+ Has all the techy features you could ever wish for.
- Needs wine to run here...

For this last reason, I'm mostly running Quod Libet lately. Integrates well with the desktop environment, and at least the tagging and library features are about as extensive as those in fb2k. It lacks the dsp-features, but I'm trying not to worry about that anymore and just enjoy the music now

replaygain, diskwriter and notepad look.

did I mention replaygain? I couldn't live anymore without it.
that's pretty much it I guess.

I first tried it for the lower resource usage. I got hooked on for:
- high amount of costumization possible
- awesome playlist handling (the only thing I miss is the "update file sources")
- masstagger
- replaygain
- support for any kind of format there is

thinking about it, I'm not even sure what I could use in place of Foobar now.

+ CUE support
+ Extreme customization
+ Replaygain
+ Converter
+ ABX
- Doesn't properly support .aac files
- No easy way to check for component support
- Not scriptable natively

For the minuses, I still have to have MediaMonkey & WinAmp.

I would have to agree 100% with all of these features and more.

The only things I don't like about FB2K is the nature of the plug-ins and how they integrate (or don't integrate) and how the authors disappear w/ a trace between major versions.

I would much rather FB2K be open source (versus proprietary) and all plug-ins be the same, but I'm just one of those open source monkies with a lotta bias.

Overall, however, I could never go back to Winamp.

@bytemastr: LOL... well WinAmp is not *that* bad actually... besides it's the only player on my PC that can properly play .aac files... so I have no choice there, do I?

Winamp is also one/the only (?) player that defaults to ripping to .aac, so it's quite natural that the Winamp developers would work around the issues that are the result of not using a proper container. The anser you will get around here when asking for "proper" AAC support is to use AAC the way it was meant to, that is inside a proper container (like .mp4).

You know... I never figured out how to rip with WinAmp Always did it with AudioGrabber, before having a brief fling with CDex, and then converting completely to EAC

Still my elderly Nokia6230 can't play *any* properly contained .mp4 files, so I am stuck with .aac

I still don't know what is ReplayGain
And now I have another reason for using foobar2k:
- Converter, for burning audio CDs

There is a "help" button at the ReplayGain settings.

I chose foobar because of it efficiency... Its small and I absolutely like, that I can make playlists very quick and switch between fast too. Later I discovered columns_ui

Sorry for the off-topic, I'll use PMs

+Sound Quality
+Extremely Customibility
+Miniamal Resource Usage
+Support for just about every format i can think of

Like others have said, "I dont think I could ever go back to using winamp"

I like it because it sits in my system tray/'notification area' and plays music. Why would I LOOK at a music player?


Oh, and because it looks like notepad. I found the concept of a notepad that played music great at first. It's a pity two other people have said this already

i like it because of its simplicity and multiple playlist handle. But i don't use it anymore because music sounds wayy better with izotope ozone plugin and i couldn't make it work on fb2k

Low resource usage.

ReplayGain. Compatible with so many formats. Low resource usage. Great tagging power.

I love Foobar because it still is able to disprove my opinion i am not longer influenced by the players i used before even if i think so.

I wrote one page before:



But why it should? If you rip a cd your tracks are corectly named and organized taken in media library, if you use renamer to add/remove or rename files to media library your database is updated. And that without scanning harddrive!

Before i got foobar, i just LISTENED to music, but then a friend showed me Foobar and i was excited. It´s not only a Player for music, it´s also a nice Freetime Activity I mostly work on the player instead of listening with it but now i´ve got 2 Foobars on my computer, one for the music and one to work on.

my only solution to manage and play and keep track of my thousands albums collection

Foobar : leap forward

+ Only gapless I could get to work flawlessly on my computer
+ Supports all my formats (flac, wav, mp3)
+ Supports a directory-tree interface (via foo_uie_explorer), the only way I will EVER use a music player.

- Steep learning curve
- Changing the look of the UI can be a lengthy process
- Does not do my laundry for me

I have moved from Winamp to foobar2k because of the GUI. The GUI appears to be faster than winamp. There is no memory consuming design, just a good old well structured standard window. So you can concentrate on functions and not on fucking design like winamp.

I tried many players (winamp, jetaudio, musicmatch, dbpower...) before discovering and adopting F2k 0.8.2.

+ low resources usage
+ reads the good formats (ogg, mpc, flac)
+ a lot of very good plugins
+ the best tagging capacity
+ higly customizable

- I still have a lot of troubles to handle (understand) the purpose of some plugins, script and configuration writting, but...

+++ the F2k community is so helpful !

