Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

2012-09-22 17:35:02

I've used foobar2000 very little, but I'm playing with it a little right now. Is there any way to tell it to never alter any tagging info within the library? I don't need to use it for tagging and am afraid that with a slip of the mouse, I may inadvertently change something.

Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

Reply #1 – 2013-01-14 08:01:10

This question came up again in something I'm working on. Let's say you wanted to use foobar2000 as an audio player for a party. Is there any way in foobar2000 to be sure that someone allowed to use the program to control playback can't alter any metadata? Can the tagging capability be disabled?

Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

Reply #2 – 2013-01-14 11:48:11

Suggestion:
Create a separate "party" user account on your machine that has only read-only access to your music.

Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

Reply #3 – 2013-01-14 11:54:56

Yes, if foobar2000 offers no ability to be configured as only a player, I thought of doing that. I just wondered if it might be more customizable. Sometimes you just don't want a Swiss Army knife.

Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

Reply #4 – 2013-01-14 12:36:46

If such option existed, your "party users" could find it and turn it off.

You can also remove any components that have tag altering capability and hide "properties" etc from the context menu.

I could potentially add such switch and make all my components obey it, but I cannot guarantee that third party components would obey it as well so it would be somewhat pointless. Component authors should instead make sure that it's hard to make irreversible tag changes unintentionally rather than rely on app-wide "tag writing enabled/disabled" options.

Is there an option to treat the library as read-only?

Reply #5 – 2013-01-14 17:00:22

I have a folder located at E:\music . . . size is 480+ GB . . . contains 13,934 files and 1,575 folders.

To set the read-only attribute on everything inside E:\music, I opened the Command Prompt window and typed:   ATTRIB +R E:\music\*.* /S /D

In less than a second everything inside E:\music was read-only.

To clear the read-only attribute on everything inside E:\music, I opened the Command Prompt window and typed:   ATTRIB -R E:\music\*.* /S /D

In less than a second everything inside E:\music was back to normal.