I got tired of Winamp taking forever to load. Forum friends seemed to really enjoy foobar, so I gave it a shot.

With a few plugins I can play just about any music file I have managed to mass up during the years, excluding a few exotic tracker formats. Been using fb2k for some years now, and as I recall, the main reason why I changed from QCD was foo_sid... ^^

- J

foobar . . . love it or leave it.

Well, you can't LEAVE foobar. It's like Hotel California.

You might as well try to leave Cynthia.

Because it doesn't automatically play a wave file when you first install it.

I started using foobar from version 0.8.x.
Foobar can be suited for taste from anyone.
If you like simple look, it's already in simple look from default installation.
If you like fancy "eye-catching" outlook, you can customize by yourself or use theme desgined by foobar's user.

I started using it because iTunes slowed my system down to the point of not being functional anymore. Winamp is tested and true, but to me it's too much "in the middle"; too customizable to be as straighforward as iTunes but not customizable enough to be anywhere near Foobar. So I decided to go "all the way" with Foobar Only use iTunes to sync my iPod these days

at first i tried foobar because is saw users screenshots of their own modifications/themes and thought that foobar looks very good. then i realised it needs lot of tweakin to get it look good and i switched back to winamp. But i was bored and tried foobar for "one more time". I got a good tutorial that i used to get my foobar look good. After that i discovered all the great utils, tagging possibilities and replay gain. now I'm not switching back to winamp anymore!

I tried Foobar last year, and I did love it. For awhile. It was customisable, played more formats than WMP and I like stuff like this. Plugins? Great idea!

However I switched back to WMP (Windows Media Player).... why?

1) The multimedia library.

Yes just that one thing only. I like to browse my library easily inside my media player. I don't wanna have to write a complex plugin to make a media library thats easy to use. WMP has a far superior library (out of the box).

I can expand albums and see all my albums. Or I can go to artists and see all their songs when I click the artist. But if I then expand artist I can see the individual albums. I can double-click and whatever is in that list becomes the new play list. Or I can right-click and add to the current playlist rather than killing it.

If Foobar had a multimedia library that was on par with WMP it'd be the superior player in the market, but sadly it's not. If someone reckons they can get that same functionality or close to it with Foobar then please, correct me! Show me!

Changed to it because WMP... errr... whatever the latest one is... went crap. The main reason is I like the artist/album expandable trees, and especially the directory one, which is difficult to find elsewhere.

I would probably change away from it, to something that may in many ways be worse, if someone came up with something similar that was slightly more usable. What irritates me about Foobar is that it's very well done, technically excellent, stable and more, yet missing some blindingly obvious and pretty much trivial features.

By this I mean things like my old gripe that shuffle and repeat are not separate. Another is that you play through an album in normal mode, reach the end, press the play button (in my case, a hotkey) - and instead of starting again, it plays the last track. Why?! All of this wonderful player and it's let down by some spectacularly simple annoyances.


http://crap.wapoc.com/foobar.png

Works for me - took a bit of messing around to do it, but not too bad. I can try to explain but it might be difficult.

I switched because I was fed up with Winamp's crap, it was to the point were it wouldn't even start.

The only down side to foobar is that fact that I change my shell style, icons, etc. a lot and like to have everything match, this would be fine with Winamp but in fb2k it's a bit more difficult seeing as how I can't find many .fcs files, and I'm not very good at coming up with a layout

Because it's quick and plays every format I throw at it, Sick of other players taking forever to load.

It hasn't been long since I began using foobar (late last year), but I don't exactly remember why I began using it. I think I got it recommended from a friend. So, I installed foobar and was met with a white minimalistic interface which looked like it could do nothing at all. It kind of set me aback, but I quickly learned of ColumnsUI, which suddenly changed everything. That, combined with foo_playlist_tree and not few hours learning the basic of TAGZ and other scripting, made foobar THE best choice for me.

In every other music player I used, there were some things that I didn't like, and some things that were not suited to my needs. In foobar? I change it myself. Do I want ColumnsUI to not show artists unless the album artist equals "Various"? No problem, wrap it all up in a little $if($stricmp($meta(album artist),Various)) and you're good to go. Do I want to be able to organize my whole music collection in one, two... make that three clicks? No problem, I've made an advanced "rename, move or copy files" script perfectly suited for my needs, and my needs only.

