Foobar2000 is perfect about sound. It provides everything you need about sound: best quality, support for most formats, ReplayGain, ABX, DSP and a lot more. Foobar2000 does its work as a player.
But there are some things foobar2000 is not good at.
I think it is UI.
Yes it is simplistic and I like it. And many users do, but don't you want more? Do you want beautiful skinning interface for your favorite audio player?
I would suggest skinning system as in Opera browser.
And one more point is DSP. Its perfect, it does your work, but when you need to change DSP list (for example when you encode files using diskwriter) it is very annoying to change it every time (oh yeah and then you change DSP list back for playback). Here I would suggest presets for DSP. Very easy to use. And in diskwriter you just select preset with which you would like to encode.

Foobar2000 0.9 can come out tommorow, why not?

Redesign of the preferences dialog:
With this, i do not mean to change its architecture, but instead major cosmetic changes to make it more readable when many plugins are installed. In short, more clear seperations between sections would be helpful. It may make sense to sacrifice some "everything at your fingertips at once" in favor of a more "section-ized"-approach.

A global configuration manager:
This one would make it possible to import and export configurations of individual components. Basically, when exporting the user would choose which component's configs to export into a single file. And when importing, the user would get a window with checkboxes where he can choose which of the available component-configs to import.

- Lyx

edit: and in general measures to tame the powerhouse and its vast amount of available options would make sense at this stage, imho. The main problem with foobar right now isn't missing features, but instead that it has become difficult to manage its many components & features.

I think an iTunes oriented UI would be a step forward. Not more of that Apple stuff, but rather a way to arrange a UI via formatting strings much as we format a playlist by them. fooui_columns is a huge step in this direction, but i think an even more flexible GUI should be included. One with multiple selectable panes that can be used to run quieres on the playlist pane(s) sort of how iTunes does it.

the ui should be worked on, maybe musicmusic + foobar staff could work together? if they arent already

what i'd like to see, is the ability to pause playback on one playlist, switch to another and start playback, pause playback on that playlist, switch back to the original, and resume where i left off.

in short, per-playlist pause points

I agree, the UI is something that could be made so flexible and powerful that no audio enthusiast could be without. Playback has little to fix here and there, unless there is something else that could enhance it that we haven't thought of doing for an audio player.

I dunno about Itunes, but something where I can just easily make playlists quick and fast as well as an extensible UI that would pick apart anything the user needs and would organize and rearrange with little effort.

And just to make this clear, 0.9 is the software release im looking most forward to these days. I can't wait to see what Peter has up his sleeve for this round.

I see that the player itself has the most advanced caracteristics, but I agree with the posts about the GUI.

One think that moves people to choose a player is its GUI. Foobar2000 GUI is excelent, I wouldn't change it, but navigate through artists/albums could be improved a lot. A media manager like the 'Winamp Media Library' or the equivalent on other players is a must for a modern and complete player. Also the posibility to integrate it in a comfortable way to the main GUI is a good idea.

Yepp... advanced media library needed alot. But winamp's ML isn't best. IMHO windows media player 9 has good library.

And also there should be a way to turn off library for better perfomance on old PC's...

Sorry for bad english...

The only thing I want right now is a media library, and a minibrowser would be good (I think someone is working on it right now, but I don't know if he will complete it).

I dont see why most of these couldn't be components.
And I'm pretty sure most people who use foobar don't want some "beautiful" skinned application. I for one like all my apps to look like windows not completly different.

I'm looking forward to the next ui_columns update, with the panes.

as for foobar, I think its pretty much perfect, there really isn't any problem that couldn't be solved by making a component. Except the per playlist pause, that would be interesting, but I think the tricky part is that the playback has nothing to do with the playlists which are part of the ui. You might be able to implement it in the UI though.

Less memory usage. Currently on my system, while playing, foobar uses around 20000 KB of memory. Now compare that to Winamp 2.91, which only uses around 11000 KB of memory. Now i only have a 128 MB of ram, so if foobar used a lot less memory, it owuld be the best player ever.

I think the current UI is fine though something a little more interesting in the visualisation would be nice.

The best addition would be some sore of medial librarian feature with a readilly accessible update/rescan function. The library display could function the same as a playlist. One giant playlist to rule them all...

- Default UI with a volume slider
- Ability to Hotkey different DSP Manager settings (say switching between headphones and speakers, you'd want to off/on Crossfeed)

I can see why people mention the GUI, but do not agree with it personally. Or rather I am perfectly fine with people having the choice for pretty eye candy, just do not force me to have to have a seekbar, volume bar, buttons, or other clutter on my screen.
edit: not that I expect the option for the original interface to disappear anytime this century, just stating how I feel.

