There was a component that allowed you to play music files directly from archives. It used to be available on the foobar homepage but it seems to be gone. Is it just being updated or is it gone for good from the official list? If that is the case can anybody point me somewhere where I can get the old one?

It's one of the optional features in the installer available at 'Optional features > Tools > Archive reader'.

Yea thank you I just noticed that I could add archives without any additional component. I think it was on the page for foobar 0.8.x. I suppose I installed it by incident.