entire db of ~11500 songs they appear in the playlist immediately. /edit --like picmixer said
Like many i used winamp for a long time. I had heard about foobar every now and then and had give it a try maybe a year ago. I'm not very big on coding, so it kinda overwhelmed me then. I recently gave 0.8.3 a try and stuck with it.
I love how customizable it is. Adding, making and requesting different kinds of components. I love albumart, trackinfo and columns ui. It would be hard using foobar without those. I also like how you can make it look completely different with .fcs and you can take those even further and change the colors used. You can setup your library competely different, whether it be by genre or artist. I like setting each playlist i have as a genre, so i can easily search within it. I'm someone who likes to mess around with programs, and figure them out on my own, and this is definately the best audio player for that (and for playing music )
Thanks to everyone that's worked on this and the 3rd party stuff.
Someone on IRC said it was the best player.
I love foobar2k, and I think there's no middle ground there. either you love it with all your heart or you hate it to death after installing it. I've been using foobar for more than a year now, after being a loyal winamp follower. I'd installed it a couple of times before that, but since I was afraid of customizing, it scared me away; now it's my only music player.
what I love:
-total control of everything (interface, sound quality commands...)
-simplicity
-easy on resources
-fast and stable
-huge EQ (actually, which other player has an 18-band EQ out of the box?)
thanks peter for this gift...
main thing that made me switch from winamp was proper unicode support
i kept trying it and thinking why would everone use such an ugly player with nothing but a playlist, and then i saw the "post your foobar" thread
i realized that this kick's winamps ass all over the place
there is one thing i hate though, the fact that you can't have a good looking foobar right out of the box.
why not have a release with all the eye candy stuff already in (nice looking FCS, album art, etc.)
that would get more people to try it
The main reason was BASS.dll usage for module playback. I was using winamp + xmplay. That was pretty annoying… Winamp was unable to play modules, XMplay was not so handy to use.
So using foobar as module music player was my first step to addiction ;D
-huge EQ (actually, which other player has an 18-band EQ out of the box?)
musikCube is the only one I can think of and although it's a pretty decent program, it's miles behind foobar2000
I've chosen foobar2000 because I read a lot of articles about different players (and tried them). Yesterday I installed foobar2000 but now I don't realy know whether I shoud stay or not.
I'm searching a program to organize my music. That works great with foobar.
I'm searching a program to play all my music (m4u, mp3, ogg..) - That works great too.
But I'm missing a sync function like itunes for mass storage devices to hear my playlists when I'm in car.
And why doesn't the art_panel show the covers from the tags? And I've problems to organize songs in Playlists. Is there nothing like these dynamic Playlists (ITunes, musikcube)?
For me musikcube seems to be the better solution (although it doesn't show the cd-covers too)
(sorry for my terrible english ) but I will try foobar again this evening
Benne
Playlists. Is there nothing like these dynamic Playlists (ITunes, musikcube)?
Autoplaylist Manager (http://www.foobar2000.org/components/foo_autoplaylist.zip)?
Until 0.8.3 foobar2000 was all about choices. All the other programs, converters and players enforce some kind of music playing paradigm, while fb2k never gets in my way. That is why I chose this wonderfully extendable music player.
The new version 0.9 had lots of choices removed, but I guess that is because the underlying structure is rebuilt, and later subversions will add choices again. The strength of fb2k was never ease of use, it was freedom for the able. I hope freedom and choices will be its future.
Until 0.8.3 foobar2000 was all about choices. All the other programs, converters and players enforce some kind of music playing paradigm, while fb2k never gets in my way. That is why I chose this wonderfully extendable music player.
The new version 0.9 had lots of choices removed, but I guess that is because the underlying structure is rebuilt, and later subversions will add choices again. The strength of fb2k was never ease of use, it was freedom for the able. I hope freedom and choices will be its future.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, one of foobars greatest strenght is letting the user choose, I hope this will continue.
I like the fact that it's designed as an audio player (not an all-round media player). Build-in ReplayGain (and MPC) support are pro's. The clean plug-in concept has lead to many useful plug-ins, that make foobar much more than the "basic" player it once was.
Once I had a playlist formatting and status bar of my liking, I forgot about skins (until foo_looks )
Just like rehgf (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=findpost&pid=384020), I very much liked that almost every time there was something you wanted to change, you could do it. To me that was (is?) the big selling point of foobar2000. Since 0.9 there is a tendency to reduce the choices to a minimum (let’s hope this won’t lead to a “We know what is good for you” kind of product in the end ).
The radical termination of support for plug-ins, compiled for previous versions, at every (SDK-) major release is a drawback though. You’re not sure if the set of components you use now will be available for the next version. Especially noticeable since Case left the team. But maybe Peter will say "that's the price of progress".
plus:
+tons of features
+great tags/text customization features
+speed
+clean structure
+utf-8
+active developpement
+audio quality
minus:
-can be a bitch to customize
-lack of outer ui customization(aka rollup/rolldown, buttons in windows title, more options for windows title customization)
-nothing else?
A truely awesome player that's close to perfection
Years ago, I used Winamp. I then migrated to Quintessential Player for a long time. About two years ago or so, I moved to foobar2000 0.8.3. It's light, it's customizable, and it's powerful. I'm tempted to upgrade to 0.9.1, but the thought of reconfiguring foobar2000 from scratch is enough to totally dissuade me. I have not the time nor the inclination.
0.9.1:
* Faster Ogg Vorbis tag editing.
I love you foobar2000.
(Oh what's up with Case? why did he leave the devteam?)
I've been using mpxplay (great app btw.) with winamp, then i've found foobar, customised some keyboard shortcuts and sticked with it...
mainly i found amazing the gapless mp3 playback, what was not so common back then (and it's still not)
yeah and i liked the special installer until v0.9 came out, hope we'll see something like that soon, 'cause i'm too lasy to collect plug-ins on my own
since i definitely waved goodbye to Win98/DOS this winter, i can't use mpxplay anymore so foo became my primary/only music player
and for you who are complaining about foobar's 'uglyness' take a look at mpxplay (mpxplay.cjb.net (http://mpxplay.cjb.net)) to see the best music player interface ever !!!
(text mode, configuration through a .cfg file, hope it will be ported to win32 once)
It does just-the-basics to everything depending on how you prefer it to be.
F00bar gives you a choice, all other player gives you crap that you're stuck with.
I pity the non-f00ballers!
You don't have to deal with or be slowed down by video media like in winamp, itunes and windows media player. Has lots of flexibilty to do anything with all the plugins available. Works great, sound great, is lite weight and keeps getting better.
The best part is its not from microsoft or apple.
foobar2000 v0.9.1 it is the best audio player I have ever tried, it is not bloated like the others and it simple to configure and will play any audio formats I have played so far. I am using it to stream music from the net/using shoutcast radio links. It is simply the best coded work I have seen yet. Thank you for your great work.
Plays everything.
It's soft.
It's free.
It's beautiful.
It has nice icons for the files
Why ? Because it's the future, and noone can deny it. And keep in mind that a conservative user tells you that.
Furthermore I REALLY appreciate the open sourced-principle and once I've got more time I'll form foobar
a bit more to my personal needs accepting absolutely NO differences between digital original Audio-CDs and
physical original Audio-CDs. You'll profit by that one day...
And the well sorted handling with a huge number of albums keeping everything clear and tidy... this
tool has it's moments... not to forget that this player is one of the most lossless-friendly ones...
you can't stop foobalisation ;D ;D ;D
-It takes less than half a second to start
-It has a small memory footprint
-It can play every type of music I have in my collection (AAC, FLAC, MP3, Shorten, Vorbis)
-It can convert from any format to any other format (well, almost any)
-It let's ME choose how it should look
-It can burn cds
-It can rip cds
-It can send music to my portable player
-It can stream internet radio
-It can record internet radio streams
-It has replaygain
-It has gapless playback
-It's free
because i LOVE alien icons
+ curently using 5MB of memory
+ tabbed playlists
+ highly customizable
+ nice file icons
+ components
+ Foobar 2.1 will kickass
- no more real shuffle artist/album (or tag) - shuffles within tags
- problems with multimedia media keys (logitech)
- MIDI
- curently using 5MB of memory
Because of the wonderful playlist, that's why I switched from Winamp. And now when I've been using it for quite a time and learned more about it I like the fact that it's highly customizable. Plus it's non-bloated... Do I need to say more?
It's just so darned well thought-out! (powerful yet simple)
Thank you Peter for this great gift!
(and btw you really set the definition of a good program)
Versatility + modularity + no bloated gui =foobar!
Its just amazingly amazing. Small, fast, featurefull, and very customizeable.
It lets me do what I want, not what the software makers want.
Reliable! Fast! Customizable!
I hate those bloat-wares keep eating resources and doing dirty stuff themselves.
it´s easy, it´s simple, one can configure it as he wants it, it steals less resources, it´s fast.
but the overall reason for me is and was: the better sound (with kernel streaming & my flawed creative USB-card (the one with the bad bad resampler)).
in my eyes, foobar is the best.
Foobar is useful, simple.
And, I like Foobar.
But, Alien icon is very bad thing, Smile icon is very very very good!
Where are the alien icons? I just recognize a strange looking cat!
Why i have choosen foobar? Everything is said in the other posts. If i would try to bring it to the point i would mention two reasons:
1. The handling of tags and the presence of TAGZ in all areas of the program.
2. The appearence of the one and same context menu in all areas of the program. Exactly that results in combining different plugins.
The only weak point i can recognize is the fact that foobar isn't able to update database automatically by watching database folder and doesn't give the media library plugins the chance to refresh them automatically on database update.
The only feature i miss to claim foobar as complete audio suite is burning audio cds (foo_burninate never worked for me) and data-cds/dvds.
uses little to no memory most of the time for me. and runs fast...........oh yeah lets not forget that whole thing called customization
WiMP has never satisfied, MMJB sucks, fed up of winamp's bullshit.
foobar provides what it offers and then some through the fantastic community. just plain looks fucking cooler
WiMP has never satisfied, MMJB sucks, fed up of winamp's bullshit.
foobar provides what it offers and then some through the fantastic community. just plain looks fucking cooler
Hey, watch your language here (I mean, on HA.org).
There are a few things I have liked about Foobar that some other players don't have (or I can't find anyway):
- The player focuses on the playlist. A media player is for media not for fancy graphics and bloated GUI's .
- Its fast.
- Customizable.
- Can display album covers with the correct plugins.
- Its free and plugins are updated fairly fast.
Because im a person who always looks for alternatives.And because foobar is really costumizable.
I once had a pre-packed foobar pack,all kinda sweet looking now i updated to 0.9 and all my sweet looks are gone and as im total useless when it comes to coding im pretty much stuck with the "ugly" default design (its not ugly,i just miss some colour and other sweet features) until someone helps me build my own or gives me his/her sweet one.
Generally
Foobar just does everything better that any other player.
Oh yeah and i use it to convert lossless to mp3.
him interface extremely dynamic
him high association with plugins
him low use of memory
and this 3 itens make it the better player ^^
(sorry for a bad english - i'am brazillian, and here we speak portuguese ^^)
Tell us why have you chosen foobar2000, or why don't you like it
Clean interface, no-nonsense playlist display; good support for audio interfaces (such as ASIO) and good management of DSP; lots of features (e.g. recording, many supported file formats, tone generators, file conversion).
Only problems are when I moved to the current version. I should have waited a bit for everything to come online.
I have just dumped winamp for it. Why? To be honest, I don't really know. I don't hear the difference in sound quaility and I really miss the stunning AVS visualization from winamp (I admit, I was using it only seldomly), but it seems the possibility to open the directory the file is in with the options presented when moving physical files won the match.
I use foobar almost only as a player, I don't even use foobar2000's mass tagging abilities. I find it powerful, but too cumbersome to work with. The Godfather is way faster in retrieving tags from names, more convenient in looking up on-line information and searching for duplicates.
AlbumArt - I don't need this. I seldomly have complete albums. Instead I listen to what is "listenable", which is a really diverse mix of music. Album art does not make too much sense for singles, does it?
ReplayGain - BIG PLUS! Too bad it is completely useless for my portable player, so i might end up hardcoding the gain values in the file itself anyway (not in the tags)
Call me crazy, in spite of all these, + the rather plain look which requires a hell lot of time (approx. 3 full night's work) to make its appearance & functionality suitable for my taste, I somehow feel reluctant to go back to winamp. And I have yet to experience the pleasure of gapless playback. Or maybe it is just because I started to hate all the bundled on-line services in winamp...
Matyas
BTW: I don't see the "low memory usage" at all, with all my current plugins!!! Right after start it is around 23mb, whereas winamp merely went above 14M. So what is this talk about low resource usage?
- It's as powerful as you want it to be.
- It's known for doing things "the right way".
- It was started initially because the author thought Winamp was going the wrong way, which I agree with.
- Columns UI
- Excellent sound quality.
- Native Interface
- Excellent handling of medial library (IE if you mass rename a file into a watch dir, it auto adds it).
- Autoplaylist !! !!
I use it primarily because it has gaples playback, and Winamp didn't had it back then. In time Winamp got gapless playback, but Foobar's configuration remained complicated for people without scripting skills (is there ever going to be some GUI for setting up them visual thingies?). I see it as a player for people with enormous amount of time to do the scripting. I don't, so I use one script made by Azrael.
Except for low memory usage, gapless playback and nice album list, I don't see really some serious advantages. Tagging is too complicated, as Matyas noted, TGF does much better job. File converter is OK, but nothing special. Album Art is fine addition, too bad you have to install it separately.
Now, that's it.
Ivan.
+ It sounds alot better then most players.
+ It looks like what you want it to!.
+ Tabbed playlists <3.
+ Imports music fast.
+ Conversions are always a good bonus.
+ Components bring a whole new aspect to the player to.
- Its a little hard to understand when you first get it.
- No mini player option without components.
It has nice icons for the files
Funnily enough this is one of my favourite things about foobar2000.
Whenever I see the words 'ogg' or mp3', I automatically think green or red - and of course the lovely blue for mpc files
still remember the first time i used foobar. i thought i opened a notepad window!
~ i love the fact there isn't a fancy GUI to eat more system resources.
~ " " that its modular, thus so customisable.
~ the mass tagger
~ the equalizer
~ transcoding features
~ channel mixer plugin makes it complete for my needs!
+ Really nice sound quality.
+ Gapless Playback.
+ ReplayGain.
+ Light & fast.
+ Multiple playlists.
- Components ported with some inertia. (Still waiting for 0.9.x version of SoundTouch or another component that can adjust pitch)
+ Has all the techy features you could ever wish for.
- Needs wine to run here...