I was actually working on a WA3/5 skin that emphasized the playlist (part of the 'working' was that the layout didn't exist in any at the time, so coding it was a bit odd)...and found Foobar2000,

+ Gapless playback, natively.
+ Replaygain (I like the report in 0.9).
+ Good tagging (even nicer in 0.9).
+ Good conversion tool (though the 0.9 one's UI is my one and only gripe for FB2K, ATM).
+ ABX...
+ Shuffle by album; not a killer feature that gets you right off, but it has certainly grown on me.
+ Independent volume setting, with intutive default keys of numpad+/-.
+ No skins required, and the buttons aren't too tiny.
+ Multiple flat playlists, tabbed.
+ Every version I've tried so far has worked under WINE w/o hassle. I haven't tried 0.9.3.1 yet beyond Windows, but I have already read simple success cases.
+ In general, it hasn't sucked more with newer versions, as is generally common in software.
+++ As with the above, it does not organize my music for me, or get in the way of my going through it. Non-flat database interfaces add plenty of hassle, and offer no benefit when wanting to listen to my music. Sure, they're handy, but not as a default method of handling the playlists. The work required to use players like iTunes, Amarok, and Banshee is just too great, and even then, they still get in the way. FB2K has multiple big flat playlists with good drag&drop support.

- Hard to read mostly functional scripting langauge for formatting.
+ Er, a scripting language for formatting that does orders of magnitude more than I have yet required of it (all I've really needed has been $replace(s,'&','and')), and much more than I ever will need.

I might as well jump on this bandwagon, new account here, and all.

I played with foobar back as far as 0.5, and, now, 0.9.3.1. Between them, I opted to drop Windows, and go MacOS X native. I loved UNIX, and, hey, it gave me UNIX and Photoshop. However, now I need to be compatible with about 90% of the world - like it, or not. The only thing that could play MOD files mostly-correctly (and wasn't DeliPlayer), is foo_dumb. I take my MOD files too seriously.


What I like:
I like how much power foobar has, that you can make it do almost anything you want.

I like that foobar has a wonderfully documented (and BSD licensed) API. That's tasty.

I like that it starts out simple, and it's primary focus is the audio, not some extra flashy junk that has nothing to do with what I'm listening to.

I like that it DOESN'T require me to install the .NET frameworks, or some bizarre not-found-anywhere-but-here OCX, or strange widgets.


What I don't:
I don't like that the API has changed so much that the jump from 0.8x to 0.9x has broken things so completely. There are many 0.8x utilities that will never be recreated.

Lack of documentation. Most dates back to 2003, and references long dead items: I was incredibly annoyed how long it took to find a 'recent' foo_modplug (since foo_mod is gone), only to find that it didn't work at all with 0.9x.

The whole Tagz system needs an overhaul. It's powerful enough to be archaic - or is that archaic enough to be powerful. It's nifty that you can register your own, but there should be a universal way for a plugin to notify foobar that it has these new display variables, and allow the user to decide what to do with them without padding or insane justification tricks, jeeez.

Closing Comments:
I'm old, lazy, and spoiled enough to want something to 'just work', or at least have some functionality that I don't have to wade through a hex editor to find what I want. (Ok, this one was partially kode54's fault.) Foobar isn't anywhere near there. However, I love it now that it works - if an upgrade breaks it horribly, I'll probably dump it forever.. there are thousands of media players in the sea.

+ Lightweight
+ Replaygain
+ Unicode
+ files inside archives
+ DSPs
+ Converter

= I see no good reason to upgrade from 0.8.3.

- Not Free Open Source Software.
- No ports to other platforms either.

plays 99% of my file types, the looks the icons. the lightness of it.... Foobar2000 is just so amazing and FREE, you can't beat this anywhere... Rock On Foobar2000 and Everyone who helps with plugins etc...

I've used Windows Media Player, MusicMatch Jukebox, JetAudio, iTunes, Songbird, VLC, and Winamp over the last few years. Out of all those I like foobar2000 the most.

iTunes was my favourite since version 5-something. Once Apple released version 7 with its bloat, bugs, and 30 MB memory footprint I kicked it off and went to foo. FLAC and ReplayGain support was just the icing on top of the tiny 2-3 MB memory footprint and Windows GUI.

Now I'm beginning to understand the complexity of components and skinning. I liken foo to GNU\Linux – a huge learning curve for a huge amount of control.

Except Linux is opensource /scowls

Originally because I heard of its customizability and I saw someon's great looking foobar. Then I found out it had a minuscule memory footprint and I really needed that on my poor 6-yr old 128mbRAM computer (the better one broke )
Now I'm unearthing all my qualms with previous audio players and making big plans for my future musical enjoyment/organization/complete customization.

?eace

I discovered foobar 2 years ago. It was the most incredible software discovery I ever made. I switched over to it mainly because I found Windows Media Player to be too slow at loading large playlists. I didn't even know how powerful it was, until I found out the beauty of customization (columns, customizable plugins, a fast database feature). It's the one piece of software I couldn't live without, seriously.

