I think foobar is missing a good helpfunction. Many other programs have a helpfile in which you can search for terms, but also has chapters with all features in it. (for example: Windows Media Player Help)

The support for native functions of foobar and many components is splintered across wiki's, webpages and this forum. I see also many topics returning with the same questions over and over, but they are not added to the FAQ (now for example, questions about listing recent added files have about 10 topics of their own).

I believe the goal of foobar is usability, and a helpfunction like WMP's is very common for programs. New users could find that easily. Default in windows is that it is accesible by pressing F1. Foobar should have that too.

A helpsystem like that could be developed outside of foobar's SDK i think? I, for example, would really like to contribute to such a helpfile, and I think others too (i see some people always taking the effort answering questions here on this forum). Maybe its also possible for componentdevelopers to automatically hook into that helpfile and add chapters to it when the component is installed.

(don't know for sure, but those files are .chm files, don't really know how it works, but it looks like a database or something...)

There is already a wiki set up:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...2000:Foobar2000

It has a few specific guides on it already, but maybe that could be expanded into a more comprehensive guide and linked to from the help menu in foobar.

You can contribute to the wiki yourself, but you need to send a PM to get edit access. Since I only read the fb2k section of the HA forums, it took me a while to find out about that.

I think repeated questions is easily fixable with an FAQ as you mentioned, but another problem is undocumented features. I had no idea that "%%" was usable in the Automatically Fill Values window until Frank Bicking mentioned it only a month ago. It's unclear whether it's a recent addition or if it's been there forever -- it's certainly not a self-evident feature, to me. Same goes for $directory_path(). Same goes for the ALL keyword that doesn't appear in the official query syntax helpfile.

The main idea in this is that new users should have easy acces to helpfunctions, especially the main features of foobar, with some examples how to use it.

I use foobar for more then a year now, just recently found out how autoplaylists work, just found out about %% indeed, and discovered the fileoperations move after 9 months, shortly after I renamed all my musicfolders and stuff by hand (go figure, that took me days...).

The forum and wiki are mostly questions and guides to more complex things, so for more advanced users or experienced users. The standard fileoperations, how and where to use titleformatting in playlists etc, how to use that basically is not documented very well.

The power of foobar is imho too much hidden for new users, as some features are easily looked over at. A normal help file in a normal place would be a great chance to adress a broader public.

And no offence to the wiki-authors, but the wiki is kinda complex i think, as it is adressing to all kind of components. It's easy to get lost there, and not easy to find answers to simple questions. This is not only my opinion, but hear this a lot, also in the dutch foobar community on gathering.tweakers.net. Also there obvious things get asked a lot.

(not to mention the questions about more difficult stuff, like columns ui titleformatting, or worse panels ui formatting. )

If you could compile a list of questions being asked really frequently, I could expand the unofficial FAQ to incorporate answers to these questions.

Hmm, didn't know about that unofficial FAQ...

I have a .chm compiler (freeware from Microsoft) gonna play with that a little...

I want to copy text from (un-)official FAQ pages and wiki's. In the end I maybe want to publish the .chm file somewhere. Can that be done without doing something wrong in a copyrighted way?

A .chm has another advantage by the way. It's easy to maintain when all is there (only changes in features when new builds come need to be added) and it could be translated easy enough.

edit:
It's easy to build it. just tested some things (chapters and some content, compiled it, and yay, it works... Type %added% and it finds all chapters with %added%... Better then google/wikisearch/forumsearch because the searchwindow is a lot smaller and it won't find long threads!)


Here is an example from a 10 minutes work of copy and paste(don't count the hour searching for good freeware .chm-creater...)

Since the content is available under the GNU FDL, copy pasting it shouldn't be a problem. The problem, however, is that foobar changes so fast that creating a help file would be a big problem (Bachi's excellent guide, which was created not so long ago is already in need of dire updating, I know that a lot of the stuff that I've added to the wiki are now obsolete).

Foobar2000 does have a help system: "help" buttons in Preferences and now (0.9.5.4) also in the Properties dialog open relevant HA Wiki pages. Unfortunately, quality of user contributions there has been questionable so far, almost like the whole feature has gone unnoticed.