Another idea ..

In playlist formatting, it'd be awesome if you could reference %_previous% or %_next% items, or even %_playlist_item_number_xxxx%.

In particular, this would be useful when setting up formatting to colour-code whole albums or artists.

As it is, formatting of this style is usually dependant on the user adding an extra "Firsttrack" tag to their files.

just an idea

Now Isee many people are vaiting to make the foobar look better, or to make additions to the user interface but I do please you again and again do not stop support the ui this time known as default. It is perfect for use with screen reader. It needs only a small fixes in the preferences dialog. I suggest you to recheck the code and make the Tab key stopping at each not static elemnt of the window e.g. in keyboard shortcuts page the key edit box is not reachable by Tab key. And please if it is possible make any option or so to have default color of the playlist text and selected frame color the same default one like elsewhere in the windows listbox.
I would also have there a feature which allow users to change parameters of any active dsp via keyboard e.g. change tempo while playing just simple by pressing any predefined key combination instead of popping up the preferences focussing on the right slider and changing the pitch or tempo etc.
I do not expect all these features in the 0.9 but sometime in the near future...
thanks alot..
edit: I am also searching for a component which acts like winamp's extended jump to file. please let me know if you know any.

With the default plugin set foobar uses (according to VM Size, not Mem usage) about 5000kb here.

Perhaps you should consider deleting some unused plugins?

I have to agree; with only the components loaded i actually use ( all 18 of 'em ) and several playlists holding 10,000+ songs, foobar2000 is only using 6.8MB Ram, and 11MB Virtual Memory

I always found Winamp to use double or triple that, even with much smaller playlist(s) loaded.

I agree ^^

in fact, it would be a good think to modify the "album list" to be a "real" media library with a research function and a possibility to quickly browse albums whatever the directory structure and even if the files are not properly tagged .

and please, no iTunes like media library... it really sucks ^^ the best is to keep clearly separated media library and the "current playlist". (for now album list make the deal)
In iTunes, after a keyword based reseach, you play the corresponding part of the media library selected... it's like if google for each request open as many windows as there is answers to a request...

at last, for me a nextstep-like browsing structure would be better than a three based structure ^^ (or both it's ok ^^)

and just one feature which could be implemeted in 2 minutes : for now I can't make a ctrl + click to select more than one track and add it into the playlist by the [send to playlist] button... very annoying ^^

(me too sorry for the poor english ^^)

洋太, it was just my opinion

Note that none of the requests, expectations here actually have anything to do with any specific core changes from 0.8 to 0.9.

Almost all of the things requested here are allready possible with the current API and SDK. All it would need for them to be implemented is some component developer willing to write a plugin for these features. Ie. Media Library, different GUI, etc.

With the exception of maybe the pause a certain playlist and resume there again. Although I personally really don't see that much sense in this feature. But to each his own.

So I suggest in case anyone wants features,like a Media Library, to make a seperate thread and request such.

The most important changes from 0.8 to 0.9 will probably as usualy be invisivle to the user and more related to plugin architecture, etc. One of things planned for example is better handling of multiple playlists internally. A thing the user will definitely hardly notice.

I would love to see the ability to save multiple playlist tabs. Also the ability to load multiple playlist tabs by clicking on 1 file.

If you dont know what I mean, mozilla allows you to do this with its tabs

That memory figure means nothing. I certainly wouldn't use it for any comparisons between Winamp and Foobar. Besides, you can tweak it downwards by removing components you don't need and lowering buffer sizes - this will also decrease your latency.

As for new features - the one thing i'd love is for the foobar core to run as a service. This would mean any program that plays audio would have access to the whole foobar plugin system. We could have some totally different players that all have excellent sound, with all the gapless stuff etc, without the author needing to code it all - they can just piggyback onto foobar.

foobar playthrough for midi files direkt to a hardware soundcanvas (vc88 ...)

I suggest you buy more RAM or wait for your next computer, because Foobar isn't going to have a dramatically smaller memory usage. Maybe some optimizations here and there to save a meg or two, but thats it. It's low enough on my system, anyway.

Plz, include foo_looks + some good skins in spetial installer

How about c#/.net support then? I'm learning that now and would rather not have to play around with c++

Seriously though i think the current .8 system is quite good. Its very rare now to find someone with a feature request that can't already be accomplished within the existing framework. Its mostly just demand for additional GUI types to mimic other player's style. (Not that this is a bad thing, iTunes, WMP, Winamp certainly have merit and i think that someone with some free time and a good knowledge of c++ could do some good things yet for foobar)

I would like to see visualizations finally coming out!


