I was just wondering why people liked foobar so much. Not that there's anything wrong with that, being a foobar addict myself .

I use foobar because it doesn't try and re-invent the wheel with its interface. It is a no-frills Win32 GUI, the way it oughtta be. The fact that you can do nifty things with title formatting helps a lot too, and I've grown to really enjoy ReplayGain, although most of the time I don't notice it too much. It's also nice that it handles clipping better than other players.

Thus, why I love it is: Interface, title formatting power, configurable.

My reasons, in addition to those listed above:

1) Support for lots of audio formats out-of-the-box.
2) Double-byte character support.
3) Very low resource usage.

I dont vote because I can only vote for one thing. I like it because:

• It's simple
  
• It's fast
  
• It's OpenSource
  
• It's free
  
• It has got a lot of nice features (Albumlist) that are easy to acess.
  
• It has got a lot of plugins
  
• It sounds very good
  
• It has got a nice Icon
  
• ...

some major pros:
- supports every format I use regularly
- awesome user interface
- high 1337ness factor :B

some Cons Of Lesser Significance™:
- no support for MIDI files yet (or did I miss something? I'd like to see this)
- no support for RealAudio (doesn't matter much)
- no seekbar/skins/visualizations *ducks* kidding!

i really wish it could takeup a lot more of my ram....

I enjoy the fact that it reads many formats and archives.

its free!

simple interface!

frequent updates!

@ssamadhi97:

It has a seekbar.... B)

The feature I praise the most? SDK.
It is excellent, elegant yet simple and gurantees that any feature I may need will be made sooner or later (or I can even made it myself).

And about buttons, seekbars... Meh... I don't need them anymore.
Although I used to be a strong advocate of adding toolbar (and still think it wouldn't hurt ) I doubt I'd use it myself. Little resource-hacker tweaks made that default "menubar buttons" fit in my foobar vision just fine, and programmable status bar with $progress() is enough replacement for seekbar (I prefer seeking with keys, just need some visualisation of seek position).

The features that could be made:
- support for some less popular (for me ) formats like wma, ra, pac, ... I'd lovely if I wouldn't have to switch to another player any time I need to play them, no matter how rarely it hapens
- display of actual bitrate not just total
- perhaps native support for DirectX plugins? Lots of them are capapble of at least 24bit processing, so quality shouldn't be an issue here..
- perhaps extend simple scripting language made for title/statusbar formatting (create commands for playback, playlist management, metadata handling and allow to attach it to various events like onFoobarStart, onFoobarClose, onTrackStart, onTrackEnd, onPlaylistInsert ...) Imagine the possibilities (!)
Edit: - and presets for DSP chains, so one can switch it faster. I hate forgetting to remove eqalizer and crosfeed after listening with headphones and switching back to speakers

You did note the "kidding" part in my post, did you?


And Messer is right, the awesome SDK is what makes foobar really shine - working with it for foo_shn was a breeze

Low resource usage.
That is the key factor for me. Well, that and the fact that Multiamp supports Foobar2000.
The other technical stuff I know nothing about. It plays, I listen, that's about it. Heh, I don't even know how to use that equalizer thing.

Hmm, I didn't think the source was available.

Unicode support.

Its the only player that correctly handles multiple text encodings such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Extended Latin (Swedish, Danish, German, Italian, etc ...).

I don't think it is. I'd love to see some of the code, though, if it's ever made public.

Am I the only one who can hear the difference in sound quality? I have a pretty mediocre sound system, but everything in fb2k sounds clearer to me in contrast to winamp.

EDIT: I luuurv the playlist features as well, and I can't think of any other programs that can digest over 6,000 mp3s in such as short amount of time.

yeah it's not and it won't be >:B
meheheheh....

and oh!
/me slaps Killmaster around with a SB AWE32 fullength ISA card..

The thing that drew me to foobar is that it fully supports unicode, both filenames and tags
a rarity

Nothing's wrong with Winamp's audio output. In fact, I believe Peter did a lot of the work on those output plugins. (But I'm not certain about that.) If you were using DirectSound out with Winamp, and now you're using Kernel Streaming or WaveOut, then it's quite likely that foobar would sound better, but that's really a problem with soundcard drivers. (Mine plays DirectSound much softer than WaveOut or kernel streaming, resulting in a much duller sound.)

simply the most advanced player i know,

- complete rg support + scanner
- advanced disk writer
- mpc, ape, flac, ogg support without bs
- non clutered (my english)
- unicode
- i can remove/change all of the info display i need...
- great gui

... iam sure there are plenty more

btw, it's been a week since the last update......Peter must be cookin sumthin good, i wonder wot it could be...... anyone know?

hmm.... then it isn't opensource...
Maybe it would have been too good.

Foobar can play my files - Winamp cannot - I require a 30 second output buffer...

What in the hell for?

There's really no difference in sound quality with winamp. Nobody can consistently ABX both players, as long as there's no additional processing to the sound signal. When they are set up the same, they sound the same.
Try reading some more on this forum so you won't fall under the evil influence of the Placebo Effect and make nonsensical statements.
Foobar is really awesome, but it's greatness lies somewhere else, again, read this forum.

Everything.

Mainly replaygain and unicode.
Also messing with tittle formatting is pretty much fun for me. Never bothered to look into it with winamp plugins, now I know how much I've missed.
I'm sure, there's more, but you get used with good stuff pretty quickly.
And in general I like the way it's being maintained.

it's more likely it would have been piss

I like the no bullshit gui.

I like the fact I can run with a 30 ms buffer and have no skips, unlike winamp which took 200 ms to stop stuttering and a bit more to not skip under load.

Whatever the structure of the code with the threads etc, dont change it, it works, and works damn well.

Some of the articafts I have had in some of my MP3s are not there in FB2000.. mainly clicks and pops. I think they are bad frames that it does a better job of covering up. The same MP3s on my hardware player in the car are chirping and blipping all over the place..

Less resource consumption, fit the definition of " Player. "

In fact, I like 2 characteristics of foobar2000 the most :
- Hi-end snd Quality;
- Resampler which compensates the snd card *Devil*, bad AC'97 SRC.

Everything.

The custom keyboard shortcuts..makes it very easy to multitask.

Just needs one thing that I use(d) in winamp BOOKMARK FUNCTION also known as favorites (got over 40k worth of tunes here)..and a simple way to keep track of my favorite tunes would be much appreciated.

The simple effective interface and keyboard navigation are what appeals to me; also like how it loads damn near instantaneously.
Also very nice how it has support for all the formats i use "out of the box" (usually NOT mp3) or thru a simple DLL file
the only real shortcoming for me - lack of a seek bar - is solved more than adequately through that 3rd party plugin.

I might as well add a complaint:

Bit Torrent seems to be able to skip it pretty easy (winamp as well). Would using the experimental kernel mode improve that?

if you mean, that foobar is skipping some parts of a song when the cpu load is temporarily VERY high (in my case: smooth scrooling of web pages in IE), kernel streaming helped for me, but it keeps crashing with a BSOD when quitting foobar.

it is?

edit:
in my haste to respond, i didn't see that several people got to you before i did. woops.

integrated tagging and replaygain are the features that personally made me switch.. using winamp now seems overly complicated for easy integrated procedures in fb2k.