It's the customizability, generally speaking. To be able to do basically what ever you want to fit it exactly to your music collection. Yes, it takes quite a while to get it all working just the way you want it, but my oh my, is it worth it.

Edit (darn me for always remembering things a split second after adding the reply): The reason I started using foobar, was because of the gapless playback. I needed that, and a friend of mine said that foobar probably was the best gapless player for Windows.

I'm a masochist.

May I second that please? =)

It's mostly visual for me. I can adjust Foobar in any way I want, and it really works for me, the way I set it up. The sound is fine and gapless and all is nice, but I change songs and look for them so much, that it really matters to me how the songs are laid out. I need to be able to quickly do what I want, and only Foobar can do it.

I does'nt want to talk about Windows Media player, it stink.
Itunes doesn't give me what I want, not good sound, doesn't read Flac.
I spent a year with Winamp, but I was never satisfied, It takes an Hour to load my Library. Don't like the media library and these windows which open in my face and resize themselves when and were they want.

Now I find the Holly Graal, it's Foobar2000 + GSM_flavored mod v0.1.5,
--The most important thing-->Foobar sound great and the music in my Grado's is more clean and clear with foo than with Winamp. For those who haven't make the experience, try to listen the same song with the same volume wthout any Dsp, with another Media player, you will hear the difference, it's the same beetween Flac and MP3.
--Library load quickly
--I can see Album covers while navigating in the media library
--I can change tags and download covers in more efficient way than with other media player
--almost anything is possible and can be done with Foo

What I don't like is that I need to understand (a little bit) how it works.


I am very satisfied with MY Foobar

I use it as an auxiliary player for tracks that aren't in my music library and also to convert CUE+WAVs ripped in EAC to LAME 3.97 -V 0 --vbr-new.

It's fast and it's lightweight, but the learning curve is way too steep and time consuming for me to get the same features as WMP11 (my choice for library management/playback), and it doesn't offer seamless integration with the AMG database (crucial feature for me) as WMP11 does.

I like it due to its minimalism (or what can be achieved, I hate people trying to mimic WMP in foobar2000 but that just shows what can be achieved) and that it can still have load of features accessible without turning in to the beast that is WMP\iTunes.

Its also able to manage my music library to my tastes and others via tagz n such.

I also like it having to use its own input plugins rather than bog up the entire system with codecs.

I like its speed and resource management. It doesnt bog down the computer nor does it arrive with "Agents".

Thats why I use Foobar2000

i like foobar because:

• plays every format under the sun with minimal optional plugins (see below)
• extremely fast loading (beats winamp and especially itunes by miles)
• looks ugly but i don't give a sh|t because i'm listening to music not watching my music player
• has absolutely no problems handling unicode (i have sh|tloads of japanese/chinese files)
• super easy to convert from one file type to another
• free!

here's all i have to add and i'm all set:
foo_burninate.dll (right click CD burning!)
foo_dop.dll (best thing ever made for my 2G shuffle)
foo_input_alac.dll (for those pesky itunes rips)
foo_input_monkey.dll (not sure why they can't include this default... but at least it's not hard to find like...)
foo_input_tta.dll (like this one... *hint* google "tta foobar" will bring you straight to the right page)

keep up the good work foobar devs

I like foobar2000 because it works. Also it goes by the "if you don't ask for it, you don't get it" philosophy.

Things I really like about:
Titleformating - tag based ui rocks
A dedicated, friendly, and helpful dev and user community

Things I don't like about it:
Titleformatting

Also I don't like the concept of the queue, I think everything should be a playlist, since the ui is based on playlists and that is, primarily, how the user interacts with the program. I also think the queue confuses basic functionality and distracts from features that would more easily be introduced if the backend had a simpler model. "Cursor follows playback"/"Playback follows cursor" - intermixed with active/playing playlist, plus the fact that you can play tracks by "adding to queue" or by playing a playlist, which are two completely different things. These are concepts I have never adequately wrapped my head around, and don't honestly care to. I don't use the queue, and I think that there some features (mentioned in previous posts) missing that a purely playlist based system could handle quite easily.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox. Cheers and thanks again for this great player.

I believe my initial reason for switching to foobar was that I dislike applications that abandon the standard windows look & feel in favor of some ugly selection of skins, which seems to be what most media players go for. Ironically since then I have customized my foobar to the point that it's barely recognizable as a windows app other than the titlebar. I guess the difference is that it's something I designed, so that makes it ok.

