Help me with foobar2000

Hi. I've been using itunes for years now, but recently I've decided to try and get something else running on my windows machine. I've been doing some streaming on twitch, so I wanted something that I could use to control playlists and the like, and also show on screen on the stream.

I ended up deciding on foobar2000. Dunno if there are alternatives, but at this point I don't really care :D

It *is* complicated as fuck though. So far I've changed the UI around a bit, and I found a component to rip my music CDs, but I could use any help with components you like, settings, etc. I'd love something to download album art automatically, and a playlist view that I could crop a region from to show on stream, and whatever else you guys might know that would blow my mind.

Congratulations! You have chosen the king of media players! For reference, below are screenshots of my configuration. First, the Now Playing view:



The components involved are an album art viewer, text viewer, and spectrograph visualizer. I believe all three are installed by default with the program. To get album art, I am unaware of an actual Foobar plugin, but I use Album Art Downloader. It can be a bit fussy but does the job very admirably once you're used to it. As a practical matter, I like to name my album covers "front.jpg" to keep Windows from doing weird shit with them (if you call it "folder.jpg" as is the default, Windows will tend to create a bunch of useless thumbnail versions and also maybe try to embed them in the MP3 file, which is a pain in the ass).

Now, for the business side of the configuration:



This was a bit more complicated to arrange but I find it very practical. In the top left, you have the Playlist Viewer component (standard; I think that's the name of it). Beneath that is the Facets component. I believe that is standalone but available in the component repository and it's great: If you were, for instance, to click on "The Arcade Fire" in the "Artist" pane, the "Album" and "Song" panes would immediately change to show only albums and songs by the Arcade Fire. Similarly, if you were to click on "Are You Experienced?" "Artist" would change to show only Jimi Hendrix and "Song" would show only the tracks from that album. The results of whatever combination of things you click on are automatically sent to the "Facets Selection" playlist, although there is some configurability there. Really, there is configurability everywhere in Foobar.

The right side of the layout is split between the other Playlist Viewer component. (I don't remember the name, but the one to view the contents of your selected playlist rather than the list of playlists. You'll figure it out.) Beneath that is the Metadata viewer. Both of these components come built-in. Note that, to get the stars to show up as I have them, you'll have to a) have ratings encoded in your tags, b) add a column for "Rating" to your view (easy to do) and c) use the Arial Unicode MS font, which has a character for the stars. You could always display it alphanumeric or using Wingdings or whatever, but stars make sense to me.

The playlist view there is, as you can see, actually part of a tabbed interface element. The "Tools" tab has the volume slider and the button to activate Layout Editing Mode and probably some other things but I forget. The "Search" tab has one of the other media views (I think Album List or something) and a search box. With that viewer and the search, you can construct a search based on various criteria from your tags and then create autoplaylists from the results that update in real-time. I usually have autoplaylists for unrated songs, songs lacking ReplayGain information, and songs with ratings of 4 or 5.

I don't really recall at the moment what other components I typically use and I'm away from my Windows machine but I can update you later. You might as well poke around the components repository on the Foobar site and go with anything that sounds interesting. You may also want to get familiar with Foobar's titleformatting syntax, which allows you to display information in the text viewer component, construct complicated searches based on various tags, etc. There should be a tutorial on the main site.

I think it's also possible for me to upload my configuration files directly if you want to install the config and poke at it. Let me know if you're interested.

Yes please! Thanks for the awesome info, man

The components I have installed are:

Album List (foo_albumlist)
Audioscrobbler (foo_audioscrobbler) - this is used to upload info to last.fm.
CD Audio Decoder (foo_cdda)
Converter (foo_converter)
Default User Interface (foo_ui_std)
Equalizer (foo_dsp_eq)
Facets (foo_facets)
File Operations (foo_fileops) - useful for copying playlists to MP3 players, etc.
Online Tagger (foo_freedb2) - useful for looking up tag info and mass tagging albums
ReplayGain Scanner (foo_rgscan)
Standard DSP Array (foo_dsp_std)
Standard Input Array (foo_input_std)
Text Display UI Element (foo_textdisplay)
ZIP/GZIP/RAR Reader (foo_unpack)