Apart from that, and the .ace problem (damn ace), the program is perfect to me.!

Someone inquires about potential changes in 0.9 and all of a sudden people post a streak of feature requests for plugins or talk about the plugins of their dreams. Note something funny here? Right: pretty much nothing I've read in this thread so far is actually really related to the player core or the API and therefore completely independent of a new fb2k version.

Missing a feature? Try bugging the developer of the respective plugin.

Want a Media Library? Two options, either keep talking about it and hope that someone else gets bored and starts working on it, or break out your fave C++ development tools and get busy yourself.


Got new revolutionary ideas or great expectations for the API or similar things pertaining to the heart of the beast? Now we're talking.. you can discuss that kind of stuff here.


Note: this post is a blatant copy from another thread of similar nature we had a while ago. That thread ended up being closed by Peter because people wouldn't stop posting feature requests that are in no way related to the player core/api. - please take a hint and try to not let this happen again this time. DO NOT POST RANDOM FEATURE REQUESTS HERE

Well, more on topic, I'd like a more dynamic version of TAGZ, so that scripts could be made where you could collapse albums, artists, etc, reference previous and next tracks etc. I think the system right now is pretty damn cool, but a lot of checking/boundary cases could be eliminated were it to be redesigned to support multifile awareness.

exactly what i was trying to say in one of my previous posts

From the programmers (and users) point of view I'd like to have three things:

- The ability to edit all playlist, regardless of if one is the active playlist or not. (I think you are working on this as picmixer said "One of things planned for example is better handling of multiple playlists internally." in one of his posts)

- Currently get_next() only returns an integer as the playlist index for the next song. It would be cool if I could return a meta_db handle for the case that the next song is not in the current playlist. This would made the implementation of my foo_temple much more clean and less hackish and would also solve the trouble with DSP plugins not working on song change if it is active.

- Some kind of general plugin support for UIs, like the pane stuff that musicmusic is planning for foo_ui_columns. So I could write one version of my plugin and all users could use them and not only the one who use foo_ui_columns.

My idea is as follows:
foobar2000 provides a User interface which only consists of an empty window. All the other stuff are plugins which could be dropped onto this window by the user. The menu would be a plugin, the classic playlist would be a plugin, musicmusic columns playlist would be a plugin, the playlist switcher from foo_ui_columns would be a plugin, I would provide foo_temple as a plugin, the album view would be a plugin, some programmer could provide a volume slider as a plugin, another programmer could provide a button bar which is fully customizable and so on...

I've been thinking about this too. I fully understand that Peter want's other developers to add features by creating alternative UIs, but we haven't seen too many developers grasping the opportunity. My guess is that it's a little overkill to make a full UI replacement, if all you want is to add a volume slider and do some minor adjustments to the default UI. After all, the default UI is very good, but I don't know how many times a volume slider has been requested. Maybe the option to provide it as a small plugin, might do the trick and give "the masses" their slider.

If it's possible to make a clean and stable UI system like this, that can accept alot of little pieces thrown together to make up a full UI, that, might IMHO be the next big step for foobar. A positive side effect of this would be that you could have everything in one window, and not alot of small windows on top of each other (I'm not really a fan of the current situation). It would be in the spirit of foobar, as it is already based on components, you just need to see the UI as another collection of components.

Note: I'm really looking forward to musicmusic's panels for UI Columns, but I agree with janjan that it would be better if panels were independent of UI. I suspect that this kind of branching will create some confusion, as in the future, people might need to use the "right" UI before they can utilize a certain plugin. This might be a pessimistic point of view, but minimizing future confusion would in the end, benefit both developer(s) and forum users.

Btw: Maybe it's already possible to make such a components based UI with the current SDK, but for this to really work out, I think it is needed as an official component. First of all, it would be a shame if development stoped after a while, that has happend with quite a few plugins already, as other plugins would depend on it to work. Second, it needs to be (rock-) stable.

Btw2: I think it's important to realize that the average user probably don't know the SDK inside out. My guess is that:
foobar2000 core + SDK + plugins = foobar2000
to the average user.

Russian version of this thread is available at:
http://foobar2000.h12.ru/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=16

edit : changed link

The api I was working on wasn't just for sidebar panels, it is a general api for stuff like that. I am also using it for the toolbars as well. Its not specific to foo_ui_columns, and I will release it with the alpha version of foo_ui_columns for feedback anyway.


As above, anyone else is free to act as a "host" for the "ui_extensions" it wont be specific to my plugin. Whether anyone else does or not is another story though.. You are entirely correct, though, there is no point in having competing apis.

I would like to see Foobar respond to multimedia keys on all multimedia keyboards without fuss, but mostly, making them work at all would be a great step forward.

