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

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

Autoplaylist Manager?

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, 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.

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) 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

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 ^^)

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.

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)