Foobar2000, Musical Software

So many choices, it’s beautiful, n’est-ce pas?

iTunes currently has huge market share for Software-based Music Managers. There’s also some other major players like: SongBird, MediaMonkey, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player.

Today I’d like to focus on an extremely creative, beautiful, and classy music player called FooBar2000.

More Screens Here.

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Foobar2000 Background

Foobar2000 is developed mainly by Peter Pawlowski, who initially worked for Nullsoft on WinAmp.

From Wikipedia:

It is known for its highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to do such things as completely replace the interface. While supporting a large number of audio file formats, it has many features for metadata support and file organization, and it has a converter interface for use with command line encoders. To maximize the audio fidelity of consumer-grade equipment, it provides noise shaping and dithering.

Basically, it rocks.

It’s slick, heavily customizable from novice to advanced, and has incredible sound-fidelity with a tiny CPU footprint.

It’s loaded with features, and any that it’s missing can be added from community developed-plugins.

It is theme-able and customizable, and you can get amazingly sweet themes from places like this: GUIStyles.com

And this: DeviantArt – Foobar Section

The theme I use right now is called FooVert 1.4, and I LOVE IT. It works with the latest version of Foobar2000 (0.9.6.9 – although version 1.0 will release shortly). It is absolutely fantastic. I’ve made a couple additions to it like I added an updated rating star system and a IPhone like CoverFlow Selection System.

FooVert features:

-A custom status bar, that displays codec profiles, mp3 stereo mode, file size and ReplayGain info.
-Custom window titles.
-Custom "Album Artist" Album list views.
-Custom "Album Artist" NG group.
-Custom columns for Album layout.
-"Disc. Track number" column displays discnumber if a album has more then 1 disc (Album layout only).
-Album, Singles and ABX layouts.
-and much more

FooVert was initially created by PicMixer, and modded by others. It’s sexy.

I have a large music collection, and one of the most creative features I love about this particular FooBar2000 theme, is the Album/Singles views. Sometimes I make playlists of all my albums, or my favourite albums, and foobar displays those beautifully with album art and tracklistings.

Sometimes I create a mix-list of singles, and I don’t want Foobar to display all the album covers for every song, so I add a "-s-" at the end of my playlist name and it switches to Singles view. So hot.

Foobar is known in audio circles for it’s extremely high MP3 sound-quality and fidelity. It also heavily pioneered volume/gain -equalization, which is the automatic or manual levelling of all the different volumes of your MP3 collection.

I also love that the FooVert theme displays ratings of songs, and allows easy sorting by rating, style, and mood (if your mp3s are organized and tagged properly with that info.)

One more thing I’ve added is a kareoke-style lyrics-displayer. (I love singing )

My current Foobar (w/ Foovert) has Lyrics, Ratings, AlbumView, SinglesView, ReplayGain, Gapless Playback, Amazing MP3 Tagging, and tons of custom keyboard shortcuts so I can instant-rate, crossfade, volume control, etc.

It’s slick, minimal, beautiful, and hyper-functional. It has all my favourite features and none of the one’s that I feel are un-needed. It’s a beautiful co-creation between the maker of Foobar (Peter Pawlowski), the maker of FooVert (PicMixer), and… me!

So now that I’ve gone on and on about it…

Do you want Foobar? PicMixer’s FooVert Theme? A place to go to learn more about customizing your own sexy, perfect, music player?

Consider it done.

Foobar Basic – Novice

If you just want Foobar2000 get the latest stable release, or try the sexy new beta with cutting edge features and possible bugs.
Foobar2000 Stable | Foobar2000 Beta

Installing it is fairly straightfoward. Download, run the file, and follow the instructions. I always recommend reading the setup choices/instructions, but If you’re confused, just answer yes to the defaults without reading

Foobar w/ Theme – Intermediate

Here’s all the customized addons + themes. If there’s any .dll files needed/included, all you have to do is download them and make sure they get into your folder -

C:\Program Files\Foobar2000\components ( or C:\Program Files (x86)\Foobar2000\components if on a 64bit Operating System like XP64)

If you want Foobar with Foovert Theme, try these
Foobar2000 0.9.6.9 | FooVert 1.4 | foo_albumlist.dll