Simple.

The way it handles tags is vital to me. In other media players, there is a screen with predefined tags, and if there are any more, you can't see it. It's also not easy to add new custom tags. In Foobar, it's as natural as typing text in a text editor. It's very powerful, and I need that. Also, it doesn't mess up tags, like WMP does. If I play something from my foobar music library in WMP, the tags get totally messed up, especially the rating.

I like it because it' a swiss army knife for audio. What I don't like is maintaining it. I'm using foobar for quite a while now and it worked fine for me, so I didn't keep track of some component's developement. Yesterday I tried to add album art, which wouldn't work with my old version of Columns_UI, so I had to replace it with te newest version. But that disturbed my Trackinfo and so on. In the end it ruined my config and I had to do everything anew...

I tried it once a few months and didn't know how to do anything useful with it. Then I saw the wiki here, and set it up so it could do everything that iTunes could do (well everything I used it for), but better in every way and without the bloat or slowness

My reasons for using foobar2000 is mostly technical (I'm very peculiar about things). foobar2000 has a robust component architecture that exceeds other players like Winamp in every way. It is easier for a beginner to write plugins for Winamp because it doesn't use a C++ class based stucture which can be a bit daunting at first, but this class based structure shows it's strengths when you get more complex code and want to interface more deeply with the core (being foobar2000 itself).

Besides the technical aspects I love foobar2000 because it's outright simple to use (for me) and brings no nonsense. F.ex the latest incarnations of Winamp are a bit bloated I must say even with the option to remove plugins you don't want. The advertisements in various Media Library pages should have never been added and at least be gone when you are running the Pro version.

I also got Songbird installed which is a nice concept but nothing I would use in daily life. The same thing can be said about Amarok and don't get me started on iTunes clones.

I like Foobar because it is light and because it support cue sheets.

The only thing that I don't like about Foobar is that there is not an installerless option for it. I would much prefer the option of simply unzipping it into my home directory.

I use foobar for my music playback needs, conversion to various formats, and thanks to panelsUI its interface can be tweaked even further.

However, I must say that I feel a lot of people here like to 'claim' the program for some strange reasons. It almost feels like its a choice because its considered 'good' by people who have better knowledge of audio compression and playback (whatever that includes) then they do. It reminds me of a movie that is liked a lot outside the mainstream, not necessarily for qualitative reasons they themselves understand, but because they are being told by people they look up to that it is awesome. And so they buy into it, the analogy being Foobar, dabble with it, find it to work ok, maybe not better (dude, claiming Foobar to sound better is just a very strange (and probably untrue) statement) and feel a little 'cool' for not using the evil Microsoft'ish Winamp (or even more evil true-Microsoft WMP). What they don't realize is that those programs might work just as well for them.

Anyway, I dont mean to troll, just wanted to vent a little.

Edit: typos.

For anyone who does not have the technical competence to use foobar, or for those who do not need its advanced options, but still want above average degree of control, I recommend MediaMonkey. It's free (at least 95 % of the functionality), it's very easy to use, and it has a lot more options to scructurize and maintain your music library than WMP has.

Would be perfect if they only put back the RANDOM feature!

Sometimes I like a new song i just added to the playlist so i'm constantly replaying it, however with the current shuffle feature it repeats the SAME SONGS in the same order over and over again.

I understand it was taken out b/c some ppl got confused with shuffle and random, but that doesn't mean you should delete it!

One - real important - reason havent been mentioned enough imo:

The great community! Many developers of plugins and stuff create it new every time they want it!

YOU are the reason for using foobar!

Second that, Generalverdacht. Foobar would have been nothing without all the plugins created by the community.

+ love at first sight because it looks like it belongs on my desktop as it uses the standard Windows GUI
+ gapless playback & cue sheets
+ title formatting
+ small memory footprint
+ total time counter
+ i hate skins
+ cute icon

Cause it dose not add Startup entry.



+ Can customize to suited my weird listening habit
+ FAST
+ Very nice icons
+ Lots of thing Foobar can do
+ A lots of good and weird(and i find it very useful!) plugin
+ Did i mentioned FAST!!

Because straight away I was able to play all the flac files I have. I have been using it straight out of the box with just the ape and shn plugins for about a year.

