Hi, I like the power of foobar but I wish it was more user friendly. Could someone link me to some GUI's that I could try out that would be similar to iTunes?

Unfortunately, none exist. You are free to create one.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Maybe something like this:
<link removed by moderation>

Whoever did that is violating our license.
I currently have better things to do than sending C&D letters to random people, but I can't say the same for Nero lawyers (since repackaged version of foobar2000 includes FAAD, which they have no permission to redistribute under terms other than GPL).
Additionally, posting link to this site is in violation of TOS #9 (repackaged versions of foobar2000 count as illegal software), and will probably meet response from our moderation next time someone does it.

Sorry, I did not know this was in any way illegal. I am in no way affiliated with the site or its producers, but rather found it in a web search.

In defense of myself, I am not sure it is in violation of GPL. It retains the original copyright notices as far as I am aware and they do not charge a fee. I did not post what I believed to be illegal software.

IIRC foobar does not comply with the GPL since it is not open source, but was specifically granted an exception by Nero. Anyone distributing foobar would also need to have explicit permission from Nero.

At least thats what I remember. A search would probably turn up the original thread on this topic.

Hmm not to mention that I don't see any gain of user-friendliness there.

It's basically a guy who made an exe out of "his" foobar folder and put it on the web. You are supposed to like his layout and colors, you are supposed to use his plugins, you aren't supposed to use the plugins he doesn't use etc

Okay you will be able to say "look ma i'm using a customized foobar" but if you don't know to customize foobar2000 "out of the box" (or let's say Case's, which already includes ui_columns etc) then you're likely not to know how to customize that one either (unless he has *massively* commented his tagz scripts)

PS. No-one forces you to learn tagz from A to Z and do it all on your own, many users has been posting screenshots and they are usually pleased to share their configs with whoever likes them =)

Completely disagree. I downloaded and switched instantly. I don't have the time to play with settings to make it look good. I could figure it out, but why when someone else has already.

I suggest having a section for downloads of 'pre-configured' foobars. All based on a 'download at own risk' and non-supported. But you might see a huge increase in use if you made things pre-configured. Take care of the masses, for the geeks will always take care of themselves.

We need MORE of these 'license violators', who are simply 'showing friends how they configured', and making it easy to do rather than telling them "get these plugins and configure using this code".

Code is for geeks. The rest of the world needs their food cut and chewed for them. appease.

Which part of "Doing that is illegal!" did you not understand?

Sure and this seems just the right place to advertize such a thing.

searchme.

You sound to me like someone who makes web pages with MS Word because "html is for geeks"

If *his* settings make it look good for *you*, then well... good for you, but how exactly is it more user-friendly? You're just using his settings instead of foobar's defaults, period.



What isn't making it easy in "get these plugins and configure using this code"? If you prefer you can simply import columns.fcs and paste foobar2000.cfg to your foobar directory, no need for a whole repackaged and illegal version!

wow, I started a flame war!

The dumb thing is that it would be trivially easy to just distribute an installer that updates an existing foobar install, all without breaking the license. foobar doesn't use the registry, so it'd be as simple as copying a few plugins into the componets folder and writing a new config file.

Of course, that would take several extra minutes, and who cares about licenseing, am i rite guys

But we definetly got a point here.
I am what's called a hacker, and I like to spend hours configuring my software.
But foobar scared me off. You can't guess any of it's powers from the homepage. As I saw winamp dieing, I went out to search for another player, but my 100Gb collection of mp3s and mpc made that quite impossible: I needed a player with multiformat support and with a good media library/database. I couldn't find database support in foobar.
Having a section on the homepage with config+components packages, together with a screenshot would increase foobar's popularity a lot. I think foobar's popularity would even explode, by giving a home to all this lonely, player-seeking winamp users.

Chronial: if you can't find the database function in foobar2000, you're not even close to the technical proficiency required to call yourself a hacker.

Stop stroking your own ego and head to the preferences dialog. If you're really a hacker, nothing you see should confuse you at all.

At first: The modern meaning of "hacker" does not really say anything about technical proficiency, but the way the user approaches and uses programs.

But for the real topic (wich you could have kept yourself, without trying to insult other forum users): The Database section in the preferences does clarify the existance of a cache - not an searchable database that can be displayed in a structured way.

Hackers write code, and hacking isn't necessarily a negative thing. Look at various open source projects and some of the great plugs fb2k has to offer.