I'm not sure which of those are standard and which I downloaded separately, but to make sure the theme works you should probably have all just to be sure. The theme is here. It's been quite a while since I tried importing themes so I'm not 100% everything will come over properly. One thing that may not is the custom column header and grouping I use to sort everything as shown (it groups songs by artist and album and sorts them in the following order: Artist -> Album -> Year, and ignores articles in alphabetizing). If things are not being sorted correctly,

- Add the following in the Pattern area in Custom grouping schemes (accessed in Preferences -> Display -> Default User Interface -> Playlist View):

Code (text):

1. %artist% - %album% '('%date%')'

- Add the following in the Pattern area in Custom columns (same menu):

Code (text):

1. $put(c,$replace($put(b,$cut(%album artist%,$put(a,$strchr(%album artist%, )))),The ,,Le ,,Les ,,La ,,Las ,,Los ,)$substr(%album artist%,$add($get(a),1),999))$iflonger(%album artist%,$len($get(c)),' ('$trim($get(b))')',) %date% %multiyear% [%album%] [%disc%] [$num($left(%tracknumber%,2),2)$num($right(%tracknumber%,$sub($len(%tracknumber%),3)),2)] $if2(%title%,%filename_ext%)

Once those are added, activate the grouping scheme by right-clicking in any of the column headers and selecting Grouping, then whatever you named that pattern. To sort by the custom scheme, click that column in the header. In the screenshot above, it's the tiny sliver next to "Pla..." that's light blue.It's possible that they fixed the ignoring articles thing but I've been copying this layout over from version to version for years. The other custom columns I use are:

- Track Fix (prevents weird tagging from making track numbers show up as 1.01 and other dumb ways):

Code (text):

1. %tracknumber%

- Play count (exactly like it sounds):

Code (text):

1. %play_count%

- Rating (same):

Code (text):

1. $repeat(★,$meta(rating))

Holy cow, I've been using this for years and I had no idea you could do all this crazy stuff with it!

Did you ever get into panels_ui? That shit was crazy. Back before they killed it, my Foobar looked like this:

Mine has always just been orange. Also now that I see how cool this can look I'm a little sad that in practice I just use the Google Play website most of the time these days.

I dunno, the attraction to foobar for me is how simple and quick it is...it's a playlist, a play button and volume slider. I mean I knew all that other functionality was available, but there are other players that have millions of features I never use.



What can I say...I'm simple guy. But it starts in about 3 ms, and it's never once crashed on me!

The developers agree with you, which is why they killed panels_ui. I'd note that Foobar starts instantaneously for me as well and the only thing that ever causes it to hang is that I store my music on a dogshit slow media drive, so it sometimes has to wait for the drive to spin up.

i <3 foobar. it isn't for everyone and i kinda like it that way. for everyone else who wants the functionality of foobar but without having to spend time to 'set it up', look at Boom.. basically an alternate edition of foobar.

This is the reason I always liked it too. I think this stuff looks really cool but the fact is I don't sit there looking at my media player while I listen to music, I play music in the background while I'm doing other things, so the the important features of a media player are that it be stable and responsive and not screw anything else up. That's why it's so cool that all of the advanced stuff in foobar is modular, though; I've always tended to use the barest of bones but I like that I have the option to add just one feature if I want to.

I'd strongly recommend Esplaylist.





NOTE: Grey components mean they're installed in the foobar2000 components directory and so probably came with foobar2000. Black components are in your user profile and so you probably installed them. This isn't always true, for example Last.fm Scrobbler will now install its component in the foobar2000 folder.

Audioscrobbler comes with the Last.fm Scrobbler

Biography View is providing the artist and album pics and info (you can disable the text, have it pull album art from Last.fm or just the local file, etc.)






This component defaults to "Specify File paths". This is dumb as shit. Make sure you change it to User Profile Folder

EsPlaylist is providing the centre piece

ReplayGain override allows you to configure whether track or album ReplayGain is used depending on whether you're using shuffle, etc.



Waveform seekbar is the waveform seekbar at the top.

I'd recommend going to the foobar2000 thread where people give screenshots of their layouts, figure out which ones you like and check out what components they used to do it and then just copy them. You can tweak from there. Oh, and start near the end of the topic otherwise you'll get a lot of broken pics.