For this last reason, I'm mostly running Quod Libet lately. Integrates well with the desktop environment, and at least the tagging and library features are about as extensive as those in fb2k. It lacks the dsp-features, but I'm trying not to worry about that anymore and just enjoy the music now
replaygain, diskwriter and notepad look.
did I mention replaygain? I couldn't live anymore without it.
that's pretty much it I guess.
I first tried it for the lower resource usage. I got hooked on for:
- high amount of costumization possible
- awesome playlist handling (the only thing I miss is the "update file sources")
- masstagger
- replaygain
- support for any kind of format there is
thinking about it, I'm not even sure what I could use in place of Foobar now.
+ CUE support
+ Extreme customization
+ Replaygain
+ Converter
+ ABX
- Doesn't properly support .aac files
- No easy way to check for component support
- Not scriptable natively
For the minuses, I still have to have MediaMonkey & WinAmp.
I would have to agree 100% with all of these features and more.
The only things I don't like about FB2K is the nature of the plug-ins and how they integrate (or don't integrate) and how the authors disappear w/ a trace between major versions.
I would much rather FB2K be open source (versus proprietary) and all plug-ins be the same, but I'm just one of those open source monkies with a lotta bias.
Overall, however, I could never go back to Winamp.
+ CUE support
+ Extreme customization
+ Replaygain
+ Converter
+ ABX
- Doesn't properly support .aac files
- No easy way to check for component support
- Not scriptable natively
For the minuses, I still have to have MediaMonkey & WinAmp.
@bytemastr: LOL... well WinAmp is not *that* bad actually... besides it's the only player on my PC that can properly play .aac files... so I have no choice there, do I?
Winamp is also one/the only (?) player that defaults to ripping to .aac, so it's quite natural that the Winamp developers would work around the issues that are the result of not using a proper container. The anser you will get around here when asking for "proper" AAC support is to use AAC the way it was meant to, that is inside a proper container (like .mp4).
You know... I never figured out how to rip with WinAmp Always did it with AudioGrabber, before having a brief fling with CDex, and then converting completely to EAC
Still my elderly Nokia6230 can't play *any* properly contained .mp4 files, so I am stuck with .aac
I still don't know what is ReplayGain
And now I have another reason for using foobar2k:
- Converter, for burning audio CDs
I still don't know what is ReplayGain
There is a "help" button at the ReplayGain settings.
I chose foobar because of it efficiency... Its small and I absolutely like, that I can make playlists very quick and switch between fast too. Later I discovered columns_ui
I still don't know what is ReplayGain
There is a "help" button at the ReplayGain settings.
Sorry for the off-topic, I'll use PMs
+Sound Quality
+Extremely Customibility
+Miniamal Resource Usage
+Support for just about every format i can think of
Like others have said, "I dont think I could ever go back to using winamp"
I like it because it sits in my system tray/'notification area' and plays music. Why would I LOOK at a music player?
Oh, and because it looks like notepad. I found the concept of a notepad that played music great at first. It's a pity two other people have said this already
i like it because of its simplicity and multiple playlist handle. But i don't use it anymore because music sounds wayy better with izotope ozone plugin and i couldn't make it work on fb2k
Low resource usage.
ReplayGain. Compatible with so many formats. Low resource usage. Great tagging power.
I love Foobar because it still is able to disprove my opinion i am not longer influenced by the players i used before even if i think so.
I wrote one page before:
The only weak point i can recognize is the fact that foobar isn't able to update database automatically by watching database folder ...
But why it should? If you rip a cd your tracks are corectly named and organized taken in media library, if you use renamer to add/remove or rename files to media library your database is updated. And that without scanning harddrive!
Before i got foobar, i just LISTENED to music, but then a friend showed me Foobar and i was excited. It´s not only a Player for music, it´s also a nice Freetime Activity I mostly work on the player instead of listening with it but now i´ve got 2 Foobars on my computer, one for the music and one to work on.
my only solution to manage and play and keep track of my thousands albums collection
Foobar : leap forward
+ Only gapless I could get to work flawlessly on my computer
+ Supports all my formats (flac, wav, mp3)
+ Supports a directory-tree interface (via foo_uie_explorer), the only way I will EVER use a music player.
- Steep learning curve
- Changing the look of the UI can be a lengthy process
- Does not do my laundry for me
I have moved from Winamp to foobar2k because of the GUI. The GUI appears to be faster than winamp. There is no memory consuming design, just a good old well structured standard window. So you can concentrate on functions and not on fucking design like winamp.
I tried many players (winamp, jetaudio, musicmatch, dbpower...) before discovering and adopting F2k 0.8.2.
+ low resources usage
+ reads the good formats (ogg, mpc, flac)
+ a lot of very good plugins
+ the best tagging capacity
+ higly customizable
- I still have a lot of troubles to handle (understand) the purpose of some plugins, script and configuration writting, but...
+++ the F2k community is so helpful !
I was actually working on a WA3/5 skin that emphasized the playlist (part of the 'working' was that the layout didn't exist in any at the time, so coding it was a bit odd)...and found Foobar2000,
+ Gapless playback, natively.
+ Replaygain (I like the report in 0.9).
+ Good tagging (even nicer in 0.9).
+ Good conversion tool (though the 0.9 one's UI is my one and only gripe for FB2K, ATM).
+ ABX...
+ Shuffle by album; not a killer feature that gets you right off, but it has certainly grown on me.
+ Independent volume setting, with intutive default keys of numpad+/-.
+ No skins required, and the buttons aren't too tiny.
+ Multiple flat playlists, tabbed.
+ Every version I've tried so far has worked under WINE w/o hassle. I haven't tried 0.9.3.1 yet beyond Windows, but I have already read simple success cases.
+ In general, it hasn't sucked more with newer versions, as is generally common in software.
+++ As with the above, it does not organize my music for me, or get in the way of my going through it. Non-flat database interfaces add plenty of hassle, and offer no benefit when wanting to listen to my music. Sure, they're handy, but not as a default method of handling the playlists. The work required to use players like iTunes, Amarok, and Banshee is just too great, and even then, they still get in the way. FB2K has multiple big flat playlists with good drag&drop support.
- Hard to read mostly functional scripting langauge for formatting.
+ Er, a scripting language for formatting that does orders of magnitude more than I have yet required of it (all I've really needed has been $replace(s,'&','and')), and much more than I ever will need.
I might as well jump on this bandwagon, new account here, and all.
I played with foobar back as far as 0.5, and, now, 0.9.3.1. Between them, I opted to drop Windows, and go MacOS X native. I loved UNIX, and, hey, it gave me UNIX and Photoshop. However, now I need to be compatible with about 90% of the world - like it, or not. The only thing that could play MOD files mostly-correctly (and wasn't DeliPlayer), is foo_dumb. I take my MOD files too seriously.
What I like:
I like how much power foobar has, that you can make it do almost anything you want.
I like that foobar has a wonderfully documented (and BSD licensed) API. That's tasty.
I like that it starts out simple, and it's primary focus is the audio, not some extra flashy junk that has nothing to do with what I'm listening to.
I like that it DOESN'T require me to install the .NET frameworks, or some bizarre not-found-anywhere-but-here OCX, or strange widgets.
What I don't:
I don't like that the API has changed so much that the jump from 0.8x to 0.9x has broken things so completely. There are many 0.8x utilities that will never be recreated.
Lack of documentation. Most dates back to 2003, and references long dead items: I was incredibly annoyed how long it took to find a 'recent' foo_modplug (since foo_mod is gone), only to find that it didn't work at all with 0.9x.
The whole Tagz system needs an overhaul. It's powerful enough to be archaic - or is that archaic enough to be powerful. It's nifty that you can register your own, but there should be a universal way for a plugin to notify foobar that it has these new display variables, and allow the user to decide what to do with them without padding or insane justification tricks, jeeez.
Closing Comments:
I'm old, lazy, and spoiled enough to want something to 'just work', or at least have some functionality that I don't have to wade through a hex editor to find what I want. (Ok, this one was partially kode54's fault.) Foobar isn't anywhere near there. However, I love it now that it works - if an upgrade breaks it horribly, I'll probably dump it forever.. there are thousands of media players in the sea.
+ Lightweight
+ Replaygain
+ Unicode
+ files inside archives
+ DSPs
+ Converter
= I see no good reason to upgrade from 0.8.3.
- Not Free Open Source Software.
- No ports to other platforms either.
plays 99% of my file types, the looks the icons. the lightness of it.... Foobar2000 is just so amazing and FREE, you can't beat this anywhere... Rock On Foobar2000 and Everyone who helps with plugins etc...
I've used Windows Media Player, MusicMatch Jukebox, JetAudio, iTunes, Songbird, VLC, and Winamp over the last few years. Out of all those I like foobar2000 the most.
iTunes was my favourite since version 5-something. Once Apple released version 7 with its bloat, bugs, and 30 MB memory footprint I kicked it off and went to foo. FLAC and ReplayGain support was just the icing on top of the tiny 2-3 MB memory footprint and Windows GUI.
Now I'm beginning to understand the complexity of components and skinning. I liken foo to GNU\Linux – a huge learning curve for a huge amount of control.
Except Linux is opensource /scowls
Originally because I heard of its customizability and I saw someon's great looking foobar. Then I found out it had a minuscule memory footprint and I really needed that on my poor 6-yr old 128mbRAM computer (the better one broke )
Now I'm unearthing all my qualms with previous audio players and making big plans for my future musical enjoyment/organization/complete customization.
?eace
I discovered foobar 2 years ago. It was the most incredible software discovery I ever made. I switched over to it mainly because I found Windows Media Player to be too slow at loading large playlists. I didn't even know how powerful it was, until I found out the beauty of customization (columns, customizable plugins, a fast database feature). It's the one piece of software I couldn't live without, seriously.
Cheers to foobar!!!
well i love the customization in it, even though i dont try and learn the coding and make my own mod. But winamp is faster. fb has tons of features and mods to it so thats why i use it.
I used to like winamp but now i'm using foobar only for 2 reasons :
Very light
Multiple playlist
Don't care about design or else, since I'm listening with my ears
It's lightweight and I can make it do what I want it to do and ONLY what I want it to do. That's what I look for in all software.
Also, making it pretty is a good way to kill some time when some time needs to be killed.
I like how you get it out of the box and from then on you build on it until you get you get what you want. I like how, in my words, it's not "bloated."
At first, I didn't like it. I thought it was way too minimalist. After a while, I realized that it was what I always wanted, a music player that plays virtually any file type, while leaving a very small footprint in resources. I was just addicted to the "features" of Windows Media Player. But in actuality Foobar has way more features, without getting in the way.
I ran 0.8.3 alongside Winamp (favoring the latter) until 0.9.X when I started learning how to use it. Preferred:
+ Unicode
+ Columns UI sort-by-album
+ foo_alarm -> foo_scheduler
+ Doesn't die on 60,000 file playlist
+ Tabbed playlists
+ Album list
+ Album art
Maybe if I had decent speakers I'd care more about sound quality...
Foobar plays music. Period. Highly customizable, scriptable interface and ability to confugre almost every function makes foobar an application that does exactly what and how I want. No more oversized super-cool players with good look as highest priority, filled with stuff I don't need or don't care about. Besides, foobar sounds just perfect. And on top of that gapeless playback. Something I absolutely require.
lightweight
highly customizable
nice EQ
replay gain
plays all types of music
the best audio player available !
I just use it, because it plays allmost every musictype and because it is fully customisable and that´s so much fun coding arround and finding the right looking.
i switched from winamp and have never looked back.
using 0.9 only thing i miss from 0.8.3 is the freedb. i know there is one in 0.9 but it doesnt run mp3 files
...i know there is one in 0.9 but it doesnt run mp3 files
It certainly does.
Lets see...
When i started listening to music on a computer (about 1999) i only knew about Winamp and i used it until a friend of mine said "try foobar its much better than Winamp". I gave it a go (this might have been around .6 or .7), but i didnt find it to be what i needed at the time. I often use Now playing scripts on irc and didnt know about any way to do that with foobar at that time.
But some months ago, Winamp fucked me over. Wouldnt wanna play a song without crashing. So i remembered about foobar and pulled it down. And at this time i had allready started to use AMIP and knew it worked with foobar. So the deal was sealed. Now that I've gotten in to foobar a little more.
I really LOVE it.
...i know there is one in 0.9 but it doesnt run mp3 files
It certainly does.
well am i using the wrong site to get the track names. cos it doesnt find loads of my albums, but 0.8.3 finds them. just tried it on Death rows greatest hits its quite a popular cd
"or why you don't like it"
It would be really nice if Foobar used a programming language that already existed...I don't know very many but it just seems that inventing a language just for foobar when there are plenty languages available out there is overkill.
Especially when you think that the people who take time to customize their foo aren't going to be turned off by using a language they perhaps already know.
eh, whatevs.
?eace
After Winamp's recent obsession with cramming thousands of ads and flashy plugins, along with hip cool features... I've become completely disappointed with my beloved media player.
Earlier tonight I was introducing a friend to some new music via SHOUTcast/Winamp, he asked me to leave it going all night, no biggie, I have plenty of bandwidth. Then I realized I really didn't feel like listening to that anymore, so I thought, why don't I just get a small audio player, I can check out something new, and have an alternative. First option that came to mind was Foo2k...
Downloaded it, installed it, added my library, completely loved it. Foo2k is everything I need/want in an audio player and nothing I don't. This program is the perfect mixture of flexibility and functionality.
Keep up the great work guys.
It would be really nice if Foobar used a programming language that already existed...I don't know very many but it just seems that inventing a language just for foobar when there are plenty languages available out there is overkill.
Especially when you think that the people who take time to customize their foo aren't going to be turned off by using a language they perhaps already know.
eh, whatevs.
See here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...r2000:Tagscript (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Tagscript)
Unfortunately, it was removed.
All of the good things have been named, so I'll say some of the things I don't like:
There doesn't seem to be a way of making f2k add to a specified playlist and then playing at all. Especially from external sources like Windows Explorer and WLM (received files). The quickest way I have discovered is by making it add to a playlist, then using my global hotkeys, ctrl+numpad6 (next track), ctrl+numpad5 (play). Send to playlist replaces the whole playlist with on track, and add doesn't play it.
It's fast, light, stable, and versatile. I still use 0.8.3 though. They don't have my favorite pluggies on 9, and I don't care for the new look. It could be worse though. (iTunes...GAK!)
It lets me listen to music the way I wan't to, instead of making me listen to music the way some big company wants me to (like with winamp and windows media player).
It is so extremly customizeable. The main point of the program is to work well, and it does just that.
after having winamp freeze up on me after playing for a certain amount of time and crashing a handful of times in one day I started looking for something else and FB2K was ranked pretty high on softpedia so I gave it a shot.
I got tired of Winamp taking forever to load. Forum friends seemed to really enjoy foobar, so I gave it a shot.