Chronial, you (maybe) qualify as a tweaker. So do I. Someone with a really customized blackbox or fluxbox interface is also a hacker? No, the software was made for them to configure. Someone who speeds up Firefox by enabling pipelining and zero draw delays, they are also a hacker? No.

foo_uie_albumlist structures my database just fine.

Okay, well, I do write code. Lots of it. And I make a damn fine living at it too.

I don't use foobar because of the configurability issue. It's too much. I don't feel like taking the time to tweak every damn little thing, and the player is almost unusable after initial installation. I have foobar installed, and I use it for the occassional need that it happens to fit, but my player of choice is Winamp or more usually my iPod. And I use iTunes to sync it. Yes, foo_pod is quite capable (I wrote large sections of it you know), but configuring foobar is way too big of a hurdle for me to leap in order to have a nice usable music player.

I've actually been writing small bits for musikCube lately instead. It just seems to have more potential for being useful than foobar does.

Foobar may be the swiss army knife of music players, but that's not a compliment. Have you ever really tried to use the screwdriver on one of those things?

Foobar is the only app that can manage my collection (260gb) effectively. All the eye candy and nice GUIs in the world won't help you when you're trying to organise/tag/convert that lot.

That said, I do agree foobar is bloody hopeless for mainstream users. The core is fantastic, but the UI gives no clues for a n00b. Please though for the love of God don't make skins the default. Just add some sensible defaults, a dynamic and sticky playlist with album art and a half-decent visualisation in the corner that when clicked goes fullscreen. Oh, and a more intuitive search tool that isn't intrusive on a low-res TV and doesn't gum up when the hard drives power down or when you've got more than 25000 tunes in there.

Note that i'm not whining for someone else to do anything - this is just my opinion.

Personally i never found foobar to be all that complicated. Any trouble I had configuring it I found the answer to on this forum by searching or asking. Everything in the preferences is organized well and if you want loads of components get the special installer. There is plenty of documentation to begin with also. I'm not a programmer of any kind. I just have masses of music and foobar is the only way to go for me. If someone would take 2 hours of there life to look at foobar and learn how it works it would be a lot easier. And for the people complaining, perhaps they should just stick to winamp instead of asking foobar to emulate it. Just my opinion. To me foobar is like the linux of audio players. It's a bit more of a pain to get going, but the results are much better.

Dont worry, that isn't gonna happen

This is not about foobar beeing complicated to configure. It's configurability is just great and it was a lot of fun to me to tweak all these things.
The problem is: You can't guess anything of foobars powers by it's homepage or it's initial settings. If only a little bit would be changed there, foobar would have a lot greater popularity.


sorry for ot, but: The modern computer term "hacker" does just mean someone aproaching something in a unusual way. The way through the fields. The way never ment to be used, the way that has never been thought about. A way that may be faster and easier, but needs thinking to be accomplished.
The word itself doesn't have any qualities affected with it - thought it does get qualities in specific cases (eg. a hack in coding isn't very gladly seen, for it is hard to understand for other coders, and very hard to maintan - two attributes source-code should not have). And it is defenitely not limited to coding ot something else.

@Chronial
I don't want to deflate your ego but from Wikipedia

There aren't a lot of people in the league of Linus Torvalds. You may be a resonably knowledgable computer user. You may be a power user. But you are not a hacker. I'm a programmer (plus I could find and use the database option in foobar without any help), but I wouldn't call myself a 'hacker' because I don't have that level of technical proficiency.

Anyway, that's all off-topic.

There have been a number of 'foobar2000 is too hard' threads recently. Whilst I agree some options could be daunting to a new user (eg. What's ReplayGain? Do I use Album Gain or Track Gain? Where's the media library? The list goes on...) and that the lack of extensive documetation is a major downfall of foobar2000, Peter didn't exactly create this program for the novice. I agree that several courses of action can be taken to make the program more accesible to new users. For a start, an interface based upon columns (whether it be columns_ui or something of Peter's own design) should be standard.

As far as documentation is concerned, this is a community, so if you want documentation, jump on the foobar2000 Wiki Page or any other Wiki Page and start adding to it. People are going to have step up and contribute (thanks to those that have already put in a lot of effort).

I used foobar out of the box for almost a year. Then I stumbled across a thread with screenshots of how others had configured it, and then a link to a page where others had posted their setup strings. Then I found the columns ui plugin and a link to other people's setup files. There's really very little that I needed to do in order to get it setup in a way that both looks nice and does everything I want it to. Plus every month or so I play around with one of the options I've not used yet and learn something new.

