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.

Thanks for foobar!

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 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]

Try using foo_convolve with an equalized impulse.

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 Garf's site). 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 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...

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, And this Illiminable Ogg codec.

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.

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"

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.

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 and
dsp crossover 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$%@

Send your friend to Wikipedia. "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.