With a few plugins I can play just about any music file I have managed to mass up during the years, excluding a few exotic tracker formats. Been using fb2k for some years now, and as I recall, the main reason why I changed from QCD was foo_sid... ^^
- J
foobar . . . love it or leave it.
Well, you can't LEAVE foobar. It's like Hotel California.
You might as well try to leave Cynthia.
Because it doesn't automatically play a wave file when you first install it.
I started using foobar from version 0.8.x.
Foobar can be suited for taste from anyone.
If you like simple look, it's already in simple look from default installation.
If you like fancy "eye-catching" outlook, you can customize by yourself or use theme desgined by foobar's user.
I started using it because iTunes slowed my system down to the point of not being functional anymore. Winamp is tested and true, but to me it's too much "in the middle"; too customizable to be as straighforward as iTunes but not customizable enough to be anywhere near Foobar. So I decided to go "all the way" with Foobar Only use iTunes to sync my iPod these days
at first i tried foobar because is saw users screenshots of their own modifications/themes and thought that foobar looks very good. then i realised it needs lot of tweakin to get it look good and i switched back to winamp. But i was bored and tried foobar for "one more time". I got a good tutorial that i used to get my foobar look good. After that i discovered all the great utils, tagging possibilities and replay gain. now I'm not switching back to winamp anymore!
I tried Foobar last year, and I did love it. For awhile. It was customisable, played more formats than WMP and I like stuff like this. Plugins? Great idea!
However I switched back to WMP (Windows Media Player).... why?
1) The multimedia library.
Yes just that one thing only. I like to browse my library easily inside my media player. I don't wanna have to write a complex plugin to make a media library thats easy to use. WMP has a far superior library (out of the box).
I can expand albums and see all my albums. Or I can go to artists and see all their songs when I click the artist. But if I then expand artist I can see the individual albums. I can double-click and whatever is in that list becomes the new play list. Or I can right-click and add to the current playlist rather than killing it.
If Foobar had a multimedia library that was on par with WMP it'd be the superior player in the market, but sadly it's not. If someone reckons they can get that same functionality or close to it with Foobar then please, correct me! Show me!
Changed to it because WMP... errr... whatever the latest one is... went crap. The main reason is I like the artist/album expandable trees, and especially the directory one, which is difficult to find elsewhere.
I would probably change away from it, to something that may in many ways be worse, if someone came up with something similar that was slightly more usable. What irritates me about Foobar is that it's very well done, technically excellent, stable and more, yet missing some blindingly obvious and pretty much trivial features.
By this I mean things like my old gripe that shuffle and repeat are not separate. Another is that you play through an album in normal mode, reach the end, press the play button (in my case, a hotkey) - and instead of starting again, it plays the last track. Why?! All of this wonderful player and it's let down by some spectacularly simple annoyances.
I can expand albums and see all my albums. Or I can go to artists and see all their songs when I click the artist. But if I then expand artist I can see the individual albums. I can double-click and whatever is in that list becomes the new play list. Or I can right-click and add to the current playlist rather than killing it.
If Foobar had a multimedia library that was on par with WMP it'd be the superior player in the market, but sadly it's not. If someone reckons they can get that same functionality or close to it with Foobar then please, correct me! Show me!
http://crap.wapoc.com/foobar.png (http://crap.wapoc.com/foobar.png)
Works for me - took a bit of messing around to do it, but not too bad. I can try to explain but it might be difficult.
I switched because I was fed up with Winamp's crap, it was to the point were it wouldn't even start.
The only down side to foobar is that fact that I change my shell style, icons, etc. a lot and like to have everything match, this would be fine with Winamp but in fb2k it's a bit more difficult seeing as how I can't find many .fcs files, and I'm not very good at coming up with a layout
Because it's quick and plays every format I throw at it, Sick of other players taking forever to load.
It hasn't been long since I began using foobar (late last year), but I don't exactly remember why I began using it. I think I got it recommended from a friend. So, I installed foobar and was met with a white minimalistic interface which looked like it could do nothing at all. It kind of set me aback, but I quickly learned of ColumnsUI, which suddenly changed everything. That, combined with foo_playlist_tree and not few hours learning the basic of TAGZ and other scripting, made foobar THE best choice for me.
In every other music player I used, there were some things that I didn't like, and some things that were not suited to my needs. In foobar? I change it myself. Do I want ColumnsUI to not show artists unless the album artist equals "Various"? No problem, wrap it all up in a little $if($stricmp($meta(album artist),Various)) and you're good to go. Do I want to be able to organize my whole music collection in one, two... make that three clicks? No problem, I've made an advanced "rename, move or copy files" script perfectly suited for my needs, and my needs only.
It's the customizability, generally speaking. To be able to do basically what ever you want to fit it exactly to your music collection. Yes, it takes quite a while to get it all working just the way you want it, but my oh my, is it worth it.
Edit (darn me for always remembering things a split second after adding the reply): The reason I started using foobar, was because of the gapless playback. I needed that, and a friend of mine said that foobar probably was the best gapless player for Windows.
I'm a masochist.
I'm a masochist.
May I second that please? =)
It's mostly visual for me. I can adjust Foobar in any way I want, and it really works for me, the way I set it up. The sound is fine and gapless and all is nice, but I change songs and look for them so much, that it really matters to me how the songs are laid out. I need to be able to quickly do what I want, and only Foobar can do it.
I does'nt want to talk about Windows Media player, it stink.
Itunes doesn't give me what I want, not good sound, doesn't read Flac.
I spent a year with Winamp, but I was never satisfied, It takes an Hour to load my Library. Don't like the media library and these windows which open in my face and resize themselves when and were they want.
Now I find the Holly Graal, it's Foobar2000 + GSM_flavored mod v0.1.5,
--The most important thing-->Foobar sound great and the music in my Grado's is more clean and clear with foo than with Winamp. For those who haven't make the experience, try to listen the same song with the same volume wthout any Dsp, with another Media player, you will hear the difference, it's the same beetween Flac and MP3.
--Library load quickly
--I can see Album covers while navigating in the media library
--I can change tags and download covers in more efficient way than with other media player
--almost anything is possible and can be done with Foo
What I don't like is that I need to understand (a little bit) how it works.
I am very satisfied with MY Foobar
I use it as an auxiliary player for tracks that aren't in my music library and also to convert CUE+WAVs ripped in EAC to LAME 3.97 -V 0 --vbr-new.
It's fast and it's lightweight, but the learning curve is way too steep and time consuming for me to get the same features as WMP11 (my choice for library management/playback), and it doesn't offer seamless integration with the AMG database (crucial feature for me) as WMP11 does.
I like it due to its minimalism (or what can be achieved, I hate people trying to mimic WMP in foobar2000 but that just shows what can be achieved) and that it can still have load of features accessible without turning in to the beast that is WMP\iTunes.
Its also able to manage my music library to my tastes and others via tagz n such.
I also like it having to use its own input plugins rather than bog up the entire system with codecs.
I like its speed and resource management. It doesnt bog down the computer nor does it arrive with "Agents".
Thats why I use Foobar2000
i like foobar because:
- plays every format under the sun with minimal optional plugins (see below)
- extremely fast loading (beats winamp and especially itunes by miles)
- looks ugly but i don't give a sh|t because i'm listening to music not watching my music player
- has absolutely no problems handling unicode (i have sh|tloads of japanese/chinese files)
- super easy to convert from one file type to another
- free!
here's all i have to add and i'm all set:
foo_burninate.dll (right click CD burning!)
foo_dop.dll (best thing ever made for my 2G shuffle)
foo_input_alac.dll (for those pesky itunes rips)
foo_input_monkey.dll (not sure why they can't include this default... but at least it's not hard to find like...)
foo_input_tta.dll (like this one... *hint* google "tta foobar" will bring you straight to the right page)
keep up the good work foobar devs
I like foobar2000 because it works. Also it goes by the "if you don't ask for it, you don't get it" philosophy.
Things I really like about:
Titleformating - tag based ui rocks
A dedicated, friendly, and helpful dev and user community
Things I don't like about it:
Titleformatting
Also I don't like the concept of the queue, I think everything should be a playlist, since the ui is based on playlists and that is, primarily, how the user interacts with the program. I also think the queue confuses basic functionality and distracts from features that would more easily be introduced if the backend had a simpler model. "Cursor follows playback"/"Playback follows cursor" - intermixed with active/playing playlist, plus the fact that you can play tracks by "adding to queue" or by playing a playlist, which are two completely different things. These are concepts I have never adequately wrapped my head around, and don't honestly care to. I don't use the queue, and I think that there some features (mentioned in previous posts) missing that a purely playlist based system could handle quite easily.
Ok, I'm off my soapbox. Cheers and thanks again for this great player.
I believe my initial reason for switching to foobar was that I dislike applications that abandon the standard windows look & feel in favor of some ugly selection of skins, which seems to be what most media players go for. Ironically since then I have customized my foobar to the point that it's barely recognizable as a windows app other than the titlebar. I guess the difference is that it's something I designed, so that makes it ok.
Simple.
The way it handles tags is vital to me. In other media players, there is a screen with predefined tags, and if there are any more, you can't see it. It's also not easy to add new custom tags. In Foobar, it's as natural as typing text in a text editor. It's very powerful, and I need that. Also, it doesn't mess up tags, like WMP does. If I play something from my foobar music library in WMP, the tags get totally messed up, especially the rating.
I like it because it' a swiss army knife for audio. What I don't like is maintaining it. I'm using foobar for quite a while now and it worked fine for me, so I didn't keep track of some component's developement. Yesterday I tried to add album art, which wouldn't work with my old version of Columns_UI, so I had to replace it with te newest version. But that disturbed my Trackinfo and so on. In the end it ruined my config and I had to do everything anew...
I tried it once a few months and didn't know how to do anything useful with it. Then I saw the wiki here, and set it up so it could do everything that iTunes could do (well everything I used it for), but better in every way and without the bloat or slowness
My reasons for using foobar2000 is mostly technical (I'm very peculiar about things). foobar2000 has a robust component architecture that exceeds other players like Winamp in every way. It is easier for a beginner to write plugins for Winamp because it doesn't use a C++ class based stucture which can be a bit daunting at first, but this class based structure shows it's strengths when you get more complex code and want to interface more deeply with the core (being foobar2000 itself).
Besides the technical aspects I love foobar2000 because it's outright simple to use (for me) and brings no nonsense. F.ex the latest incarnations of Winamp are a bit bloated I must say even with the option to remove plugins you don't want. The advertisements in various Media Library pages should have never been added and at least be gone when you are running the Pro version.
I also got Songbird installed which is a nice concept but nothing I would use in daily life. The same thing can be said about Amarok and don't get me started on iTunes clones.
I like Foobar because it is light and because it support cue sheets.
The only thing that I don't like about Foobar is that there is not an installerless option for it. I would much prefer the option of simply unzipping it into my home directory.
I use foobar for my music playback needs, conversion to various formats, and thanks to panelsUI its interface can be tweaked even further.
However, I must say that I feel a lot of people here like to 'claim' the program for some strange reasons. It almost feels like its a choice because its considered 'good' by people who have better knowledge of audio compression and playback (whatever that includes) then they do. It reminds me of a movie that is liked a lot outside the mainstream, not necessarily for qualitative reasons they themselves understand, but because they are being told by people they look up to that it is awesome. And so they buy into it, the analogy being Foobar, dabble with it, find it to work ok, maybe not better (dude, claiming Foobar to sound better is just a very strange (and probably untrue) statement) and feel a little 'cool' for not using the evil Microsoft'ish Winamp (or even more evil true-Microsoft WMP). What they don't realize is that those programs might work just as well for them.
Anyway, I dont mean to troll, just wanted to vent a little.
Edit: typos.
For anyone who does not have the technical competence to use foobar, or for those who do not need its advanced options, but still want above average degree of control, I recommend MediaMonkey. It's free (at least 95 % of the functionality), it's very easy to use, and it has a lot more options to scructurize and maintain your music library than WMP has.
Would be perfect if they only put back the RANDOM feature!
Sometimes I like a new song i just added to the playlist so i'm constantly replaying it, however with the current shuffle feature it repeats the SAME SONGS in the same order over and over again.
I understand it was taken out b/c some ppl got confused with shuffle and random, but that doesn't mean you should delete it!
One - real important - reason havent been mentioned enough imo:
The great community! Many developers of plugins and stuff create it new every time they want it!
YOU are the reason for using foobar!
Second that, Generalverdacht. Foobar would have been nothing without all the plugins created by the community.
+ love at first sight because it looks like it belongs on my desktop as it uses the standard Windows GUI
+ gapless playback & cue sheets
+ title formatting
+ small memory footprint
+ total time counter
+ i hate skins
+ cute icon
Cause it dose not add Startup entry.
+ Can customize to suited my weird listening habit
+ FAST
+ Very nice icons
+ Lots of thing Foobar can do
+ A lots of good and weird(and i find it very useful!) plugin
+ Did i mentioned FAST!!
Because straight away I was able to play all the flac files I have. I have been using it straight out of the box with just the ape and shn plugins for about a year.
Now I just hope I can get through the steep learning curve and figure out how to wrestle this baby until it looks the way I want it to. I seen screen captures of others setups and they look amazing, much cooler than my stock settings.
Port it to Linux and there will be nothing to dislike!
QFT
Second that, Generalverdacht. Foobar would have been nothing without all the plugins created by the community.
Depends - without "all the plugins", a few interesting things would be missing.... but also alot of options-bloat and horrible configuration-hell would be missing.
Ignoring filetype plugins, as i see it, the most important thing which barebone-foobar (no 3rd party plugins) is missing, is a less minimalistic UI - and the lack of a better official UI is also what started this whole mess.
I started to use foobar a couple of weeks ago, Mainly because it supports natively .ape files, the audio codec I'm using to archive my cds.
So I'm a total newbie. Infact I'm using it with the standard gui, quite minimalistic, but I saw there are "thousands" of plugin that can change the aspect and add a lot of functions. I.e ReplayGain
WinMPlayer and its embedded DRM control is another reason to change music player.
In general I would like to change the habit to use mainly Ms programs and start to use as more I can (at home for example....) free and opensource software.
Foobar Linux portability could be nice.
Ciao
I'm totally in love with title formatting. The way I'm able to make columns in Columns Playlist, and filter/sort my files for easy tagging.
Foobar does what I never was able to make Winamp do...
I started using foobar2000 PRIMARILY because the true gapless MP3 playback support. This was the first thing. Then later I found about the multi-band marvelous EQ. And not much longer, I found out a little tool that I mess and un-mess every now and again, the CONVERTER. And Not much after that, I discovered that it can also masstag...
I just painfully regret, murmur and get sad that there is NO LINUX port.
I hope the developer change his mind one day...
Linux Port would be cool. But until this happens I use 0.9.4.3 with wine and Jack to have audio without stutters.
