First of all, I want to say thanks to the fb2k developers for making such a great, customisable audio player .

Anyway, I've been messing around with it on this old computer (PII 333) over the last few months, and have just installed FB 0.74. One thing I have noticed is that normal playback CPU usage is 10-12% for MP3s and OGGs with the equalizer disabled, but jumps to 25-30% with the EQ enabled.

Would it be possible to put in an alternate "fast" EQ setting with slightly reduced quality? I realise that most audiophiles with CPU power to burn wouldn't care, but for older computers and laptops on battery power that would be a neat idea. Perhaps code the EQ to process audio at 16 bits rather than the full internal precision under a "fast" mode? Or is there already an alternate EQ plugin available somewhere targeted at older hardware? (Of course, I'm not saying that the normal EQ plugin should be reduced in fidelity, by the way).

Secondly, compared to Winamp 2.x, I love the "playback / follow cursor" feature. I have the "change selection" checkbox disabled as well for that mode. So... would it be possible to add a "play selection only" checkbox in the options? That is, you can select an album or list of songs in your playlist, and FB will cycle through that selection according to its playback mode (random/repeat/etc) without playing any non-selected songs. This would avoid creating a whole new playlist when you want to listen to one album or artist.

So anyway, hopefully some of these ideas are useful for the devs, or if I'm missing something I'd welcome anyone pointing in the right direction. Cheers again for the excellent software!

I don't think "playback / follow cursor" is a good feature

Playback / follow cursor is already a feature!
gusnz's last feature request sounds good, but I am contented to be creating playlists for that purpose anyway.

thanks for the interesting and relevant post.

kthx


gusnz, the "play selection only" idea sounds nice, but are you aware that you can easily create new playlists by copying / collecting entries and pasting them into a new playlist using foosion's foo_utils which adds the Edit submenu to your playlist context menu?

Yet another person can't read forum description before posting.
Further abuse of dev forum will result in admin actions (warnings, account suspension).
Moving to general.

You can even get rid of the option altogether by editing the main menu items in preferences.

Wow, I didn't realise I'd start a flamewar!

zZzZzZz: Sorry, my bad. I only signed up today and guessed the dev forum was for development suggestions too .

ssamadhi97: I've never seen that plugin, but I've experimented with right-clicking on a selection and using "Send to Playlist" which presumably has a similar affect. The playlist management in FB is pretty good overall; I was just thinking of a way of doing it without modifying different playlists.

Meanwhile, what does everyone think of the EQ... has anyone heard of alternate plugins out there?

- Angus.

Sorry, I can't help you with the equalizer problem.


As far as foo_utils & the Edit context menu are concerned: click here to get to the page where the plugin is hosted.

Like I mentioned, it adds the Edit submenu to your context menu, which allows you to cut, copy, insert, paste (append) and collect playlist locations. "collect" means that it adds the locations you have selected to the locations that are already in its "clipboard".

If you don't change eq settings all the time, you can prepare impulse response for your favourite eq setting(s) and use convolver.

ssamadhi97: I just tried it then, and it's pretty cool -- thanks for the suggestion . Also the "History" plugin is great; I have random play enabled and I'd missed being able to use forward/back on the list of actually played songs. I'm also messing around with the "Shuffle" plugin, which allows something similar.

Messer: Thanks for the suggestion! I downloaded it, and it seems pretty neat, especially to get concert-like ambiences. However its CPU usage is pretty similar to the EQ (25-30% all up including decoder/output), so I guess it's not really a replacement in this context.

In the meantime I saw foo_dsp_xbass listed on the 3rd party plugins page, but the link's broken (at least for me), although the site's up the file's missing.

Cheers - Angus.

I just wanted to clarify this: The plugin stores the data in the Windows clipboard using a custom format. See the source code for details.

Irrelevant at this point, since no program besides your plugin can paste this data as of yet (afaik). So, stop confusing the poor newbies.

(jk btw)

Heck, even Windows' clipboard viewer refuses to render this "foobar2000 playlist (.fpl)" type. Damn proprietry standards! ().

Seriously, although I know next to nothing about Windows coding (I'm a DHTML/CSS/Perl/PHP guy) would it be a good idea to copy the track listings in an ASCII format as well as the custom playlist format? (Assuming you can specify several datatypes like "formatted text" and "unformatted text", I'm really rusty on this.) Could be useful if someone says "what's the tracklist for XXX album...." and you could copy/paste it in a presumably readable/TAGZ-formatted manner into other programs.

Possible, but not implemented. I may add an .m3u playlist in text format, since this is easier than coding a renderer for the current format (let Windows do as much as it can for us ).