Cheers to foobar!!!

well i love the customization in it, even though i dont try and learn the coding and make my own mod. But winamp is faster. fb has tons of features and mods to it so thats why i use it.

I used to like winamp but now i'm using foobar only for 2 reasons :
Very light
Multiple playlist

Don't care about design or else, since I'm listening with my ears

It's lightweight and I can make it do what I want it to do and ONLY what I want it to do. That's what I look for in all software.

Also, making it pretty is a good way to kill some time when some time needs to be killed.

I like how you get it out of the box and from then on you build on it until you get you get what you want. I like how, in my words, it's not "bloated."

At first, I didn't like it. I thought it was way too minimalist. After a while, I realized that it was what I always wanted, a music player that plays virtually any file type, while leaving a very small footprint in resources. I was just addicted to the "features" of Windows Media Player. But in actuality Foobar has way more features, without getting in the way.

I ran 0.8.3 alongside Winamp (favoring the latter) until 0.9.X when I started learning how to use it. Preferred:

+ Unicode
+ Columns UI sort-by-album
+ foo_alarm -> foo_scheduler
+ Doesn't die on 60,000 file playlist
+ Tabbed playlists
+ Album list
+ Album art

Maybe if I had decent speakers I'd care more about sound quality...

Foobar plays music. Period. Highly customizable, scriptable interface and ability to confugre almost every function makes foobar an application that does exactly what and how I want. No more oversized super-cool players with good look as highest priority, filled with stuff I don't need or don't care about. Besides, foobar sounds just perfect. And on top of that gapeless playback. Something I absolutely require.

lightweight
highly customizable
nice EQ
replay gain
plays all types of music

the best audio player available !

I just use it, because it plays allmost every musictype and because it is fully customisable and that´s so much fun coding arround and finding the right looking.

i switched from winamp and have never looked back.

using 0.9 only thing i miss from 0.8.3 is the freedb. i know there is one in 0.9 but it doesnt run mp3 files

It certainly does.

Lets see...
When i started listening to music on a computer (about 1999) i only knew about Winamp and i used it until a friend of mine said "try foobar its much better than Winamp". I gave it a go (this might have been around .6 or .7), but i didnt find it to be what i needed at the time. I often use Now playing scripts on irc and didnt know about any way to do that with foobar at that time.
But some months ago, Winamp fucked me over. Wouldnt wanna play a song without crashing. So i remembered about foobar and pulled it down. And at this time i had allready started to use AMIP and knew it worked with foobar. So the deal was sealed. Now that I've gotten in to foobar a little more.
I really LOVE it.

well am i using the wrong site to get the track names. cos it doesnt find loads of my albums, but 0.8.3 finds them. just tried it on Death rows greatest hits its quite a popular cd

"or why you don't like it"

It would be really nice if Foobar used a programming language that already existed...I don't know very many but it just seems that inventing a language just for foobar when there are plenty languages available out there is overkill.
Especially when you think that the people who take time to customize their foo aren't going to be turned off by using a language they perhaps already know.
eh, whatevs.

?eace

After Winamp's recent obsession with cramming thousands of ads and flashy plugins, along with hip cool features... I've become completely disappointed with my beloved media player.

Earlier tonight I was introducing a friend to some new music via SHOUTcast/Winamp, he asked me to leave it going all night, no biggie, I have plenty of bandwidth. Then I realized I really didn't feel like listening to that anymore, so I thought, why don't I just get a small audio player, I can check out something new, and have an alternative. First option that came to mind was Foo2k...

Downloaded it, installed it, added my library, completely loved it. Foo2k is everything I need/want in an audio player and nothing I don't. This program is the perfect mixture of flexibility and functionality.

Keep up the great work guys.

See here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...r2000:Tagscript
Unfortunately, it was removed.

All of the good things have been named, so I'll say some of the things I don't like:

There doesn't seem to be a way of making f2k add to a specified playlist and then playing at all. Especially from external sources like Windows Explorer and WLM (received files). The quickest way I have discovered is by making it add to a playlist, then using my global hotkeys, ctrl+numpad6 (next track), ctrl+numpad5 (play). Send to playlist replaces the whole playlist with on track, and add doesn't play it.

It's fast, light, stable, and versatile. I still use 0.8.3 though. They don't have my favorite pluggies on 9, and I don't care for the new look. It could be worse though. (iTunes...GAK!)

It lets me listen to music the way I wan't to, instead of making me listen to music the way some big company wants me to (like with winamp and windows media player).

It is so extremly customizeable. The main point of the program is to work well, and it does just that.

after having winamp freeze up on me after playing for a certain amount of time and crashing a handful of times in one day I started looking for something else and FB2K was ranked pretty high on softpedia so I gave it a shot.