Now I just hope I can get through the steep learning curve and figure out how to wrestle this baby until it looks the way I want it to. I seen screen captures of others setups and they look amazing, much cooler than my stock settings.

QFT

Depends - without "all the plugins", a few interesting things would be missing.... but also alot of options-bloat and horrible configuration-hell would be missing.

Ignoring filetype plugins, as i see it, the most important thing which barebone-foobar (no 3rd party plugins) is missing, is a less minimalistic UI - and the lack of a better official UI is also what started this whole mess.

I started to use foobar a couple of weeks ago, Mainly because it supports natively .ape files, the audio codec I'm using to archive my cds.
So I'm a total newbie. Infact I'm using it with the standard gui, quite minimalistic, but I saw there are "thousands" of plugin that can change the aspect and add a lot of functions. I.e ReplayGain
WinMPlayer and its embedded DRM control is another reason to change music player.
In general I would like to change the habit to use mainly Ms programs and start to use as more I can (at home for example....) free and opensource software.
Foobar Linux portability could be nice.

Ciao

I'm totally in love with title formatting. The way I'm able to make columns in Columns Playlist, and filter/sort my files for easy tagging.

Foobar does what I never was able to make Winamp do...

I started using foobar2000 PRIMARILY because the true gapless MP3 playback support. This was the first thing. Then later I found about the multi-band marvelous EQ. And not much longer, I found out a little tool that I mess and un-mess every now and again, the CONVERTER. And Not much after that, I discovered that it can also masstag...

I just painfully regret, murmur and get sad that there is NO LINUX port.
I hope the developer change his mind one day...

Linux Port would be cool. But until this happens I use 0.9.4.3 with wine and Jack to have audio without stutters.
I don't like the way Amarok is so less customizeable. Maybe I am a bit to fastidious from Foobar.
I like Foobar because of
- Beeing customizable
- Coverting and Ripping
- Masstagging
- Replaygain (Amarok mustchange a lot. That replaygain script works not so well)
- Media Library

I initially decided to switch my ripped CD's from the lossy WMA format to FLAC format for the better sound quality.

I examined numerous music players. Many of them to do not play FLAC format files. Some of them are too basic. Some of them had bad reviews by users or web sites. I saw no bad reviews for foobar2000

foobar2000 has quite a few features that make it a powerful player. I love the fact that it can be customized for a more personalized function and appearance. The customization process also presents an enjoyable challenge that will hopefully expand my audio knowledge. The few flaws that have been mentioned for it are unimportant in my view or can be handled by secondary programs.

Thanks to the developers for providing a great program!!!

- A large amount of scalability
- Low system resource hog
- Good sound quality
- Out of the box codec support

No ugly/heavy skins, just plain good ol windows native interface
Extremely customisable
Usage of the proper decoding engines
It covers all my converting and tagging needs
True gapless playback
No ugly/heavy skins, just plain good ol windows native interface

Clean simple interface with custimizability via CoulmnsUI and some panels for album art and such. I hate the whole skin thing. Just show me my stuff and play it. On that note. Support for many formats. Wavpack specifically. Tag editing/cleanup/management. Would like to say the converter but currently got bug(s) with that.

The main reason I switched from WinAmp to Foobar2000 was great Unicode support. I have a lot of German and Scandinavian music, and Foobar is able to display characters correctly. Some of the reasons I have stuck with it:

- Interface looks like a normal program
- Customizable in all the right ways (not just stupid eye candy, you can tweak it to display information you care about)
- Incredible community of supporters
- Great plugins (to the OP: look at foo_title if you don't like foo_looks)
- Masstagger rocks

Foobar really seems to be all about the music. It just never gets in my way! As others have mentioned, if it ran on Linux, it could take over the world.

I switched from Winamp because of this:

+ Tools for organizing my music
+ Low CPU / Memory consumtion
+ Multiple playlist and Panel Tree in Columns UI

I chose Foobar2000 because i can have every detail i want, organised with the way i want. Total customization are the magic words.

I can tell you why I like it and why I don't like it.

I like(d) it because of its simplicity, no graphical wizzdos or useless features, just an mp3 player.

Up until now, when it no longer has the feature I've used ever since I first installed winamp, or the feature doesn't work. It hasn't for the past three versions. See here

I chose Foobar2000 mainly to play FLAC with scrobbling support for Last.fm. But now I really like customizing it and making it look great. The whole plug-ins scene is really cool.