I don't like the way Amarok is so less customizeable. Maybe I am a bit to fastidious from Foobar.
I like Foobar because of
- Beeing customizable
- Coverting and Ripping
- Masstagging
- Replaygain (Amarok mustchange a lot. That replaygain script works not so well)
- Media Library
I initially decided to switch my ripped CD's from the lossy WMA format to FLAC format for the better sound quality.
I examined numerous music players. Many of them to do not play FLAC format files. Some of them are too basic. Some of them had bad reviews by users or web sites. I saw no bad reviews for foobar2000
foobar2000 has quite a few features that make it a powerful player. I love the fact that it can be customized for a more personalized function and appearance. The customization process also presents an enjoyable challenge that will hopefully expand my audio knowledge. The few flaws that have been mentioned for it are unimportant in my view or can be handled by secondary programs.
Thanks to the developers for providing a great program!!!
- A large amount of scalability
- Low system resource hog
- Good sound quality
- Out of the box codec support
No ugly/heavy skins, just plain good ol windows native interface
Extremely customisable
Usage of the proper decoding engines
It covers all my converting and tagging needs
True gapless playback
No ugly/heavy skins, just plain good ol windows native interface
Clean simple interface with custimizability via CoulmnsUI and some panels for album art and such. I hate the whole skin thing. Just show me my stuff and play it. On that note. Support for many formats. Wavpack specifically. Tag editing/cleanup/management. Would like to say the converter but currently got bug(s) with that.
The main reason I switched from WinAmp to Foobar2000 was great Unicode support. I have a lot of German and Scandinavian music, and Foobar is able to display characters correctly. Some of the reasons I have stuck with it:
- Interface looks like a normal program
- Customizable in all the right ways (not just stupid eye candy, you can tweak it to display information you care about)
- Incredible community of supporters
- Great plugins (to the OP: look at foo_title (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=46595) if you don't like foo_looks)
- Masstagger rocks
Foobar really seems to be all about the music. It just never gets in my way! As others have mentioned, if it ran on Linux, it could take over the world.
I switched from Winamp because of this:
+ Tools for organizing my music
+ Low CPU / Memory consumtion
+ Multiple playlist and Panel Tree in Columns UI
I chose Foobar2000 because i can have every detail i want, organised with the way i want. Total customization are the magic words.
I can tell you why I like it and why I don't like it.
I like(d) it because of its simplicity, no graphical wizzdos or useless features, just an mp3 player.
Up until now, when it no longer has the feature I've used ever since I first installed winamp, or the feature doesn't work. It hasn't for the past three versions. See here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57078)
I chose Foobar2000 mainly to play FLAC with scrobbling support for Last.fm. But now I really like customizing it and making it look great. The whole plug-ins scene is really cool.
Extremely customizable.
Good community.
Light and fast.
Open Source.
I wish there was something like Foobar but then as Operating System. (I dont mean Linux)
Open Source.
Uhm... no.
well maybe open source is not the right defining, but I mean you can change almost everything by yourself.
Thats hardly the definition of open source.
well maybe open source is not the right defining, but I mean you can change almost everything by yourself.
I cannot understand why this rumour doesn't end that you can change everything by yourself. It was a big improvement in Foobar 0.9. that many options in the preferences were removed. Take a look in a clean install of foobar and then take the same look in clean install of Winamp: You will see that Winamp has much more options.
I cannot understand why this rumour doesn't end that you can change everything by yourself. It was a big improvement in Foobar 0.9. that many options in the preferences were removed. Take a look in a clean install of foobar and then take the same look in clean install of Winamp: You will see that Winamp has much more options.
I think he's talking about plugins too. I've installed UI Columns, Navigator Suite and foo_playlist_tree. I've configured and scripted them (the two latter) way beyond the standard settings, to fit my music collection.
Mostly because of the extent in which you can customize it. And for the amazing tag features.
Also, it fits the same profile an app like Firefox does. Which is keep it clean on default and let the individual user extend it's functionality to his or her preference instead of overloading an app with functions you only use a portion of.
For a long time I wanted to like foobar, but I couldn't stand it. I had kinda like a love/hate relationship with it The default UI did not meet my wishes and the task of coding your own config seemed to big for me. But, I did it anyway eventually and now I love it
Open Source.
Uhm... no.
well maybe open source is not the right defining, but I mean you can change almost everything by yourself.
Ignorance to this degree is a major issue causing factor in the world. Do you just hear a term and presume it applies to something you like? Does it ever occur to you to actually look things like this up?
People like you are responsible for the idea that people that spread msn viruses are "hackers", low fps in games is "lag", and other stupid misinformed terms of slang that make accurate communcation significantly more impossible.
My reason for installing foobar2000 is not a technical one - but as I don't think it's been mentioned here, it may be of some interest to those monitoring the take-up of the software.
I decided to try out a music database and streaming radio website called Last.fm - this recommends a small list of audio players (only about three, I think) that work with the site. My player wasn't listed, but foobar was, so I decided to install it too.
My other player was VLC (which has never let me down on audio, even if its video handling is occasionally problematic). I don't think I would have installed another player without having visited that website.
For a new user, a big plus for foobar is that it seems to work straight after installation, with a big, clean, uncluttered interface. It may strike a new user as more complex than VLC, but that is largely due to its many optional advanced features, which require a lot of discussion and documentation. Obviously the advanced features are a strong recommendation for those users who need them - but once it's realised that those who don't need them can run it in a basic mode, the complexity is more apparent than real. I particularly liked the fact that you don't need to search through lots of preference menus to tweak the privacy settings, as can be the case with commercial players.
It's too early to say whether I'll stick with foobar (or last.fm) as I've only just started to try them - but first impressions are good.
Open Source.
Uhm... no.
well maybe open source is not the right defining, but I mean you can change almost everything by yourself.
Ignorance to this degree is a major issue causing factor in the world. Do you just hear a term and presume it applies to something you like? Does it ever occur to you to actually look things like this up?
People like you are responsible for the idea that people that spread msn viruses are "hackers", low fps in games is "lag", and other stupid misinformed terms of slang that make accurate communcation significantly more impossible.
well to be honest I googled before I posted 'opensource'.
I googled for "opensource foobar" and came out to:
"FooBar2000 - a Free, Open-Source, Extendable digital music player"
the reason I used this term was because it's hard for me to express my words as non native englishman.
In order of priority:
1. Full Unicode support.
2. Great sound quality.
2. Small footprint.
3. Customizable interface.
4. Last.fm support.
5. Masstagger.
No order of importance...
Simple interface
Customizable as HELL
Small footprint (ninjaing what Sashka said >.>)
Great format support
Well, I've been using WinAmp for a little while, as WMP sucks in little ways (for one, I hate its shuffle) and doesn't have FLAC or APE support.
I've recently gotten into Foobar because of its converter--I can convert from many formats (like APE and FLAC, huzzah!) to others very easily. I also like its interface simplicity, though I wish it could minimize to small toolbar like WinAmp.
I also rip often to .FLAC images with .cue sheets for backup, and I love that Foobar can play these. And it can burn using Nero? What can't Foobar do? (well, I'd like to be able to rip to image with separate .cue, not embedded, but I use EAC anyway)
I like its shuffle, but I wish I could click "next" and it would shuffle to another song, like in WinAmp. Doesn't seem to work in Foo.
Would I be able to use a remote control with Foobar?
So, in short, I like it's simplicity and the depth of its functions! Very powerful little player.
I'm an old-timer, a DOS fossil, and I'm filesystem oriented. I use foobar2000's default GUI.
To me, foobar2000 is like an audio oriented filesystem browser, with a toolbox. That is how I think of it; that is what I want; that is how I use it. iTunes and WMP, etc., are overwhelmingly intrusive by comparison. (And foobar2000 can do what they do too, if desired.) The tabbed playlists make my preferred mode of operation effortless, exactly as with a tabbed internet browser. It is a mystery why most of the other audio player developers don't agree with this.
My answer to the original post: I like the transparency through it to the file on the disk, and the tab-navigation.
Edit:
My main usage of foobar has not been music: it is a central tool in my Chinese studies. So, I appreciate the Unicode support. Foobar actually makes a very good adjunct to a flashcard program: chop up the language-lesson audio as desired, edit the formatting string to show just the (Chinese) filename, set the font very large, set the window size to show just the filename being played, select "random", and let it fly!
Most of the popular players seem to be playlist oriented. That is, you create a number of playlists for different moods/scenarios, and then when you startup WinAmp or WMP or VLC you just select the playlist and off you go.
What I need is a library-centric music player. I want to have a library view (sorted by directory structure or artist/album) from which I can drag-drop albums and, rarely, individual songs into the Now Playing list. If I can use ctrl/shift keys to select multiple albums/songs for dragging, all the better. You just can't do this with the popular players.
I started with MusicMatch which was exactly what I needed, except that it had a pretty big footprint AND it didn't support Flac. I then tried the Monkey, which was fine except that it was really an adware player, which I didn't want. And then I stumbled upon Foobar, which seems to do the job.
Now I've got to tell you, I'm not in love with Foobar. Its been a pain in the neck to get setup in a way that works for me. MusicMatch was extremely easy to use in comparison and was setup the way I liked it out of the box. But given the memory footprint and lack of FLAC support, I've decided to use Foobar.
Here's to hoping that Foobar becomes easier to use (a slim maybe?).
I've been using it for about a year, switching from Winamp because...honestly, I don't even remember the reason I switched. I think I was just frustrated with Winamp's interface and ready to try something new.
Foobar 2000 strikes me as, not so much a music player in itself (though it certainly is that), as a framework around which you can build your own ideal music player. If you want something minimalist, with no frills or fancy graphics, it can do that. If you want something incredible-looking, it can do that too. If you want pretty advanced media management, it can do that too. There's never been anything I've wanted the program to do that I couldn't, eventually, after a great deal of work and/or hunting for plugins, make it do.
The dark side here, of course, is that the task of actually *making* it do what you want it to do can be daunting (to say the least), especially if you don't have a lot of time to invest, or a mind for technical tasks. This, the scattershot documentation and, sorry, the (perceived, at least) attitude of some folks (namely, that if you don't have a lot of time to invest or a mind for technical tasks that you don't *deserve* to use Foobar2000) keep me from being able to unreservedly recommend it to people. There's a difference between having a steep learning curve and being actively hostile to new users, and while I'm not sure FB2K or its community is unreservedly the latter, both certainly edge in that direction at times.
Also, I kind of hate the name.
Still, I love tinkering with things, and I love being able to make it behave exactly as I desire, so I'm almost certainly going to stick with it.
There's a difference between having a steep learning curve and being actively hostile to new users [...]
I have never seen that happen and frankly, i don't believe it's true(we have good mods here). If someone aren't prepared to invest alittle time on reading up on things and expects everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, then i don't really see it as being hostile to say that they probably should go use another player instead. On the other hand then newbies which aren't lazy is newer brushed off like that...
Also, I kind of hate the name.
Although the name of a player is utterly irrelevant, then i personally really love it, as it reflects just that...
My own reasons for being a diehard fb2k fan is simply because of it's feature set, configurability, GUI and footprint, and where the most important features of that feature set, is the support for WavPack images with embedded cuesheets, tagging/mass-tagging, renaming/moving, converting and ReplayGain support.
Anyway, that was just my 2 cents
1) FLAC + full unicode support
2) masstagger
3) album list plugin (it's like iTunes w/o the bulk)
4) KS
not a fan of the default UI, but hey to each his/her own. At least there's a plugin that allows me to let foobar look the way I want.
I have never seen that happen and frankly, i don't believe it's true(we have good mods here). If someone aren't prepared to invest alittle time on reading up on things and expects everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, then i don't really see it as being hostile to say that they probably should go use another player instead. On the other hand then newbies which aren't lazy is newer brushed off like that...
Maybe hostility wasn't the right word, but there's definitely a culture of...something, I don't know, and don't particularly want to use any loaded terms. But the characterization of a certain group of new users as 'lazy' (even as you are trying to argue that there is no hostility to newbies) lends a bit of support to my perception.
My point, I suppose, is that it's a great program, but not one that I'd recommend to anyone without a lot of time, technical ability, and patience. And that's kind of a shame, because I think there are people without a lot of time, technical ability, and patience who would use and benefit from the program if some effort were made to meet them halfway.
but not one that I'd recommend to anyone without a lot of time, technical ability, and patience.
You forgot to mention special needs. If you don't have any special needs, that being connected to compression format as well as organizing and layout, then you don't really need foobar. MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) will work just as good for those people.
But the characterization of a certain group of new users as 'lazy' (even as you are trying to argue that there is no hostility to newbies) lends a bit of support to my perception.
When someone is trying to get into fb2k, then they will without a doubt notice that it will take a little effort to learn and use propperly. Then if you are not the type of person who takes joy in getting down and dirty with such things, then the logical next move would be to admit to yourself that this player is properly not meant for my target group and then go look for another more suited alternative instead. This behaviour to me is fully accepted and also not the slightest bit lazy, however, when some person of that same group dosen't go that route, but instead comes to this forum section and demands help and support without really wanting to make some efforts themselves, then to me that is totally unacceptable and without a doubt lazy behaviour and that was solely the thing i meant previously with my use of the 'lazy' term.
My point, I suppose, is that it's a great program, but not one that I'd recommend to anyone without a lot of time, technical ability, and patience.
Neither would i
And that's kind of a shame, because I think there are people without a lot of time, technical ability, and patience who would use and benefit from the program if some effort were made to meet them halfway.
Very true, but that would also spoil it for the current target group though, so i honestly dosen't hope that it will change, but that's just me, though
Btw, i'm not trying to pick a fight with you or anything like that, but just expressing my own personal oppenion about this issue
Very true, but that would also spoil it for the current target group though, so i honestly dosen't hope that it will change, but that's just me, though
Btw, i'm not trying to pick a fight with you or anything like that, but just expressing my own personal oppenion about this issue
Oh, I certainly wouldn't advocate crippling the program to make it easier to learn. It'd be nice if it demonstrated some of its flexibility and power right out of the box, though. Although I suspect that's difficult, since so much of what makes the program incredible comes from its plugins, and it's probably unfeasible (if not outright impossible) to distribute them along with the executable.
And believe me, I'm not seeing this as a fight. I appreciate the replies, really. Never hurts to have one's preconceptions challenged!
The conversion capability of foobar2000 fits me perfectly. Being able to convert into or out of Single image files with embedded cuesheets and logs has simplified my Backup Archive immensely. Not to mention I can keep up with the latest codecs to encode with and don't have to wait for program updates like with other audio players to use them. Foobar2000 with its conversion ability is seriously all I could ever need or use.
Recently, I switched back to using foobar as my audio playback after I discovered panels and how pretty darn neat they come out as. Also, grabbed the continuator and tube plugin. Granted the PanelsUI does increase the footprint of foobar but it doesn't slow the program down unlike some other player that begins with a small i. It is also not slowed down by my current mp3 library of 5,000+ songs (it grows when I convert my CDs or buy new CDs).