1. Installation is fairly simple, install foobar2000 as above.
2. Then UnZip/UnCompress the foovert_1.4.zip file into C:\Program Files\Foobar2000 (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Foobar2000)
3. Then, when you first run Foobar2000…
Open foobar2000 and it should ask you what interface to use — SELECT Columns UI interface.
4. Then go to File > Preferences > Columns UI > Main (Tab)
and then click on Import, which will now enable you to brower for the .fcl file. Choose foovert.fcl.
5. After the foovert.fcl theme is loaded, you will need to add an NG Group. This can be done by going to
File > Preferences > Display > Columns UI > Playlist View, then click on the Grouping and
replace the format with this (copy the line I’ve written below, and replace whatever is in Foobar’s Grouping) — but don’t hit enter/ok and close the dialog box:

$if2(%album artist%,Unknown Artist) - ['['%date%']'  ]$if2($replace(%album%,' (',$rgb(109,109,109)' (',')',')'$rgb(),'  [',$rgb(109,109,109)' [',']',']'$rgb()),Untitled Album)

In that same dialog also set the Playlist Filters to "Show only on playlists" and the fill the filter box with this:

*single*;*shuffle*;*-s-*;*-abx-*;*--hidden--*

This is to make sure the sexy album list only shows up when you’re viewing an Albums Playlist. (Remember, if you want a playlist to be singles, just right-click the playlist name, and add a " -s-" on the end of it.)

FooVert Customized – Advanced

If you want my fully customized Foobar/FooVert Expanded combo, pickup:
Foobar2000 0.9.6.9 | FooVert 1.4 | foo_uie_lyrics.dll | foo_masstag.dll | foo_albumlist.dll | foo_bubble_coverflow.dll
*note, these are all the precise versions that work with my setup, there may be updated/upgraded versions that also work but I don’t recommend trying them for a easy setup experience.

To install, repeat the steps for the foobar/theme above, making sure the extra .dll files are placed into the C:\Program Files\foobar2000\components folder, and when done with all those steps, add the ratings scripts (see below steps.)

Make sure your ColumnsUI Layout looks like this:

And make sure Show Caption is not checked for any item.

1. Goto Columns_UI preferences -> Playlist View -> Columns and make sure the ‘Ratings’ column is hilighted/selected.
2. In the right pane there are some tabs (Options, Scripts)… Choose the Scripts Tab, and then look at the Display Tab beneath it.
3. Replace whatever is in the display tab, with this:

$if(%rating%,$repeat(●,%rating%),o)

4. Next right click on any song in your playlist, and select "Tagging > Manage Scripts"
5.
Here you need to add 5 seperate scripts for ratings 1 to 5.

Under "Actions To Perform" Click Add, it pops up a menu. From the menu choose "Set Value"
Under "Field Name" type "RATING"
Under "Field Value" type "1", click OK to close the dialog.
Now in the Scripts section, type "Rate 1" and click the Save Button.
Ta Da, you’ve created your first rating script!

Repeat this for the other four, replacing the number 1, with 2, 3, 4, etc.

Now you can either set ratings by right clicking a song, and choosing "Tagging -> Scripts -> Rate X" or as I prefer, I set up Global Hotkey keyboard shortcuts for each script so I can rate the song currently playing by pressing "Alt+Ctrl+1" -> "Alt+Ctrl+5", executing scripts "Rate 1" -> "Rate 5"

Regarding the Global Hotkeys, when you are setting the hotkey in the Foobar2000 Preferences, if you set the hotkey for the script under the ‘[context]‘ menu, then it will rate whichever song you have currently highlighted even if it is not playing.

If you set the hotkey for the script under the ‘[context / now playing]‘ menu, then it will rate the song playing even if you have a different song highlighted.

This image may help clarify.

Album Art?

A hot-topic for foobar2000 is how to get it reading and displaying album art, the short answer is… For any Album in a folder on your computer, make sure there is a .jpg image of the album cover in there — and make sure it’s named "folder.jpg"

Conclusion

Lastly…

Go to Hydrogen Audio Foobar Forums to learn all about Foobar2000 and Customizing it.

So there you have it, beautiful praise for a beautiful piece of software, that I feel will enrich your music playing experience and can be customized to suit whatever style you use for your media.

Foobar is amazing, blazing fast, and the documentation on the net is massive and diverse (and also organized a little more smoothly in this post,) and hopefully it helps

Keep Rockin’.

Jason helps you successfully bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to be, using his clarity & insight to help you rise in all areas. He speaks, writes, and offers success-coaching at http://RyzeOnline.com. He’s been featured on Firepole Marketing, Building Digital Empires, PuttyLike and IntuitiveSoul Radio. Follow him at @jasonfonceca.