I've used foobar for a few days now and it's really good. I'm currently using the latest beta. I have a few suggestions. I'm not bossing anyone arond, these are just my thoughts and comments.

When people write reviews and promote your software they will certainly rate the look and feel as well as the user friently factor. An application should be perceived as professional for professional users and user friendly for new users.

--- Properties window ---
... needs to be cleaned up. The window content is to close to the top frame (more top margin please). The buttons on top of the Metadata frame is not good. Place them at the bottom in the Metadata frame and make them normal size.

Subsong index and song length info could be showed in the Other info box imo.

Replaygain does not belong in this window. I've removed my replaygain component so it shouldn't be there. Since it's a separate component it should have it's own window imo.
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--- Edit > Selection ---
How about renaming this submenu to Remove? and move appropriate items here.
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-- Edit > Search ---
Search in the Edit menu? Add it in the toolbar imo, then select items on Enter, play if only one item in result.
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--- Playback Menu ---
Could you rename Playback follows cursor and Cursor follows playback. Selection would be a better word imo. I was really confused about what this was.
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--- Library > Album List ---
Could you make this a normal window (not tool style) and rename it to Media Library. I would love it if there was a search box at the top also.
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--- Support for more file formats ---
Need support for MIDI, WMA and streaming http MP3/AAC.
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--- Colums UI ---
How about making Colums UI part of the installer. It makes the UI very flexible and more customizable. Too bad it doesn't work on the latest beta.
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--- Beta 13 ---
I've also tried beta 13, and what happened to rightclicking on the control buttons so the images could be changed, that feature is gone in beta 14. I also liked the behavior of the Volume control better in beta 13, it was a lot more smooth.
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Keep up the good work. I wouldn't mind a response on this.

Agreed. In fact the text on one of the buttons is truncated here.



Not sure what you mean with song length info, but subsong index definetly belongs in location and not in other info.



The replaygain SCANNER is a seperate component. Your files may still have replaygain info even if you don't have the scanner.



I don't think "removing" is all that its intended to do, and it's below "select all".

However, "Clear" above "Select All" could be misinterpreted easily.



Current behaviour is exactly how all other Windows applications work, and what you propose is not.



Dunno about this one :-P



The Album List is NOT the Media Library. Dunno about the window style.



Additional formats have nothing whatsoever to do with the core.

Streaming should be supported AFAIK.

The technically correct term would be focus which refers to the list item with a frame around it. The selection consists of the highlighted list items.

The problem with visual appearance is that it is highly subjected to personal preference. I am fairly certain there is no way to please everyone with a fixed style, and we will not include a dozen options to customize this window.

Actually it's the same in Word, Notepad, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc etc


Thing is, like foosion said, that the cursor / focus is not the same as the selection.


MIDI will be back as soon as kode54 gets around to updating his component, and streaming almost any and all formats the player supports via http works just fine (Including but not limited to MP3/AAC. Works for FLAC, SHN, etc too.)


After your previous usability complaints I have to wonder whether you did take a look at Columns UI configuration?


To the best of my knowledge volume control behaviour was not changed at all between beta 13 and beta 14... can you try to describe what's different? ("a lot more smooth" doesn't really tell me much)

My opinion about properties-window:

Each Copy-Button is not fitting the given buttons-size (the p gets a bit cutted/truncated).
The metadata-buttons need a shift to the left side.
The groups need a small distance (so they need to be shrinked).

The ReplayGain-Values need a bit distance to the left border.

After selecting a given metadata-value (e.g. artist) and pressing 'edit'-button, there is no focus to the metadata-value - at least the whole window has no real cursor-focus.
In my opinion the metadata-value should be selected/marked and should directly be editable.

It's not possible to select more than one metadata-field and remove them - should be possible without masstagger imo (yes, I know about the '...'-button, but that's not what I mean).

just some thoughts :-)

Thanks for all the replys.
I realize now all my suggestions might not have been so good. Thanks for explaining it to me.

I'm still not sure about the "Album list" though. It is clearly not only an album list... you can browse through all your tracks by any ID3 tag. And now in the RC you've added the Filter box, so to me it's a Media Library.

I tired the MP3/ACC streaming, and it works... yay. Sorry I said it didn't, I've should have tried first.

Ok, Search always seem to be in the Edit menu, but at least shouldn't there be a "..." after it since it brings up an additional window?


Yea, I tried this UI with the 0.8 version of Foobar. It is very good and can configure the UI to almost anyones taste.

EDIT: I have another wish I didn't bring up before. It would be cool if you could add the ability to remove Remove, Crop and the separator line when rightclicking on an item in the playlist. Since you can remove everything else, why not these 3?

Album List and Media Library are two entirely different things. The Album list is just a front end to the Media Library.

The Media Library is a backend/database that can be used by a variety of official and third party components. DBsearch, autoplaylists, etc. all come to mind as different front ends to the Media Library.

I find it perfectly usuable. Did you look at how unusable the Standard UI menu is? I will list the problems here for you.
- Click on a menu button then press the left and right keys with the mouse over the button. it does not work.
- Whilst in a submenu, and the mouse not over a button due to the above bug, it collapse the entire menu instead of the submenu only.
- Click on Help and move the mouse right. The menu collapses and does not decollapse.
- The frequently reported problem where the menu doesn't collapse when you re-click on the button after moving accross to another button.
- ESC does not exit the menu toolbar.

Default UI menu issues are well known, have been discussed several times already, and it has been said that they will be addressed but not before 0.9 final.

A small inconsistency: the Edit cuesheet dialog uses a console font for its text and buttons. Perhaps the standard font would be more appropriate?

This might clear it up for you. If you click on the seekbar anywhere but on the slider the slider will jump to the exact posision where you click and have a very smooth motion if you drag it from side to side, while if you do the same thing on the Volumebar it is very jumpy and does not behave this way at all.

I can't reproduce that on b14... it slides smoothly here... and when I click anywhere else (other then ON the slider), it jumps a little over 3db in whatever direction is appropriate...

I guess mil3s wants to have the same "slider jumps to where I press the mouse button" behaviour for the volume control.

Yes, I saw that was said about the fourth issue already, but not the others, which are separate issues. FYI the third issue is a (semi-?)recent regression. 0.8.3 doesn't even do that.

That is correct.

Thank you for compiling and posting the list, I'm still testing it but I've actually fixed most of the above for the next version.

This is trivial... but will the Edit cuesheet dialog's font be left as it currently is? It's not exactly important... just wondered.

Would it be possible that the new "lossy-to-lossy transcoding warning" had a "don't show this next time" checkbox?

totally agree with you.
Why there's no more menu editing?