hi just wondering if theres a way to make foobar play incomplete files while theyre downloading. also it seems the seeking algorithm is reading the entire file up to the playback spot instead just skipping to the play point...never noticed this so much on my pc, but it seems to make foobar pretty unusable on a laptop via wifi, as reading thru 75 mb of data just to skip 3/4s the way thru a large file can take a long while..and cauze a frozen output buffer stutter in the meantime..

just hanging in the 'hood - probably not knowing anything
but I don't think foobar is oriented at playback of half downloaded files... it would have been the foo_read_http incase.... But as far as i know, at current times, playback of not downloaded files that are not streaming is limited to video in some p2p progs. Otherwise it's streaming or full download, then playback. Correct if I'm wrong,,,,

the reading through the entire file on seek is a well-known and documented feature of fb2k.. i believe the explanation is that in order to get sample-exact seeking in mp3 files (which do not contain seek tables), the files must be decoded all the way up to the sample. afaik, other players just take an educated guess for seeking. this feature's presence has been defended for a long time, and it doesn't look like alternative behavior is forthcoming any time soon. file formats that support sample-exact seeking don't have this problem, though!

and yeah, it's annoying on wifi or over the network, but such is the nature of the beast. i don't know, perhaps someone could write an alternate mpeg decoder (like kode54's mad decoder) that would take seek guesses, but i don't know how the issue of decoding not being sample exact would be resolved for the dsp chain (this was previously quoted as one of the reasons that fb2k must have sample-exact decoding)...

You probably have some albums encoded as .cue/mp3.

I suggest wrapping the mp3s in an mp4 container to increase seeking speed. Add the mp3 file to the playlist, right-click it, choose "mp4 utilities - convert to mp4 (same directory)". Then open the .cue file in a text editor and edit it to point at the newly created mp4.

After that you can delete the original mp3, as the whole operation is lossless and you can restore the original file by choosing "mp4 utilities - extract mp4 track(s)" from the context menu.