Everything that is needed to make Foobar useful out of the box can be found on these forums or linked to from these forums and for the most part requires nothing more than some copying and pasting or downloading colums ui settings.

And to establish my level of computing proficiency, the last code I wrote was in BASIC in 1982, and my last attempt at setting up an Excel spreadsheet took someone who knew what they were doing 2 hours to fix.

Let's just end this discussion here, but remember that even Wikipedia isn't god .

An discussion about foobar beeing to hard to configure or foobar beeing to complicated doesn't make any sense at all. That's just the way foobar is - if you don't like it, foobar just isn't the right player for you.
What I am talking about is "advertising" - show potential users, what powers sleep in foobar. There should be an interesent to get the largest possible userbase, for only users write plugins, write configs, give featback and donate . If this is possible without changing the programm, there is no real need to discuss about it - it should just be done .

I am going to have to disagree here. I am a new user. I have spent probably a total of 5+ hours the past two weeks just reading the forum trying to learn how to tinker with foobar's design using columns_ui and other plug-ins and personally I find them really hard. I am not a coder and am uncomfortable adding code, changing code and dealing with code in general. However, with the download that started this flamewar, I will be able to tinker with. I like to tinker with working programs to change them to suit my needs, on a small scale, however, when I have to try and completely configure foobar it gets way to complicated for the average and slightly above average user.
By offering pre-designed packages like the aforementioned ITfoobar, one gains a better understanding of the underlyings of the program and can learn how it works better than reading a wiki on how to make it work. Sure it isn't for everybody but I know that for some people (ME!) it will provide a giant stepping stone when it comes to helping understand the workings of the product. It is like in life, some people learn by reading, some by visuals, and others by experience. I learn best when experiencing results first hand. I see something that works so I dive in and see how it works. However, when reading how it works I do not grasp the information. I see the gallery of other people's configurations and I am amazed at how wonderful they look. If there was a way that people could share their complete designs (with one easy download) with one another so that other people can tinker and personalize it, it would be a big plus.

Anyway, that is just my opinion. Once I find time I will be experiementing with that download and trying to understand how things work so hopefully I can create my own personal foobar.
-steve

In general if a program comes with a default "preset", the people who just don't want to mess with coding will never bother to change it and never learn how to configure the program then. Last I checked Winamp can do all that fine along a ton of other players. The coding and configurability is what makes foobar so great. Including a preset is pointless for most foobar users and would only encourage new users to a) not bother configuring or b) ask loads of stupid questions on the forums or c) both. Just my opinion on the matter. Also, one can always install iTunes.

After following the threads here about tutorial, preconfigured f2k and other similar discussions I unfortunately decided that although I want to use f2k, it's not a player for me...

Posts similar to the previous only discurage people who want some help...

GR8 for you, the f2k community!
I don't see any profit from it but I'm not the one to decide...

PS: Additional thinking shoud be useful, but that's not my problem...

If you go to the columns_ui page, there are many setups available for download that require no or minimal configuration. Exactly what you're looking for. All you do is download the .fcs file, back your existing one up, and then import the one you've downloaded.

EDIT: Look at the very first post in thisthread:

This is the columns_ui homepage, and this is the collection of settings (with screenshots) that other people have uploaded. There are also links to the threads that contain discussions on how to set this up.

Ok...please forgive me...I seem to be an idiot here. In what ways "should" foobar2000 be more user friendly? Please explain it for a person who has never used iTunes before... fb2k seems pretty simple to me. If you want to play tracks, just go to Playlist | Open... or Open files or Open Directory. To edit tags, just right-click on the file and left-click on Properties. Masstagging? I may just be new to audio players, but foobar made it real easy to do that, as long as you didn't grab the lite version. Highlight all files, right-click the files, then left-click masstagger, and what you want to do. Seems intuitive to me. I am completely and utterly lost.

Or maybe you're confused by the layout of the menus and plugins. If you were to ask for a big change, having foobar2000 come out with a cleaner menu interface would be what I would ask for (besides an updated web page with ALL the plugins). Besides, Winamp has a preferences menu that is similar to fb2k. It's just been used long enough that many people forced themselves to learn it.

