I'm going to blow the dust off my old hobby of programming, because there are some specialized functions that I want to implement into foobar2000. Historically, I had written some Perl scripts to deal with MP3s, and I'd like to implement that functionality into foobar2000 somehow. It would probably make my scripts much more useful to other people, and I could use the interface of foobar2000 that way.

Mostly, I want to create a script to do specialized filtering of potentially duplicate songs from a very large playlist, to clean up collections of music so that there is no redundancy. I want to create one to fix artist names if they are in "Lastname, Firstname" format, and I also want to create a script to export the playlist information to a CSV textfile so that I can print it out.

Basically, I have no idea where to start, and was wondering where I can start in terms of learning how to program DLLs for foobar2000. I presume that the best environment to use would be the latest version of .NET visual studio 2005 would be good, and that I'd have to use Visual C++, specifically.

Also, considering the projects that I want to do, is there any freely available source code that would serve as a guide for how I could write programs such as the ones I have in mind?

Thanks for anything you have to offer!

Take a look at this:
Click here for Tutorials

That should help. Thanks klez!

Thanks goes to Foosion for writing this Tutorial. Ive just posted the Link

I really don't konw how to use this Tutorials

I compiled it but nothing happened....

I want to know how can i get the directly graphic solution thank you....

Hi, it seems to me that the sort of task you wish to perform is more suited to a script than to a full-on C++ component, before you begin you might want to take a look foosion's foo_comserver, which can be found on this board somewhere.

Although it is not yet complete, and it will not let you modify the library, or playlists, the CSV export would be possible, with just a few lines of script. Also, you can use almost any language with the COMServer, even perl if you wish (with ActivePerl installed).

Edit: and of course you can always urge foosion to add more functionality to his component. For the time being coding your own component is probably the best way to achieve what you want to do, but it will be a very specialised component of interest only to a few people, which really does not justify the amount of work that a plugin requires, especially with testing and stability (a crash will bring down the whole of foobar). I hope that in future the comserver will make such specialised tasks alot easier.