Use PanelsUI 0.14.9 or 0.13.8, as I read in the PanelsUI thread 0.14.10+ have crashing problems. I have had problems with 0.13.8 but some people don't, while I have had zero problems with 0.14.9. So take your pick of those two.
So in short:
Conversion
Customization
No Slowdown
That sums it up.
+ Lightweight, in both CPU and RAM usage
+ Good with big playlists
+ Very configurable
+ Can play everything from MP3s to burned sandwiches
+ No annoying features like the common skin bullshit
+ Works great with wine in Linux. If it didn't, I would still be running windows. :-)
+ Playlist tabs
- Not open source
I recently switched to Linux, and after walking through most of the good music players there are, I just had to run foorbar2000 with wine. (for those that don't know, wine is an windows environment emulator kind of program for Linux + other unixes).
http://keitsi.minttupuffet.net/misc/fb2k_linux.png (http://keitsi.minttupuffet.net/misc/fb2k_linux.png)
I already pointed this out in the foo_discogs thread, so apologies for the repetition, but I moved over because I wanted my MP3s, all 30,000 of them, tagged properly, once and for all, according to the Discogs standard.
I'd become a bit tired of Winamp hanging and crashing too, whenever it felt like it, but often on exit from the program. This would cause things like playcount and ratings I'd set in that session to be lost, with no way to get them back.
I also have felt for a long time that the extended syntax in Winamp's search bar was kind of limiting, a bit annoying, but no deal breaker. I'm very happy with the power of this feature in foobar, and happily enjoying the learning curve. Lots to read, and lots to learn.
My music sounds better in foobar too, without DSP.
I am one happy bunny now, thanks to foobar. I can't wait to get rid of Winamp once and for all.
I've been using foobar for about 3 years or so now and I would never go back, for all the reasons mentioned above! I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu linux (which I recommend to anyone and everyone!), and after trying a few media players made for linux had to go and get foobar running on a windows emulator. There really is nothing better!
@keitsi: just noticed your post, seems like someone should do a linux port!
Why I've chosen Foobar?
Because it is repeatedly mentioned as the best audio player available. Plain and simple.
That and now that I've discovered Samurize, I can get around the lack-of-skinability:
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/338358/Images/Desktop/Thumbnail%20-%2013-11-07.png) (http://www.snapdrive.net/files/338358/Images/Desktop/Desktop%20-%2013-11-07.png)
One MAIN reason : ASIO and Kernel Streaming OUTPUT. I'm currently testing foobar within a very high-end custom-made Hi-Fi ensemble with active crossover, engineered from the beginning like a studio monitoring system, so "bit-perfect" playback is crucial for me.
In plain stereo mode, foobar's output goes to a VST Host software (Console) where the audio is splitted (treble, mid, bass - this is the active crossover part) via VST plug-ins like IZotope Ozone, before accessing a multi-analog ASIO sound card (Lynx 2B) connected to six amplifiers and two 3-way main speakers.
I guess that's all.
Been using f2k for several years now, mostly as a hi-fi player for SHN and FLAC shows and other personal recordings (along with a few archived reference CDs.) Bought an iPod Nano when they first came out (for audiobooks) but foo_pod was not quite right at the time so eventually got hooked on iTunes for the library management and podcast support. Kept coming back to f2k and VLC whenever I had a file with problems or wanted to critically evaluate something through my RME card & quality playback chain. Years of *nix use and a multiple OS/file format world have trained me to have many tools at hand and to simply use each for the things it is best at, while (mostly) ignoring the weaknesses -- as long as some other tool can meet the specific need at hand.
Fast forward to this month, discovered facets and am diving headfirst into 0.95 and no looking back!
There is nothing in *nix media player land comparable, fingers crossed for some enterprising soul who decides to port...
What made me change to foobar from the beginning was when i bough my new Hi-fi system and realized the really bad sound quality in Winamp.
And there was really no alternative to foobar.
What made me stay with foobar is the configurability, great downloadable configurations and really good plugins.
And not to forget the nice community/user-forum.
I've started using foobar bout 3/4 years ago, and the main reason for that was that I finally could do everyting I wanted with one program (converting, tagging, burning, blind abx, etc), and do it well too, instead of having a util for every function I need. The only other program I use for audio besides foobar is EAC for it's secure ripping to wav, then foobar handles whatever I wanna do with it.
Also the memory use of foobar with my 30k+ collection of mp3/ape/flac files is much better than with other players, winamp crashed regularly, would hog many mb's of memory, and was extremely slowpoke with all my files in the playlist, where foobar deals with it without any problems.
Third, the flexibility and quality of sound reproduction rocks. I find the DSP plugins to be very good, and stuff just seems to sound better than with other players.
Alltho foobar is a great program which I love to use, I still have problems with it on a regular basis, mainly due to it's complexity and because I grew up in the precomputer age. For example, title formatting code is like total jibberish to me (thank god for columns UI), and many of the settings in the preferences menu I don't fully understand.
Also, finding out how to do something I haven't done before with foobar can be quite tedious. The forum gives a wealth of information about the program, but I often find myself reading for hours, while I just wanna know one little thing. It's like finding a single leaf on a tree. One of these days I'd really like to like to read the manual.
This aside, I've been a happy user ever since I first met foobar, and I think I will remain a happy user for a long time cuz you guys know what you are doing. I have confidence that by the time version 1.0 is released, it will be perfect
Cyberschelm
It's good quality player,and it's fast and small.
Foobar2k is the best ever~
Foobar2000 is small, fast, basic, has many plugins and above all it can just play anything for small CPU load. It's fun to see Foobar2000 customizable, but I think the not need to install various audio codecs yourself. Able to play any music file for low CPU load, is why I use foobar2000.
Ofcourse the community at self is great community. One who listens, asks and acts. Good job people.
I am thinking of switching from Winamp 5.5x because of all the bloat but some things in foobar still don't satisfy me.
1) I want a minimalist view option available as a toggle option. And it should be the default layout. No playlist except for the displaying of the currently played song name/ singer/album/year (filename and/or tag info). No 'File, Edit...' menubar. No title bar.
2) Missing 'Repeat' on play control. Missing 'Shuffle' on play controls. (Shuffle is not the same as Random according to this: http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/mes...d_board_id_is_1 (http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/message_id_is_7940_and_board_id_is_1) )
3) Missing timer/negative timer on the play control.
4) Missing option to minimise player to tray icon like Winamp. I don't want real estate on my Windows taskbar taken up by a music player.
5) Not really foobar's fault, but I need similar plugins as shown here for Winamp:
http://www.zophar.net/winamp/ (http://www.zophar.net/winamp/)
6) Drop the 'Application' from Right click (music file) -> Open with -> 'Foobar 2000 Application'
1) I want a minimalist view option available as a toggle option. And it should be the default layout. No playlist except for the displaying of the currently played song name/ singer/album/year (filename and/or tag info). No 'File, Edit...' menubar. No title bar.
2) Missing 'Repeat' on play control. Missing 'Shuffle' on play controls. (Shuffle is not the same as Random according to this: http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/mes...d_board_id_is_1 (http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/mes...d_board_id_is_1) )
3) Missing timer/negative timer on the play control.
4) Missing option to minimise player to tray icon like Winamp. I don't want real estate on my Windows taskbar taken up by a music player.
5) Not really foobar's fault, but I need similar plugins as shown here for Winamp:
http://www.zophar.net/winamp/ (http://www.zophar.net/winamp/)
6) Drop the 'Application' from Right click (music file) -> Open with -> 'Foobar 2000 Application'
Did you even tried using it? (2) and (4) (6) is already built in and you don't have to do anything special to use it at all. of course you can set your play order to 'Repeat' and 'Shuffle' and 'Random' too (for 0.9.5). and (4) (6) can turn on in preference.
(5) There is some plugin for foo that do this too. but maybe not exactly the same.
For (3) you going to have to edit some titleformating string a bit. but it's not that hard.
(1) You have to edit it. but of course it can do this.
i like it because,
- i can switch playlist so easy.
- replay gain info.
- can convert 'everything' that foobar2000 recognize.
- use tag for display information (so audio tag are very important).
- easy & simple.
- gapless & good sound quality.
- awesome equalizer.
- customize configure for convert *.exe.
- easier tagging (i love this feature very much).
- more importantly it's FREE.
1) "now playing only display"
2) "repeat, shuffle, random playback orders"
3) "timer/negative timer"
4) "minimise to tray"
5) "console music playback"
6) "explorer context menus"
As for 1) and 3) you're using wrong software. Foobar2000 has possibilities to implement all of it in several ways, but it needs some actions from user. But basically it is play-list based player. If you don't like it don't use it.
2) is available
4) is also available for a long time already
5) http://static.morbo.org/kode54/ (http://static.morbo.org/kode54/)
6) it's registry thing but foobar can do it for you anyway
From the earliest day, I was a Winamp user. Several plugins and the somewhat configurable layout was enough, and with a life-saving plugin, Dynamic Library (dynamic disk scanning opposed to default Media Library), I could browse my collection (40-50k files) relatively easily. But as time moved on, with the new releases, the whole thing became more and more a cpu/memory hog, sometimes search queries took 2-4 sec, startup/shutdown a lagfest... This, and the fact that my expectations were raised (album art display is still laughable in WA) so I've had to search for something new
I knew foobar from a few years ago, but back then, it was too complicated to set up properly, and there was a lack of components - but now, with all the great amount of them, easily configurable default ui, etc. foobar seemed a far superior alternative. Lastfm plugin, and the fact that I can use my old Winamp dsp-s (sorry, foobar DSPs are still to esoteric for me) made it even more sweeter.
Nothing is perfect though - here's my list of the sour things in foobar:
- - I really miss some of winamp's playlist functions - like pressing 'q' on a track, and that track plays after the current one, overruling the playlist.
- - I miss the shuffle toggle button. Having a 'shuffle play' button is not equal to that, and I don't want to go to the preferences just for that.
- - there's a great amount of cool components, but the fact that all the UIs are not compatible diminishes this fact... Like I like facets, but would like to get a decent track display... no luck.
- - still to much scripting is needed. I know foobar is not for the average joe, eg. should I really bother all that much to get a decent track display? the documentation is, well, there, but it's hard to find. A foobar newbie still has to crunch trough tons of forum posts.
- - pre-made configs are hard to install... why not use a simple compressed click-and-install format (which can be edited after decompressing)?
All in all, foobar is an excellent player, and unbelievably fast - I think the problem with it is the same with linux (which was also not intended for the masses) - functionality is there, but a lot of people won't have the nerve and ability to give that much time to solve it. The new default ui is a great step into the right direction. I only wish developers would start to code more and more components for it.
1. I really miss some of winamp's playlist functions - like pressing 'q' on a track, and that track plays after the current one, overruling the playlist.
2. I miss the shuffle toggle button. Having a 'shuffle play' button is not equal to that, and I don't want to go to the preferences just for that.
3. still to much scripting is needed. I know foobar is not for the average joe, eg. should I really bother all that much to get a decent track display? (...)
1. The function "add to playback queue" does this. Set it to "Q" in the keyboard config.
2. Right-click somewhere near the play controls, then add the "playback order" toolbar.
2. I did it, and my life's been all better ever since. Though, as you say, it's not for the "average joe". I think of it as a music player for people who know what they want and how they want it. For anyone else, MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) should probably cut it.
It's the Swiss Army Knife of Audio codecs.
I have used Foobar exclusively for 3 or 4 year snow.
I am not a power user, I just like the clean sound and the multiple playlists.
I used to use Winamp and used to get upset with it cos you did not know the name of the playlist you were playing. So I love Foobars tabbed playlists.
I used to ask Winamp for this feature, but they spent all their time on Skins, which are a bit of fun, but not really essential.
I have hardly ever used any of Foobars Options and like others on here I wish they would write a manual and also the various user interfaces are getting confusing.
Regards
Digby
Hi,
I don't like to develop any sentimental sense of loyalty towards any software. I like to try new things and for the last four years I have tried each and every new version of any mainstream and high-end audio player I was able to localize on the web (it's my hobby!), and there are many audio and media players indeed.
I have to say that, after thousands of attempts of leaving foobar2000 aside, at the end of the day, by any or other reason -many reasons in fact- I find myself again with foobar2000. So it has survived till now as the first one on my estimation, and that means something.
Ys,
Rozzo
Because in foobar you can set file buffering in advanced > decoding.
I never understood why other software players didn't do this automatically. This is way better than for instance winamp that accesses my hard disc every other second. And it has the added advantage that one can delete a track from disk while it's still playing from ram (massive timesaver) which is a blessing when sorting a lot of music.
Foobar is the only player I have tried that allows me easy flexibility to define, display and manipulate tags in a way appropriate to classical music.
Still upgrading from 8.2 or .3.
~4 years non power user
Stumbled onto .9.5 today as I needed to convert flac to mp3 and 8.2 couldn't handle it and wouldn't accept new lame 397 command-line switches. FB2k 9.5 handles it just fine.
Oh, thanks for the new Default UI and Quick Setup, nice to see Album Art without programming the UI.
First of all – it’s high quality sound.
Second - SDK, if you have good programming skill in C++, there is no problem to add some functionality.
I choose Foobar a few years ago when looking for a Flac player. I liked that it was a simple, clean player, that was not a commercial product, that people were free to develop plugins for.
I still have no idea how to use it, or catalogue anything, or have a cool looking player like so many.... but for the new year that is my goal.
Keep it up Foobar!!
Cheers!
I love Foobar2000 because it plays music without getting in the way. It's a surprise how many players fail to do just this.
1) Full Unicode Support
2) Replaygain
3) Masstagger / File Utils / String Formatting
4) keyboard-centric
5) ... and with 0.9.5, the lovely default UI.
Hi all, first post on this forum. Been reading stuff here to get foobar working, I really appreciate all the time people put in this player and its community.
I started using Foobar2000 because I heard people saying it was such a great player. Although I was content using WinAmp Lite, I decided to give it a shot. When I got it working just right after hours of reading forum posts and tutorials and a lot of trial and error (my, that's a lot of ands in one sentence) there simply was no way back.
Well I'd like to use foobar (I really like the way it handles *.cue files) but there is no support for a dynamic library (meaning the id3 tags are stored in a seperate file). I'd like to keep my files untouched. Other than that it looks like the perfect player. I'll be using Amarok 2.0 when it comes out since that supports everything I need in a audio player.
Well I'd like to use foobar (I really like the way it handles *.cue files) but there is no support for a dynamic library (meaning the id3 tags are stored in a seperate file). I'd like to keep my files untouched. Other than that it looks like the perfect player. I'll be using Amarok 2.0 when it comes out since that supports everything I need in a audio player.
maybe you could achieve this with foo_customtag... but not sure if its possible
maybe you could achieve this with foo_customtag... but not sure if its possible
Not really mate It doesn't work the way it's supposed to...
because its the best freaking audio player out there.