I'm rebuilding my website (manual for foobar2000) :
http://eolindel.free.fr/foobar2000/

(several pages are not "upgraded" yet)

But on this website, there is a masstagger tutorial (new and rebuilt but not up to date yet). I'm going to rebuild my step by step part too ( which looks like that currently : http://eolindel.free.fr/foobar0.9/steps.php ).

But as I'm currently on a eee laptop running under linux, There are some things that changed with the major rebuilding of fb2k and it's default user interface that I can't update as I'm not able to run foobar smoothly on it.

Moreover, I did a rather (but outdated) extended FAQ here: http://eolindel.free.fr/foobar0.9/FAQ.php .


To sum it up, my website has some outdated pages but is still a good starting point to explore the possibilities given by foobar2000.

I know that there was a plugin pointing to my website as well as the wik and the official FAQ some time ago.

About the wiki, I already expressed my opinion about it but:
-navigation and ergonomy are completely missing
-information is completely mixed up : there are pages about 0.8.3 version along with pages about 0.9.5 version while things changed a lot
-information is often really poor or outdated
-only very few members are contributing with their best will but it's such a mess that the tend to get desperate after a while (or they just don't have anymore interest into contributing to it)

But on the other hand :
-everyone can contribute and correct mistakes (and it's a big plus as well as a problem)
-there are pages which are crucial (especially the page listing all plugins and the one with the titleformat functions)

About my website :
-Information is fairly outdated (but goes back only to the first 0.9 versions)
-Being the only one to maintain it is quite boring, and I don't always have time to go through HA forums to update everything (I didn't touch my website for nearly two years until some weeks ago)
-The pace of plugin creation is too fast to stick to the most recent ones especially as I'm alone to write pages on my website (by definition..)

But on the other hand:
-Being the only one to maintain my website creates a unity : I know exactly which pages are available and what is said on them, the style and description is common to every pages, and it's a quite important aspect when you deal with documentation I think
-Navigation and ergonomy are fairly better than on the wiki (especially on my "new" website with the section "related pages" at the end of each page)

The really big good great thing would be to have a sourceforge like platform for plugin developers mixed with a wiki like system (with rights to have access to pages and modifiy them only to very selected people). I already thought about that but for the moment, my PHP/MySQL skills are not sufficient to be able to create such a platform. The matter has already been discussed some time ago but the project never saw life : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=43194 )

But it requires to have internet, I know it's not very problematic these days, but it's still a problem. A documentation in .chm or a local website in a sub folder would solve it

I overlooked the helpfunction in preferences, never saw it... (how is that possible...). there is a disadvantage in this use of helpbuttons. In foobar there is no way to ask a question about something. First I need to load the wiki, maybe a total irrelevant page and then search for it. Or I need to find the foobarforums here on hydrogenaudio and ask my question.

Say for example I have a question about finding recent added files. Which helpbutton should I pick in foobars preferences? there is one for every preferencepage, but as a newby, I wouldn't know where in preferences to look. So I click a random Helpbutton, and it brings me to the wiki. Can't find anything about added files on the page it loaded, so I type in the search on wiki "find recent added files". It has one hit, the unofficial FAQ, but that has 50 chapters on its own. I just want to know about adding recent files and get an overload of info. That scares me coz I am a newb, i give up and start WMP.

.CHM files have the advantage that searches for keywords load only the relevant text with hits, not a whole page with text about everything. It's fast, its easy, it's small and it's portable.

The .chm can grow along with foobar releases. If there is a 0.9.4.3. chm file shipped with foobar 0.9.4.3 then all the information can be specific for that version. Just upgrade/add/delete and let the .chm grow with foobarupgrades. Give the .chm files their versionnumber too, corresponding with the foobarversion it is shipped with.

Say the .chm contains only info about corefeatures, and some official components, like playcount, facets and database search, then it stays small and easy to maintain. Every beta is about 2 to 5 functions extra, so it wouldn't be that much of work.

The best way a .chm file works is a program that deeplinks into it, pressing F1 in preferences > Medialibrary > loads the relevant chapter (like the helpbuttons in preferences).

I am gonna start with it. If people want to help, great, maybe we can do a projectlike thing with googlewrite or something. Write together on a document (or copy/pasting it, and put all chapters and text in a .chm file and publish it here on hydrogen to ship with new foobars. Default UI only ofcourse... PM me if interested...