Ok, my greatest love for foobar is its versitility with formats, and more particularly the ability to play (and convert) spc, nes, sid, etc. to wav so I can play these video-game formats on stereo systems. The only formats lacking are .hes, .usf, .vgm, .gym, and .sap. These are formats for pc-engines, nintendo 64, game-gear, sega, and atari, respectively. I know there have been posts for the .g(ym) format at the 3rd party page, but they no longer work, and I would love to develop these myself if I knew how. So please, PLEASE, can somebody tell me where to get some of these plugins or how I can develop them?

Foo_nezplug supports HES. For the rest, there is a Winamp input wrapper, but it tends to be buggy.

If you wait long enough, I'll finish cleaning up 64th Note, and you can have native USF support.

Yeah I've had lots of trouble with those Winamp plugins for these formats and I gave up on them. But much thanks, that takes care of 2 formats, 3 more to go. And I would appreciate if someone could post some explanation/tutorial about making such plugins, as it seems that few of us actually know how.

No plugins there but sources code in case someone willing to give a try doing a plugin for Foobar from those:

PC2E:
Open source PC-Engine emulator progressing really fast.
Sound emulation is way better than NEZplug , check with "Jackie Chan" for a good exemple.

NotSo Fatso:
Excellent NSF/NSFE open source plugin for Winamp with loads of options.
Support all the extra sound chips (VRC6, VRC7, MMC5, FDS, N106, FME-07).

If it interests me to develop another HES plug-in, I'll look at this code.


Festalon supports all of the same sound chips, and emulates most of the PSG type chips at their native clock rate and downsamples them using a high quality filter. Of course, this is quite slow.

NotSo Fatso does support oversampling, which is similar in nature, but is not as exact as the native clock rates, and I don't think it uses high quality, albeit precalculated, FIR filter tables to downsample. However, it does have the major plus of object oriented design.

Hey Kode, I was gonna start a new post but Ill post this here. It looks like most of our foobar game formats come from you, thank you so much!

I would love native USF support!

I had some comments on some of your input plugins.

Lets do the NES first, because its already under discussion. My experiences with your plugin are that is has good sound, but there are several other problems I have with it. First, the shadowed files could be named better (see notsofatso). The seeking is terrible, it takes massive cpu and a huge pause. Also (biggest problem for me) it is missing a silent skip. It is for this reason I am using the other NES plugin that was posted, because it has silent skip, even though it has its own problems (no nsfe, for starters). It would be much appreciated by me and others I am sure if you made a return to your NES plugin.

Foo_spc is great, the only thing I miss is silence skipper which I am use to from SNESamp (I recently converted to foobar from winamp). I probably listen to spc's more then any other format, so I would love tihs feature.

And last, sidplay2. This one works really well! I have found one song so far that doenst play in sidplay2, but plays elsewhere. I can send it to you if you want. I have a feature request that I have not seen in any other sid player, but it would be great, and that is again silence skip. Many of my .sid's go for 6-8 minutes, you name it, so I have it set to "force all songs to play indefinitely". It still would be very, very cool if there was a silence skipper so that once the song actually stopped it would move on in the playlist....this would be very cool. It would make you have the best .sid player ever implemented!

Anyway, there you go. Hopefully you read this.

foo_gym no longer works? That's news to me given that I'm still using it. All you need are the VC7 runtimes (and no that doesn't mean the full .net framework for those that are stubborn and refuse to install it).

Anyhoo, here's a page with foobar plugins to add support for some of the formats you want. foo_vgm in particular is what's kept me from bothering to add vgm support into foo_gym - why bother when someone else has already done it?

It has sure been quite a while since the last version of foobar was released, I'm wondering when the next will come out. Does anyone know where the progress stands on 64th note (for native USF support)? I'm also wondering if there is a plugin or if work is being done for a plugin thats supports the GSF format (gameboy advance). And also, I'm wondering about a plugin or a program to use for converting MIDI (.mid) files to .wav, is there one I can get? And by the way, much thanx to Googer and Kode54 for your advice and the work that you do w/ foobar!

When it's ready.


This will either require considerable hackery, or a lot of work. The playback is designed around the concept of the component having its own playback thread, so the emulation loop is not really designed to break out until the caller wants to stop playback completely. This could probably be changed with minimal work, or if you're feeling dirty, a playback thread for every running input which sends samples to the run() function in a synchronized manner and halts on an event until run() needs more samples.


Similar to above, but this will probably be easier to convert.

What I really want out of both is clean multi-instance support, so conversions and ReplayGain scanning will work while another file of the same type (or the same file) is already playing or in the process of conversion/scanning.

I can share my partial work towards this with 64th Note v0.3, where I already converted the RSP plug-in, and used some ugly macros to shove its namespace into the same static module as the main plug-in, which only took about eight hours. With about as much work, the rest of the project can be cleaned up, and the merge completed without the macro function renaming hackery. That hackery was mainly required because both use similarly named and almost identical code generator functions for the recompiler cores, and with a little work, the like-named functions can be merged together and made to work for both R4300i and RSP modules. I would also like to eliminate the HLE audio core, since although it is faster, it does not replace actual RSP emulation, and did not appear to emulate reverb or any other processing effects which are probably hard to detect anyway. *whew*

Damn, I do a good job making all of these excuses to avoid doing the work.


foo_midi will work, as long as you don't mind buying (or stealing) a commercial DXi synthesizer. Hyper Canvas DXi seems almost worth buying, but I would like it a lot more if it had GS support. (I have already added basic hackish drum part remapping for GM2, but that's about all I can do... This should be in the next release.)

I was thinking about stealing the MIDI component from my program FL studio. It has an MIDI OUT.dll file and the FL STUDIO DXi.dll files. Can I use either of these? What do I do to make them work in foobar?