I love it because it's fast and efficient ! The programmer knows his stuff, good job man
ALL I CAN SAY IS:
FREEEEEDOM!!!!! to do anything you darn please with your music!!!
Thank you!!
I found fb2k 0.8.3 while searching for a music match replacement. I wanted a multiple file renamer, tagger and converter/ripper without limitations imposed on it's features, and fb2k completed that desire. I've enjoyed customizing and watching it grow since.
I originally needed something that could handle .tta files and a wikipedia comparsion of media players showed foobar could handle it along with a whole skew of others so I tried it and loved it ever since. I love tweeking it a little bit every time I'm bored.
A few months ago I was thinking about a long, praising text here about its great and useful options and user interface (I came from winamp about or two years ago, and after I got used to it I enjoyed it very much), but I think I found what can I say in short and simple: I like foobar's functional beauty very much.
(And - although I am a big fan op optimized software - I can't say too much about its hardware footprint, because it simply can't be measured on my system, at least CPU-wise )
I've been using foobar couple years ago and tried it about year ago again but I've found to many coding and configuring instead of enjoying music, so I've turned to media monkey pro witch fits me in excelent way. Unfortunetly I 've changed my sound device to EMU 0404 last time and media monkey which uses winamp plugins freezes when using asio drivers so in the meantime I'm back to foobar which handles ASIO quite good.
> to many coding and configuring
Hm, Foobar plays music quite well in its default state.
I agree that I've configured much of it, such as the formatting and layout of basically every part that displays some info about a track, and by god I cannot stand black-on-white for a playlist, but I'm just a customiser by nature.
The only thing that kept me with Winamp for so long was its spectrograph plugin. Now that Foobar has one, I'm really enjoying its better layout and superior playlist management abilities.
Though I still don't really like how it's the standard grey Windows fuf. I suppose I just want something nice to look at.
Cause there is no other option :/ iTunes is 2 cpu consuming, no folders in playlists, its not very beautiful though intuitive and simple to use. Amarok is not yet avaible for windows. Winamp media library is crap, and mediamonkey has really stupid interface. EDIT:Most players are ugly as hell (maybe except winamp & itunes), and skins for the ugly-ones are also ugly
In fact, only thing that I like in foobar, is its customizability, which is quite good I guess, but since I have very little skills in programming, I have to use plugins by others, which doesnt suit my needs completly.
Anyway, after one week of modding Ive managed to have nice UI (mogelbrod panel UI), writing custom tags to id3tag, (rating, date added, play count), jump to currently playling song, playlists organized in folders, total tracks in playlist info, some autoplaylists (some not :/), artwork display, nice & small spectrum analyzer (though I would like something better, but if foobar handles vst's well, it shouldnt be a problem), popup info, iPod support (quite nice! tags mapping and syncing)
Things I cant get to work: autoplaylist based on total size, playlist with random albums, autoplaylist based on other autoplaylists(see my post in playlist tree plugin), drag and drop to playlist (!!) [not doable yet through playlist tree, which I use), iTunes-like search (doable using facets in default UI, but not in panels UI), easy way to create autoplaylist, auto-rescan library, cash mashine, pool, free drinks, getting playcount from ipod (heard it can be treaky or eaven not possible?), graphical representation of library ( ),
Things I havent worked on yet, but still want it: simplified eq (2 many faders! but again i could use vst), sorted playlist (heard its doable), converting flac/any other to ALAC (dunno if possible), powerful tags & files managing (I think no problem with that, but havent tried it yet so cant tell), multiple genre tags), better iPod support (I can only wait for newer foo_dop).
Don't know where to start!
Live Show Tagger, as a collector of live music, this is wonderful, wonderful.
I can use my ipod on my work PC and laptop without erasing it and not to mention having to load itunes and the annoying army of memory resident junk.
The community...
That doesn't begin to answer but ...
simple, light , customizability, but also respect standard as ID3tag and can display album art name cover.jpg.
Small, simple customizable, no "dogs and ponies". What more can I say. Thanks you FooFolks!
MRK
Light in resources, fast and extensible.
Great piece of software. :-)
Only missing thing (but I can live without it) it's a way to handle MTP devices directly.
I like it because i can customize it the way i want, and its not bloated with sh*t like many other players
Well, I'm an obsessive tinkerer, so I'm drawn to the completely customizable UI. On that same note, it's easily expandable with other people's plugins, and as I learn more C++, mine as well.
There is not even a default layout to choose from that takes up more than half my screen without losing viewability, let alone the one I made.
Sure, Winamp offers most of this as well, but resource use is on average better (three times better at idle now that I look at it) with foobar2000, and many of the customization options, especially for making custom UIs, for Winamp are far more a pain in the ass than comparable ones in fb2k.
Plus, it's got a few out-of-the-box features that to my knowledge no major player for Windows has, such as mass-file-conversion (iTunes pushing the aac format doesn't count).
If anything, the only thing I'd say it's missing is a graphical queue manager for Panels UI, but I know enough C++ to get around that given time.
Honestly, foobar is one of the most ridiculously designed pieces of software I've ever seen from a user interface perspective. In order to make it look anywhere close to an average media player from 5 years ago I have to download 5-10 plugins and (possibly) write scripts to configure the UI? WTF?
I've been programming for many years now and have spent days customizing dotfiles and having all sorts of fun hacking configurations, but foobar is a nightmare to deal with. All over the forum and wiki I see stickied posts that say "DONT USE PANELSUI" and yet 99% of all configurations posted use PUI. Even worse, to get something that doesn't look like total junk you have to use PUI. EVEN WORSE, programming PUI is buggy and poorly documented, and it's not even being worked on anymore! Is this the expectation of the foobar community for a user to configure foobar to have a halfway decent UI?
Look it's great the foobar is all nice and efficient and compact but when you have to spend 2 weeks to get it to NOT look like an Excel spreadsheet, something is wrong.
The only reason I'm even approaching this is that I need a Windows program that can handle a large library with fast replaygain scanning.
Ok, I feel better now.
@nxmehta
It isn't foobar's design you are raging on, but its third party software, especially PUI - ColumnsUI is way easier.
you could start with tool++'s configurations http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=46093&hl= (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=46093&hl=)
then get another windows visual style (http://browse.deviantart.com/customization/skins/windows/visualstyle/ etc). Note that foobar may look fine with the new default UI then.
Honestly, foobar is one of the most ridiculously designed pieces of software I've ever seen from a user interface perspective. In order to make it look anywhere close to an average media player from 5 years ago I have to download 5-10 plugins and (possibly) write scripts to configure the UI? WTF?
I've been programming for many years now and have spent days customizing dotfiles and having all sorts of fun hacking configurations, but foobar is a nightmare to deal with. All over the forum and wiki I see stickied posts that say "DONT USE PANELSUI" and yet 99% of all configurations posted use PUI. Even worse, to get something that doesn't look like total junk you have to use PUI. EVEN WORSE, programming PUI is buggy and poorly documented, and it's not even being worked on anymore! Is this the expectation of the foobar community for a user to configure foobar to have a halfway decent UI?
Look it's great the foobar is all nice and efficient and compact but when you have to spend 2 weeks to get it to NOT look like an Excel spreadsheet, something is wrong.
The only reason I'm even approaching this is that I need a Windows program that can handle a large library with fast replaygain scanning.
Ok, I feel better now.
If you've been "programming for many years now" Why not write a customizable UI that "isn't ridiculous".
The new default UI is more than enough for anyone who's not a gloss-fag.
Look it's great the foobar is all nice and efficient and compact but when you have to spend 2 weeks to get it to NOT look like an Excel spreadsheet, something is wrong.
I like the fact foobar looks like Excel or some database frontend ! I even in fact use it that way.
In order to make it look anywhere close to an average media player from 5 years ago I have to download 5-10 plugins and write scripts to configure the UI?
Look it's great the foobar is all nice and efficient and compact but when you have to spend 2 weeks to get it to NOT look like an Excel spreadsheet, something is wrong.
Why are you trying to have it look like a media player from 5 years ago? Foobar's playlist-centric design is more effective than the stereotypical car-radio-ish player with big playback buttons in your face and playlist control as a sort of luxury extra. Music management is not optional.
I agree that black-on-white is ewwww, but it takes all of two seconds to change the colour scheme -- I was already much satisfied by the tan on dark blue scheme, which I only tweaked a little. Everything else I did to customise it has been evolution over the course of its usage.
I don't have any plugins. Foobar fulfils all my needs out of the
box package file. I'm especially enamoured with Automatically Fill Values from filenames. To heck with you, ye lax taggers!
I used it at first because it was an easy to use interface to convert files.
Then I noticed that sound quality seemed to be higher (and I have no proof of this, so please view this as entirely subjective and not proven by me and don't kick me off the forums for breaking the rules) Then I found out it could be highly customised to suit whatever layout I wanted - and look pleasing to the eye. Then I found out that with a bit of a nudge it could manage my albums better than I expected. Then I found out it was great for handling tags.
...
Plus I have never liked Winamp. Ever. And I used version 1 I find Windows Media Player to feel sluggish and bloated. I like neat, tidy, resource economical software. Media Player Classic while being good for video, has horrible playlist management. No iplayer is ever going near my PC. And every other player is trying to emulate what the guy above seems to be after... which is the winamp/horribly useless here's some buttons and a track name and it's just like a car stereo!
So essentially I use it not because it's good, but because it's the only software that does what I want.
It's an incredible bonus that it also happens to be extremely good. I don't have a sister, but if I did I'd let Peter Pawlowski sleep with her.
So essentially I use it not because it's good, but because it's the only software that does what I want.
Same here o.0
It's an incredible bonus that it also happens to be extremely good. I don't have a sister, but if I did I'd let Peter Pawlowski sleep with her.
I think foobar is so good because of plugins, so your sister would be very busy... ^^
I've been using it for several years now and I can't bear to get close to a different music player now. I love the simplicity of its design, along with full customization capabilities.
Also, I take the opportunity to thank the developers for the new WYSIWYG default interface option. It's amazingly effective for my modest needs. Thank you!
Honestly, I want to like foobar2000, I really do.
However, lack of any kind of integrated set-it-and-forget it Podcast/Netcast features is a major miss for me, since I listen to podcasts for at least 5 hours a day. So far only ONE program can do that, and it's not foobar2000.
I have simple requirements:
1) Must automatically download new episodes without user intervention or a second program.
2) Must remember position within the file.
3) Must have an option to automatically delete non-new Podcasts/Netcasts once listened to without user intervention or a second program.
If foobar2000 can implement such features, it will of course be my media player of choice. Lacking them - I have to pass.
Hi, I use Foobar2000 side by side with Winamp. I like the undramatic no frills lay out. WinAmp has a slight pause between tracks, very irritating when playing continuous albums. Foobar2000 keeps on playing.
Why do you use Winamp?
Actually I don't have a choice not to use foobar2000. It's highly addictive, and with a fast growing music collection that needs proper tagging it's the best tool around.
With the extensive ability to store custom tags and create (auto)playlists the possebilities are endless. Also I have many ideas of new components I hope I can learn to develop in the future
I have simple requirements:
1) Must automatically download new episodes without user intervention or a second program.
2) Must remember position within the file.
3) Must have an option to automatically delete non-new Podcasts/Netcasts once listened to without user intervention or a second program.
(1) is not possible (might be with some external batch script i think), but you can try create a thread requesting such feature. I think that (2) is possible - I just don't remember if it's a function in the core or a component (i was unable to find it). (3) is possible with this component (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=50312).
I use Winamp for my player (and have for over a decade ) ... I don't have any gap problems with gapless albums.
But as for foobar ... I couldn't live without it for tagging! The ability to powerfully edit tags in MASSES (and quickly), and then rename the files and move them into album folders based on those tags is ... outstanding. Without foobar my music collection would be messy and horribly unorganized ... with foobar, it's clean, neat, and tidy. Couldn't live without it.
I use Winamp for my player (and have for over a decade ) ... I don't have any gap problems with gapless albums.
But as for foobar ... I couldn't live without it for tagging! The ability to powerfully edit tags in MASSES (and quickly), and then rename the files and move them into album folders based on those tags is ... outstanding. Without foobar my music collection would be messy and horribly unorganized ... with foobar, it's clean, neat, and tidy. Couldn't live without it.
I initially started using foobar like that. Then I gradually started using it when I wanted a bit of music playing in the background, and to run off my ipod. Then I started customising it a bit more - and each time I did that, I used foobar a bit more for music and Winamp a little less. I've now found that every single feature I liked in Winamp is replicable in some form or another in foobar (except maybe visualisations), plus many more useful features.
The last time my computer crashed, Winamp didn't get re-installed and it's been foobar all the way since
Mainly because of its small footprint, and how its easy to manage/edit tags in a large music collection, does these things better then any other player. To many players have become bloated im glad foobar has not.
About 3 years ago I was winamp & iTunes user (i could not choose the best one between the two, so I had both of them). I made my own skins (none of them were accepted by winamp.com so it kinda sucked). The day earlier before registering here i started using foobar. It was version 0.9.3 (or so). I loved it, compared to iTunes & winamp. Because i could make the player look like I wanted. ('custom tags, bunch of components woohoo'). My library is still under construction, but I guess, it will never get to the `final version`.
At work I have openSUSE linux. Well, let's face it, my work laptop is not for music playing, but linux native player Amarok is not so good as fb2k. But I took some ideas from Amarok, to add in my library. Also, foobar2000 has the best community site (in my opinion)to get some help..
Cheers everyone somehow connected to fbk!
Keep up the great work/development of the greatest music player
It works, has a clean interface and can do Kernel Streaming.
What more needs to be said?
I did love it, till I installed 0.9.5.1
Thankfully I still have an older installer around to keep using
Have been a foo user since 0.8.3. and like it for it simplicity and the fact it can play everything you throw at without the need to install some codec that may not work. I've fallen in love with the converter function because it keeps all tags and you can do multiple files to one if you choose so. Plus those colored icons per codec is sweet.
Hi,
New poster, long time lurker. I've followed foobar's evolution on the last couple of years, always tried new versions, to simply uninstall them next. Thankfully, the new DefaultUI finally allows me to have this setup my way without having to know too much technical details.
With that said, i chose foobar because no other player gives me this degree of customizability and power. Also no other player has this strong community of users always ready to help.
Cheers
I did love it, till I installed 0.9.5.1
Thankfully I still have an older installer around to keep using
I'm quite new to Foobar2000, and I've never used older versions. Is there a particular reason you prefer the older versions?
I love it because every piece of it can be moved and played with.