1. Ability to display information from all MP3 headers, i.e. if an APE header is found, display this data, but still examine the other headers and display any EXTRA information found there.

2. Improved performance with CD Audio... I have been unable to make CD Audio work whereas it works "out of the box" with other players.

What about my idea of a service? mplayerc (for example) could use the foobar audio pipeline, with all the advantages, for example.

I'd like to see the "album grouping pattern" formatting string to be added to foobar core setup, so that all plugins that need it (replaygain, kode's shuffle control, etc) can refer to it there.

Hello.

My humble opinion, Foobar is a great "toolbox", but a pain in the ass to use
effectively with DSP. Ex: the EQ or other config. plugins, it have been so much
easyer to have configurable dropdown boxes in the main interface, where you can
directly access you most used DSP plugins, evt. with some presets.
(all configurable of course.)
This have been discussed many times before, and i guess this is the most
"wanted" future request. accessibility/usability should be the main concern for the
Foobar development crew, not looks.This is something that should be delt with
by 3party. The "hotkey" issue is also important. Foobar does not get any
better with a new visual interface.. Another quite crusial "core" plugin i
would see changed are the burning option, you should not be forced
to use/install a big commersial package for this feature to be used.
personaly i would like to see a plugin with optional engines,
ex: burrrn or bao. etc. One other thing i have trouble understanding is why
Foobar as a free app. would use a commersial one, for this feature.
If the perception is that most ppl. have nero installed, it`s time to reconsider.
(I have mentioned this before, but with no logical answer.)

actual support of windows audio codecs so you dont have to use mplayerc for half your files...oh and a linux port

Hello.

and i forgot, native DirectX/VST support. i have read a few treads on this subject,
is someone working on it.?

No request here.

Just wondering if the compatibility with current components will be kept.

I expect new name

Something like F Audio Toolbox

Well, the thread seems to be rapidly deteriorating - let's try to keep it on topic. I'd say that most users don't have a chance to distinguish between "core" and "plugin" if they are not developers themselves, so their requests should not be considered stupid or offtopic - in fact, they can be used to discover areas that need some work, even if they do not suggest actual core/API features.

For example, a lot of people want "Media Library" - what could that mean? Everyone assumes something different, most things can and should be done externally (it would be great to have several kinds of such libraries to choose from), so, this request should go into 3rd party development thread? Or should it, really?

There _is_ a default database in foobar2000, and it's integrated into its internal structure. It's pretty fast and powerful, so Album List plugin that uses it covers a lot of "media library - like" issues.

There are easily visible limitations, though. The database has very rudimentary management tools, it doesn't rescan its directories in background to discover new files, it doesn't clean up links to removed or replaced files by itself. Adding such features to the database-related code would make it possible to extend, for example, the existing Album List to a full-scale Media Library. Do you really expect users to try and discover whether these things are "core-related" or not before posting here? They just want 0.9 to have a Media Library and that's pretty understandable and useful for developers :-)

In short, I'd like to say that there _is_ a grain of truth here: right now f2k needs very few improvements at the core level, it's a great program already, but very few users can make intelligent suggestions about its architecture, so their posts about "major features" (whatever they consider as such) should be used as "raw material" to determine development direction.

I think foobar2000 has already a huge amount of functions and flexibility, but I'd like to see in the future versions a reorganisation of the preferences pannel...

If you already know foobar for a long time or if you're curious enough, you can already use it like this. But it can be quite confusing for a newbie to configure foobar2000 for the 1rst time...

Having the choice between a simple mode and an advanced mode could be usefull...
The options tree could also be replaced by a system with groups and tabs...
=> However, these suggestions only reflects my personnal opinion and if you don't agree with them, that's perfectly fine...

1. DirectX/DirectShow/VST support(plugin or in the core). I hate the 16bit buggy winamp DSP plugins...
2. MatrixMixer/AC3Filter/ffdShow like speaker mixer.
3. Alternate use of Windows audio codecs, or a special input plugin...

These aren't major wishes(I think), but old wishes, and these can change the player much.

Aren't all these components wishes ??
As others have said on this thread before, we should only concentrate here on what changes we wish for fb2k CORE...

Yes, I'm sorry. But I wasn't sure if need or needn't modify the core for these features.

I hear for long time about these problems, I don't know if these problems will be solve or not...

Here's my only wish (for now™): some kind of loop function for formatting strings. For, while, anything will do...

Hmm, off the top of my head the only request I have is a nice spectrum analyzer. Some sort of bar style like Winamp:



...oh! And a decent shuffle (random) thing that doesn't play songs by the same artist 3-4 times in a row.