Oh, maybe it doesn't look pretty enough. This seems to be what this whole thread is about; having an interface that appeals to you. If that's the case, don't mask it under the term "user-friendly," because no matter how it looks, it's going to work the same (unless you change the menu...). You're also going to have to exert some patience. foo_ui_gfx (foo_ui_gfx thread) looks very promising (as long as it doesn't go the way of foo_looks, which you *MAY* want to look up (foo_looks thread)), so you can either try your hand at that or wait a little bit more for skins. Just remember, even Winamp isn't all that pretty without it's advanced skins.

For future references, please explain yourself more clearly. I don't want to have to install iTunes to know what you're referring to.

Edit: Also refer back to previous post; colums_ui is NOT difficult to set up. If an fcs hasn't been created for the style you want, politely ask the person who's setup you like. Most are more than happy to help you set it up.

Edit2: Thanks to Andreasvb for reminding me about menu editing.

You can customize the main menus and the context menus in fb2k, it's under core in preferences.

You can remove, and add pretty much what you want, even functions of plugins you have.
Place separators where you want them, moving around. You can make sub menus, too.

And then you have keyboard shortcuts, globally too, if you want.


Just play around and see what you can do, you'll discover many things, trial & error =)

Edit: Make a copy of foobar2000.cfg before so you can recover if something would happen (e.g. hitting reset)

I really am an idiot. Thanks Andreasvb; I had completely forgotten about right-clicking to change the menu.

Still, of course, doesn't change the core of my rant...

This is how my right click menu looks like.

And by experimenting with other setups you've downloaded, you'll pretty soon be learning how it all works. That's how it worked for me, anyway.

Yes, overly simple. Hell man, I had FB2K installed for like a year before I found out, by chance reading here, that it had support for multiple playlists.

What the user sees on a new install is basically just a list of songs, in a simple interface. Not even a volume control. They can play songs, they can right click on them and do some tasks, and that's about it. No playlists. No library. No organization.

I don't like iTunes interface for a lot of reasons, but let me use it as an example. When I first open iTunes, I can put music in and I get something similar to fb2k, just a list of songs. One of the first things a user finds is the "Browse" button, which brings up three lists of the songs Genre, Artist, and Album. Picking one of these limits the display to that item. Organization. Playlists are self appearant on the left side of the screen. There's a item above them called Library. And so forth.

Basically, I don't need a music player. Those are a dime a dozen. Hell, Winamp solved the music player problem back in 1996, and all things added to that since then are just minor enhancements to the concept. What I do need is a music library, something to help me organize, sort, and manage my 100+ gigs of music. Foobar *can* do that, with suitable adjustments.

Take the playlists again. That sort of basic functionality is not obvious to a new user. Because of that lack of support, I initially dismissed foobar as a toy with some useful plugins and that's the only reason I kept it around. And I still use it that way only, because configuring it to do what I actually need is way, way too complicated.


I don't care how it works. I'm interested in using a program, not configuring it.

What I was referring to was not having a default "skin" or look. It is ok the way it is, very very minimalistic but it works. However for those that are interested in changing the way foobar looks. Yes, it works fine, but it is not visually appealing to begin with. My big problem has come with incorporating the numerous plugins that I wish to use and getting them to all work together because usually one will work and one will not.

I have used iTunes a few times and that was only to download free songs from the pepsi caps that I won. Other than that I currently use winamp as my main player. I want to switch to foobar because I have heard how it handles big big playlists and is very good at organizing them all. winamp blows when it comes to that and that is the main reason that I want to switch but I would like it to at least look visually appealing to me.

I guess I will just have to keep on playing with foobar and trying to get it to look the way I want it to look.

Something people need to finally realize is that skinned != visually appealing

Get a good windows theme and it'll look great, just like all your other programs

does this mean that i am not allowed to put foobar2000, all of my components, and the config file into one zip folder and give it to my friends that like the way i have it set up?

In theory, yes. But as long as you don't put it on a public website, noone is going to sue you for doing that. You should be aware that people you give it to lose uninstall ability and possibly get other issues related to different win9x/winnt binaries.
The real problem is people doing this on big scale (see above), and also providing horribly broken installers (uninstall didn't exactly work when I tried it), while they could have achieved the same by just making installer that runs our installer, overwrites config file and installs additional components, without violating license or introducing issues.

On this subject, are Case's builds violating the license or does he have permission?

He does have permission.
He also makes official installers anyway.

Cool, that's what I thought.