I kinda wished it was a bunch of elements that could be changed with CSS (Think of the possibilities for looks! A background for the entire player maybe? CSS margins? Custom colors for panels, and choosing whether lists have alternating colors for rows, so on, so forth...) but then again, that's just a Firefox user talking.
I don't like that fact it's not quite fully featured from the start, but I am sure once I have a specific set of plugins, I can just keep the DLLs around for the future. That's actually the upside fo Foobar2000, no bloat. And if i need something, some finger work helps me get to where I need to go for the goods I'm searching for.
Portability means if I ever wanted to put it on my computer, that option exists. If I ever want the player on a different drive, transference is no issue. Feel the need to lean it up? I can trim the fat any time. And oh, every piece of it I know by heart. At least what i put into it.
Despite it's shortcomings, it can most times be overcome with a DLL file, some help documentation and a Wiki article. The community here helps a whole bunch too... well, not me specifically since I tend to be a whiny bitch at times, but posting what I know in these forums will hopefully help someone else in the future.
Yay for thread necromancy!
I switched from Winamp to Foobar because of the start-up time. When I simply wanted to listen to music and do something else, Winamp took ages to start playback.
I also learned appreciating Foobar's playlist and file management and the thousandfold options and customizations, especially with all those components created by wonderful people!
Also, Oooh, shiny, it is well do-able to customize your skin to almost anything you want - background image, box positioning, and what not. Check out the panel stack splitter component. Alternating row colours should also be options in playlist viewers.
In terms of SQ foobar is almost guaranteed to output pure. The options are laid out to you in a very blunt way(no need to go digging or shut off addition hidden features).
It supports WASAPI and Asio painlessly. I really don't understand why people feel foobar is complicated, it is much easier to use than some more bloated players such as winamp or Jriver. That said both winamp and jriver have other neat features but in the voyage for audio purity in a transport they are somewhat useless for me. The interface is simple, blunt and does what I need it to do. I can't make it pretty but I have it minimized always anyway.
As for memory and space considerations, computers are so powerful these days I have stopped counting. Some people are wierd and use those pure ASIO/WASAPI players with no interface. I really don't understand why, SQ is not going to automatically become wtf uber awesome, and if it does chances are the player does something with the volume. Not that it matters since its all to what people enjoy most and placebo is a real physical condition that can't be tweaked and even gets the best and worst of us.
I use foobar2000 for several reasons:
- It is lightweight, very low on resources, fast responses.
- It has (3rd party) iPod support.
- It completely replaces MP3Gain.
- You have almost full control over your files and their contents.
- You can create a layout that fits your personal needs.
- 3rd party components add features and improve user interface and playlist handling.
In my opinion, foobar2000 is still not a perfect solution. That does mean all other programs like iTunes, Winamp, MediaMonkey etc. are even worse. For me, there's just no alternative. But it is good to know you are using the best available program.
There are some greater cons (in no order):
- No album art embedding/removing.
- Method of creating Autoplaylists is not very intuitive.
- Foobar2000 solely relys on playlists. Neither a good nor a bad thing, but the default playlist view won't do the job. If at least you could have multiple playlist views and permanently dedicate some of them to specific playlists, much would have been gained.
- When you have many playlists and just look at that big list, it is hard to locate the most useful ones, and it is impossible to see which playlist is an autoplaylist.
@durch: I'm not sure which one, but IIRC there is a playlist component (perhaps ESplaylist or ELplaylist, look it up yourself) which supports multiple playlist views. At least with the Columns UI playlist switcher you can use title formatting to indicate whether a playlist is an autoplaylist. Furthermore there are playlist switchers, like foo_playlist_organizer, which allow you to organize the playlists in a tree.
I do not use foobar, because it is not localised (+ extremely lame excuses for not supporting localizations by the developer).
I have used foobar for many years as my music player, but just recently learned really to love it through the customization options. One of the best things I discovered is the ability to use foo_scheduler to start playing music every morning without the need to get out of bed. Of course, weighted randomness provided by foo_random_pools is a perfect option with morning playlists. Also, huge thanks to marc2003 for his scripts in WSH Panel Mod, ability to show last.fm info in player and do almost anything with JScript are really nice.
Not to mention lightweight, never having any problems with codecs, widget-like sidebar show with foo_title, easy filetagging and many more great reasons to fall in love with this player.
Because of all the organizational features, and extensions like masstagger. Before foobar my library wasn't even big enough for me to worry about tags or sorting.
It's just so easy, simple and clean. Although I know there are many kinds of options like the Album browser and different playlists, I don't have to use them, which is great. I still hold on to my once-made-and-rarely-changed layout:
[a href="http://i49.tinypic.com/29zd5cj.png" target="_blank"] )
I moved to foobar several years ago (don't remember when) as my computer had a very hard time keeping up with winamp's ever-increasing bloat. At first I found it to be a very neat, and very scaled down player - which I really liked: what I wanted was a play list, a "play" button, a "stop" button, and possibly a "shuffle"/"random" button. Anything else would be extra, and a possibility for memory hogging Skins in particular - I keep my audio players minimized except for when I actively switch tracks.
However, I pretty quickly learned that there was a lot more to it than first met the eye: I learned to do tagging, customizing the appearance, set up file conversions, make foobar help me sort my music library... And still it uses so little memory that it once managed to convince me that the whole program was as minimal as a music player reasonably could get!
Now, the only drawback I presently see is that it doesn't(??) work natively in linux. (Yes, I should look into Wine and that stuff).
I wasn't sure where to post, didn't feel like it was worth a new thread but hopefully this'll do.
Is there a way to add like a notepad or editable textwindow ui or something, I'm quite new to foobar.
I have audiobooks in foobar and they're split up in hour long sessions so I probably can't listen to a whole track in one go so I'd like to be able to just quickly note down which track and what time I'm on to keep listening next time.
Many Reasons but here is a few.
1) On the surface. Simple
2) I can change the layout the way I want.. empowering & thought provoking
3) Script language.
4) Hooks (to put script) everywhere. one can really customize the app
First Apple makes (has someone make for them) Awesome! Hardware!
But like the Pc vs Mac, iphone vs many mfg.. or ios vs android they've missed the boat..
People normally, over time, want to have things done the way they want and not limited to what the designer wants
Apple gives a painting.. Foobar is a canvas and paint.
Great App
have been a long time jet auido user and its bbe features..also used good old quintessential player back in mid 2000s and before...around 2 years ago i used foobar2000 a while then turned back to jetaudio and recently switched back to foobar...
first time I explored fb2k was a result of a searching a good discogs tag editor....i was looking for a good tag editor which will be connect to discogs and get tags from there, after a couple of apps i tried i gave a try to foobar and its discogs tagger plugin..and that was what i looking for, works best for me...thanks to its developer bubbleguuum
since i explored fb2k discogs tag editor, even if i use jet audio for listening i always used for foobar for discogs tagging...
recently i use fb2k for both listening and tagging as my general audio player...cuz i just explored foo_dsp and foo_vst, it gives largest suuport for using dsp/vst plugins on windows, 2nd winamp i guess..
i get best sound quality and sound that i desired via fb2k and vsts...that's why i recently switched back to fb2k again...
but still not a big fan of fb2k, there are still some points that i dont like with foobar; like everyone; lack of interface, you have to install columns.dll, wsh panel vs for just getting a good interface, i know there are lots of good custom setups but most of them really dont work for me....biography, lyrics etc lots of useless(for me 95% stuff i listen has no lyrics and if i want to check out an artists info, pictures etc. i prefer visiting artist's discogs page) info on foobar window and generally when i want to customize them if i delete or edit necessary code, foobar crashes.
I initially chose Foobar2000 because it plays 32-bit float WAV's (At an earlier time, this was very rare for audio players). That was really the only reason at first.
I kept using Foobar2000 and promoted to others because...
1) It's so customizeable and can be made to look really nice.
2) It can play so many formats (even rare ones) with component add-on modules.
3) The component add-on modules are so sophisticated.
4) It can make huge changes to every file in playlist libraries very quickly.
5) It's very very stable.
THANKS VERY MUCH Foobar2000 creators!
It just works better than other mp3 player applications I've used so far, since it's lightweight and customizable and the same old reasons why I masturbate to the thoughts of foobar2000 every night.
At the moment, foobar2000 offers unique features through plug-ins that are not available in any other player. Specifically, I'm referring to faithfully reproducing high resolution content like DVD-A, SACD and DTS-HD.
doesn't insist on me uploading my music to the cloud, just so that I can go back to the 90's and stream MY OWN music lol
Used everything from MediaMonkey, Songbird etc. when I decided to boycott ifailtunes
Perfect player
I have a few question that why fb2ks Developers like CAT?
I love DOG
At least partly due to a Hydrogenaudio tradition:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=8696 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=8696)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=12320 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12320)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=31151 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=31151)
And hey, my avatar is sorta a cat, at least in Latin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda).
Well.that is to hard to me
Stop your Img and say any word
Im a dog,never red panda
and just joking THX for all
I use foobar2000 because of its simplicity and the possibility of using a large buffer while streaming -- my internet connection is slow but so nevertheless I can browse in the web and listen to internet radio without interruptions. Colorful visualisations would be nice.
I am among that small percentage of audiophiles that have an extensive classical library. Virtually all prayers are locked into an Artist>Album>Song paradigm. That is great for pop, jazz, etc, but absolutely worthless for classical. I need Composer>Work>Movement, and that is darn near impossible to find. Even the Foobar DUI can't do it right. (No, Facets is not the answer). But CUI works like a champ. With the addition of a few custom tags, I can continue Conductor>Artist>Orchestra. Using the Graphic Equalizer instead of the default EQ, I couldn't be happier.
Bob
Even the Foobar DUI can't do it right.
Does your definition of "do it right" involve skinning? Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean. I use extensive non-standard metadata involving STYLE, GENRE, REMIX ARTIST, REMIX TITLE, the CATALOG NUMBER and PUBLISHER combination for labels. I can do all of that custom metadata stuff in DUI. What can't you do?
I chose it because the devs know what they are doing unlike others and the SDK was designed with some element of sense, unlike others....>_>
Even the Foobar DUI can't do it right.
Does your definition of "do it right" involve skinning? Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean. I use extensive non-standard metadata involving STYLE, GENRE, REMIX ARTIST, REMIX TITLE, the CATALOG NUMBER and PUBLISHER combination for labels. I can do all of that custom metadata stuff in DUI. What can't you do?
I can't list columns in different order for different playlist -- Classical, Pop, Demo, etc. Have I missed something?
Bob
I like many others started with bundled players that cater to folks who don't "look under the hood", but just "drive", like:
1) WMP - a joke... for anyone that cares about their music, it's too sophisticated in areas that don't matter, and too simplistic in areas that do matter. And it messes with your beloved tags behind your back. NO WAY
2) iTunes - where to start here..."we here at Apple force you to do everything via iTunes, and the iTunes database is the lifeblood of all your music, videos, apps, books... and it's up to you to treat it with kid gloves and back it up yourself, because if you screw up the iTunes database, you're screwed... and by the way we aren't going to fix any of our blatant code bugs like allowing you to add duplicate database entries, and we won't give you a way to really clean up the duplicates created by our defective code, or reinitialize the database without losing other critical info, and we won't recognize custom tags, and and, oh, now we're going to hyperlink you to a page full of media we think is "cool" and you won't be cool unless you buy it from us and then pay us again to store it on iCloud, blah, blah, blah, buy, buy, buy.... I can't tell you how many hours of my life Apple has stolen from me with iTunes' confusing and totalitarian device sync nightmares, disappearing entries, duplicating database entry bugs, and lack of any useful improvements. Sexy, buggy software. NO THANKS
I then moved on to "3rd party" players:
3) Winamp - This was very nice - at first. Then it got bigger and bigger and bloated and bloated, trying to be everything to everybody and lost its focus - it's a freakin music player!!! yes I tried Winamp Lite, but can't use the media library in the Lite version. GOODBYE LLAMA
4) fb2k - I admit I tried it once, and was overwhelmed by its lack of structured, workflow documentation and formidable setup, and gave it up and went back to Winamp. But Winamp just kept getting fatter, repulsive, and slower, till I went back and tried fb2k again, and... when I finally started to "get it", every new discovery about what this amazing player could do was like finding another pearl. Once you transcend the learning curve, it's head and shoulders above all the others. Its sophistication, accuracy, speed, flexibility, and small "footprint" make it the greatest contribution to digital music management since the mp3. Peter has got the perfect formula in fb2k. Thank you Peter, musicmusic, and all the other fb2k developers! Your work is dynamite!!!
a) Accurate, rich tagging support for any customized tags
b) UI can be made as sophisticated as you want in any specific area, e.g., playback, filtering, display info, searching, artwork, lyrics... it's up to you, so the developers don't have to keep trying to change it to "find the market" - it's already solid, and evolves on its own
c) It can handle a very large music library without badly bogging down or crashing
d) awesome iPod support (please, please, figure out IOS 5.0, iTunes is worse than ever!)
e) simple where it needs to be, and sophisticated where it matters
f) many diagnostic tools either built in or available as add-ons.
g) all the other pearls I haven't discovered yet
If I was to complain about fb2k the only thing I would suggest is a comprehensive how-to manual that starts explaining the simple conceptual beginnings, and ends in the complex applications, similar to a textbook. The docs that are available really jump around in subject matter and are lacking in enough real-world examples. But hey, it's free, and I get that.. and if the lack of an easy to understand manual serves as a way to filter out the complainers and sissies and leave only "the few, the proud", then I understand that too. Vive fb2k!
I don't quite know where I should post this, but in terms of the versatility of foobar, it's pretty great. The only thing think they may want to expand alittle into is further customization in the graphics department. Such as having the ability to have a "blanket background picture", thats slightly glossed over or something. Even maybe having a transparency setting so you can see your desktop wallpaper etc. Just an idea I had popping around and thought maybe someone will make use of it.
Even maybe having a transparency setting so you can see your desktop wallpaper etc.
File>Preference>Advance>Display>Default user interface>Main window transparency
Even maybe having a transparency setting so you can see your desktop wallpaper etc.
File>Preference>Advance>Display>Default user interface>Main window transparency
I actually had a sneaking suspicion that Foobar would already have something like this. Although it's not one hundred percent as, it's just the background colour that would be transparent etc. The text, and grey bars running along the sides'll be the same. Although to try and make it appear less overall transparent, I've set the background to a black so you can still see the desktop, without being to put off with the transparent little gray bars on the side. Thanks for helping lead to a solution for now.
I primarily use it due its flexibility. Where else can I create custom tags (or even use non-custom tags) and have them display exactly how I want, using any style I want? Only foobar gives me this kind of customisation.
I've tried out all sorts of media players over the years -- Winamp, WMP, MusicMatch, Songbird, even the ghastly SonicStage once upon a time (although never iTunes) -- and they all ultimately fail in comparison to foobar.
Customisation.
I'm not thinking about the visual and stylish part, but the navigational part.
The way I can build it exactly how I want it.
The way I can remove the things I don't want, and then add the things I want.
Customisation.
I needed to Replay Gain my music collection for Rockbox, foobar was recommended. It's also one of the few apps that can RG, used it solely for that. I then decided to use it as my default music player, after weeks of tweaking, poking and prodding (which I detest) I now have a UI that I like.
The ability to export f2k settings is great, allows a painless restoration of most of the customisation.
Simple, lightweight, fast, stable, lots of DSPs available, customizable interface.
It does the important things perfectly, the useful things well, and the unnecessary things not at all.
I like foobar2000. It's the best player ever.
Say your words.
Love it ,cause its powerful function!
I used QMP before foobar. I changed to foobar when I decided to rip my 400 CDs collection. And foobar is FAST.
Also:
I detest progs that "know" what you want and try to force it whether you like it or not.
I like to procastinate spend my time tweaking the interface.
I have autoplaylists for missing lyrics, web traces in lyrics, ReplayGain missing, date missing and other compulsive-obsessive tag issues.
I have found some interesting features in other players (possible duplicate detection, Guayadeque's smart play mode), but F2K keeps being the best.
I am a new foo bar user... I am amazed. I was looking for a program to use on my HTPC that I could control with my phone and allow it to play over the rcvr while the TV was off. This worked great using Foobar, Remote for win phone 7, and I had to load up 2 other utilities but it works AWESOME.
Where is the Donate Tip jar?
It does the important things perfectly, the useful things well, and the unnecessary things not at all.
Very well-stated.
Where is the Donate Tip jar?
It's over at flattr (https://flattr.com/thing/51681/foobar2000-freeware-audio-player).
I am also brand new to foobar2000 after freeing myself from iTunes but still needing my music encoded in ALAC.
I have followed what few (dated) tutorials I can find and I have things up and running without having lost a single song and I was finally able to remove iTunes and most of the bloatware from my PC.
I still have a great deal to learn if I want to see my album artwork, install new skins, or just feel as if I am smart enough to have this program on my computer.
Little by slow, I am confident I will get at least halfway to mediocre.
I am trying not to attract attention to myself as one of those who doesn't use search before asking questions. We'll see how long I can make that last.
Special appreciation to Hydrogen Audio, and Jon Cairns for all the information that has proved so helpful.
I must say the interface wasn't exactly love at first sight, but once I started to use it I got to love it. I really appreciate the interface now: simple, fast and properly useful.
I'm amazed by all things that can be done with it, and how well they work. There were two things I wanted it to do, but there was no built-in functionality, neither a plugin for them. Not a problem! There's an SDK, with which I created the functionality I wanted.
It has a simple, yet fast and powerful, library manager, WASAPI exclusive support, gapless playback, it can play from cue files, encode, play DVD-Audio, tag, can be controlled from my iPhone/iPad, and lots more! (some of the listed things I like come from plugins).
foobar2000 is in a way the cherry on top, especially once you have spent some money in sweet toys (sweet toys are still sweet toys, but not the same without this delicious cherry).
+ Plays many formats
+ Gapless playback
+ Shows embedded lyrics
- English language GUI only
- ugly interface
I can sum it up in one word: titleformatting.
It is so powerful and pervasive throughout every functionality in the core foobar as well as the extensions.
From file operations to library managers and playlist viewers to upnp to artwork display to tag display to many other things, it is pure genius.
Foobar2000 - LEAN, MEAN AND CLEAN
I prefer foobar2000 because:
- it is a dedicated audio only player with native support for many codecs
- I have an external audio interface that uses asio drivers and I can configure that easily in Foobar2000 and the configuration remains stable. This is very imporatant to me.
- I like the way Foobar2000 has good time-saving tools for automising tagging from filenames
- It took some time to understand how to modify the layout, but now I can have a library that looks the way I want it.
- The ability to add components
- a great DSP manager (this enables me to use my favourite EQ, dynamic compression, and a host of effects, in real time too - great for DJs)
- A useful tool with advanced features that matter
- No irritating "bells and whistles" features
'nuff said!
For its versatility thanks to available plugins and because I can make it just as I want it to be.
I originally got it so I could do some AVS graphics programming. I was put off by some things, but
eventually figured it out. It's a great "roll-your-own" program thing (in a world of clone your own
developers). It's too bad there's not more "project" programs like this one. OOP languages bore
me to tears and many of the concepts seem bizarre (at beast).
Foobar2000 enables the end user to get beyond such things, have some fun, make something
for themselves that can't be ruined by scratching the screen with a rock.
It's great!
Quick startup time, low on resources, clean and simple UI, and also plenty of features none of which slows it down.
I want something simple yet powerful / Configurable. I Don't want to watch Movies or Podcasts or have coffee made for me by most of the other programs.
I want one program that plays back audio well, no tagging. One program can't do everything and others lose focus on the original goal.
My answer:
I choose Foobar for three reasons:
1. Customisation
For me, Foobar’s capacity for customisation is by far its biggest appeal. As a professional graphic and interactive desiger, I am passionate about way graphical interfaces look and function. So with Foobar I love not only being able to change the way everything looks, but to write my own scripts for how my music is organised and displayed. It’s wonderful! Though despite the potential to “pimp” the interface with fancy gimmicks and plugins, I prefer things simple and neat.
2. Control
Foobar offers so much control over my music collection, with advanced capabilities for both searching and editing tags. I feel completely in control over my music collection and feel there is nothing I can’t do.
3. Speed
I also love how blindingly fast Foobar is. I must have well over 100 thousand files in my music collection, yet I can access and edit their information instantly. It’s almost scary how responsive the program is! While the actual updating of large numbers of files may inevitably take some time (accompanied by a handy progress bar), the controls themselves never ever lag or say “hang on while I think”. I feel strongly that it would be a terrible shame if the program ever became bloated and slow.
So, when you combine Foobar’s high level of customisation, control, and speed, what you end up with is just a massive amount of control and power over one’s music collection.
I love Foobar. It could possibly be the greatest Windows program I have ever used, in terms of the balance it strikes between the capabilities it offers and how lean its coding is. I would like to take this opportunity to thank and commend all the developers on what is a truly wonderful program.
The only (slight) negative I can think of is a fairly steep learning curve to get from a complete newbie to having a fully customised Columns UI interface (I had a lot of questions along the way). I keep thinking I’d like to write a beginner’s guide but I never get round to it! (Sorry!)
I also feel Columns UI is so useful and so ubiquitous that it should be integrated into the core program. This would also help beginners as they wouldn’t have to go looking for this plugin in order to make what I consider very basic customisations to Foobar’s appearance; also, by only having one set of interface controls (instead of two sets) it would make the program neater and less confusing. But of course I appreciate the need to keep Foobar’s core code to a minimum.
+ File Management / Conversion: Probably why I first discovered foobar2000. Quick to mass tag edit, rename and replaygain files. So easy to then convert to other formats via conversion presets. Can even query to find files not tagged to my liking.
+ Playlist management: I like to randomize playback of my large collection, not hearing the same thing twice. Could never seem to get this with other players I tried since nothing is remembered between sessions, or there wasn't even shuffle. With the playback statistics component and the powerful playlist query language I can set my playlist to have true shuffle, not playing a song again until all other songs have been played. I can even set it to play my 5 star rated songs more often, my 1 star items never, and keep it from playing my wife's crappy music.
+ Format support: I also probably started using foobar2000 when Vorbis came out, it might have been one of the few players to support it. In general it seems you can get Foobar to support more formats than other players.
+ Rock solid: Not sure I can even remember foobar dying on me.
+ Direct operation: I like how you can directly load files into a playlist from wherever to operate on them. There is no "stupidity" layer like iTunes that tries to manage your music files for you as best as it sees fit but just gets in your way because it's so arbitrary and impossible to understand or use. Just yesterday I used foobar to convert a pile of FLACs to AAC that I could load on to an old iPhone we gave to our daughter. I spent half a day trying to get iTunes to recognize those AACs off the network drive they were on so I could transfer them over to the iPod. No luck at all getting iTunes to find them. Installed foo_dop and 10 minutes later I have the AACs playing on the iPhone. Can't begin tell you how much I loathe iTunes/iPod and Apple, foobar seems like the opposite of that, which is why I love it.
- My biggest gripe is that I open foobar2000 up once my machine boots, and don't unload it until I am forced to reboot, which can be months. Usually my machine gets done in by a power failure or hard crash before that even happens. That means months of statistics gathered by the playback statistics don't get saved, among other settings. I've just installed foo_jesus and we'll see how that goes. This is one area where I think I'd like to see that built directly into foobar though so it more proactively saves settings (or even has an obvious way to do so manually).
- Not open source: This isn't a problem at all right now, and i fact I'm sure it makes foobar a better piece of software. In the future I'd like to migrate to Linux and I'd hate to see foobar not follow me there. I also wonder where foobar will be 10 years down the road if the author was unfortunately hit by a bus or something. I'd just hate to see foobar become obsolete in the future if the source is never made available before support for foobar ends.
Can't begin tell you how much I loathe iTunes/iPod and Apple
I feel exactly the same!
I’ve used Apple computers every day for the last 17 years (sadly everyone uses them in my industry) and I cannot stand them. They dumb everything down and everything seems like it’s designed for babies. Everything is white and glossy, like “baby’s first toy”. I’m no Microsoft fan either, but at least with a PC you can build your own machine nice and cheap and YOU are in control of your hardware and you can set up Windows how you like it. A Mac condescends and oppresses the user. Fine if you’re not interested in customising your machine, but a nightmare if you want to feel some degree of control. Apple’s showcase and crowning glory for their poor design is their mice. Each new design of Apple mouse is more hideous, uncomfortable and impractical that the last. They are vile.
As for
iTunes, I’ve never seen it in action, but I’ve heard enough to never want to install it.:
- If you want to buy a song from iTunes, there’s no online version—you HAVE to install their software—which cannot be uninstalled!
- Yes, the software cannot be uninstalled. I know because I have tried countless times to uninstall iTunes from Macs and in every case the Mac will ALWAYS remember it had iTunes installed, regularly bringing up “updates” for the program you have supposedly removed. Even if the program is gone, I do not consider it an uninstallation if the Mac keeps nagging me to install updates for it.
- I heard that for a while iTunes planted some kind of virus in your music that restricts the way it’s played or copied, for “copyright reasons”. This is horrifically oppressive and unforgivable, even if they have now changed their mind on this.
- Apparently iPods only work in conjunction with iTunes. If you want to set up an iPod to another player, you have to go down the route of custom plugins and hacks. Apple forcing users of their hardware to use it only in conjunction with their own software is unforgivably oppressive.
- I have just looked to find a picture of the iTunes interface. As I fully expected, it is hideous and looks like Mac OS X. Just that interface fills me with dread. Knowing Apple pretty well, I have little doubt that they would not allow you to customise the appearance of their player, either. That would be too much personal freedom and might harm their incessant, obnoxious branding!
Given how much I hate Apple, and how much I love Foobar, I think it really is fair to say that Foobar represents the exact opposite of Apple.
I can't put my finger on it. It just seems to sound better than EAC and VLC. I also saw my DAC and headamp use it during their manufacturing/QA process.
Hi,
I have been using Winamp since 2011, which is when I had my first computer. It was just very popular then (at least in my country).
However, I noticed that the client crashed quite often at random times. Version 5.8 was lighter than the last official 5.666, but it did not change the fact that the program crashed at random moments. Not to mention the fact that the software just stopped being updated regularly and a new version comes out on average every 4 years. Also, not all of the file formats I used were playable by Winamp. E.g. opus format. There is a plug-in for it, but it can't handle all files.
I did 3 approaches to the foobar. One in 2018, the other in 2019 and finally at the end of 2021. My friend recommended it to me and now I know that I chose it well.
The interface is fine, as minimalist as I like. First of all, it is light, it fires up much faster than winamp. And it handles all my opus files perfectly.
I used to regret the fact that there is no Polish language for foobar, but I'm used to its English interface and it's fine.
And I made keyboard shortcuts similar to those in Winamp.
Another thing is a more accessible playlist for screen readers. In Winamp, this list was available, but I had little ability to manipulate it.
The only thing I miss in foobar is seeking for AAC files and AMR support. There is a plug for this, but it does have some problems. EG there are strange noises when seeking such a file. Winamp had no problems with that. But I wrote about it to the component developer.
When it comes to raw AAC, you can wrap such a file in an mp4 container, but for me it is not a solution to the problem. It's like covering the weeds in the garden instead of tearing them up.
I still use Winamp for raw AAC and pack other files into m4a.
And one more important thing. We can make foobar portable and not Winamp.
That's it for the moment.
If I remember something, I will let know.
The big ones for me are what Foobar2000 (FB2K) does which VLC doesn't (which is why I abandoned VLC):
- VLC is a Swiss Army Knife for media files including video, so is bloated and slow to start up when all you want to do is play MP3s (FB2K is lightweight unless you load it up with extensions);
- VLC insists on caching cover art and displaying from the cache, and preferring image files it finds over the image I have deliberately embedded in the MP3 (FB2K can be configured to prefer embedded);
- VLC can't be made to stop playback after each track in a playlist (FB2K can be configured to stop).
Those are the reasons I went looking for something else, and I made a shortlist based on reviews. What attracted me to try FB2K in particular were:
- Playback Speed control with a resolution of at least 1% (actually 0.01%!);
- Customisable user interface;
- Open source, with an active developer and user community.
...and since then I've been bowled over by the way I've been able to tailor the UI and the functionality to my needs and desires. It's a steep learning curve, but worth it. Bonuses:
- Tempo control independent of pitch (unlike Playback Speed), in real-time with no audible loss in quality (amazing);
- Replay Gain.
I don't see much likelihood I will invest more time and effort migrating to something else again, unless forced to do so by circumstances. FB2K does everything I need, and most of what I desire, and the few minor niggles have a chance of being corrected in time.
Rectification. Foobar2000 is not open source. :) Core is a closed source. But, components may already be open source.
Rectification. Foobar2000 is not open source.
I'm sure you're right, but I think a review site suggested it is so that still had a bearing on my short-listing.
I used Foobar a number of years ago, for some reason, moved to JRiver. I decided to try Foobar again a few weeks ago when I realized the amount of SACD recordings I have not listened to since I switched. I will not be switching back, come to really appreciate the speed and flexibility Foobar offers. I think the audio quality is better with Foobar, I can play all my SACD files, will not be switching back.
I love Foobar2000 for Kode54's videogame music components..
They allow me to listen to old video game music sound files.
SNES (.spc), Sega Genesis(.vgm/.gym), PlayStation 1&2(.psf/.psf2), and etc..
^_^