foobar2000 Discussion and Customization v2

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ledge: Jun 10, 2003

The old thread was created over 4 years ago and the OP hadn't been touched in over 2 years and it was completely out of date so here is a new version.

What is foobar2000?

foobar2000 (foobar or f2k) is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform.

foobar2000 Official Website

foobar2000 Features!

code:

    *Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
    *Gapless playback.
    *Full unicode support.
    *Easily customizable user interface layout.
    *Advanced tagging capabilities.
    *Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
    *Full ReplayGain support.
    *Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
    *Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

Once upon a time upon installing f2k you would end up with something pretty horrible like this:

But since version 0.9.5 (The current version is 1.1.8) there has been a new default UI that will look something like this...

In fact on first running f2k you get a dialog to choose your layout...

And customising the layout in the default UI is pretty drat simple, so it is pretty easy to get to something that suits you. For example my layout is this...

Components
The components are really what makes f2k so fantastic. These expand the player from a good music player to incredibly powerful and A list of most of the components can be found here though there are some not listed there that can be found in the f2k 3rd party plugins forum.

Some examples of plugins that I think are pretty good are...

foo_wave_seekbar - provides seekbar functionality (seeking, position indicator) on top of a pretty image of the waveform of the currently playing song.

SimPlaylist - a replacement playlist display component that includes album art and grouping.

Facets - Media library viewer with linked lists, multiple columns, album art, statistics, and search functions. This gives iTunes like music browsing.

foo_uie_lyrics3 - Lyrics downloader and display component that supports timestamped lyrics.

But there are heaps of others covering ipod integration, podcasting, tagging, visualisation, searching, statistics, playlist management and heaps of other stuff.

Playlists

f2k is a playlist based player which means that you can have multiple playlists with different selections in them, either single albums, genres, everything in your library or pretty much anything else.

One of the most powerful features of f2k, I think, is autoplaylists. These allow you to write queries to select music from your library that will automatically update with any new music or changes to tagging. For example I have an autoplaylist called "The Usual" with the definition:

code:

(%genre% HAS Trance OR %genre% HAS Rock OR %genre% HAS Dub OR %genre% HAS Ambient 
OR %genre% HAS Electro OR %genre% HAS House OR %genre% HAS Indie OR %genre% HAS Brit 
OR %genre% HAS Leftfield OR %genre% HAS Techno OR %genre% HAS Downtempo OR %genre% HAS Pop 
OR %DISCOGS_GENRE% HAS Elec) AND NOT (%artist% IS Joy Division OR %artist% IS The Smiths 
OR %artist% IS Morrissey)

And if you have the Playback Statistics component installed you can do this...

code:

%added% DURING LAST 2 WEEKS AND NOT %path% HAS podcast

to display newly added music (that doesn't have the string 'podcast' in its path).

Title Formatting

Another important part of f2k is title formatting which is the scripting language used for displaying text (and doing other things) within the interface. For example in my sort order settings for playlists I have the following...

code:

$swapprefix(%album artist%) - $if($strstr('Various Artists',%album artist%),,%date% - )%album% - %discnumber% - %tracknumber% - %title%

Which will sort by the album artist with 'A' and 'The' ignored, then only if the album isn't a compilation by date, then by album name, discnumber, track number then title.

But that's not all title formatting can be used for, it can be used in the playlist display,

More about title formatting can be found here.

Customization and Skins

f2k doesn't really have skins as such, but that hasn't stopped people making some stunningly good looking interfaces. I used to use one of these, but eventually got to the point where the default ui with SimPlaylist and a few other components was everything I wanted and any skin just got in the way of usability.

But if this sort of thing does float your boat then probably the best place to look is on Deviant Art. Most of these skins need multiple components, so make sure you read any instructions carefully to get them working.

Also, if you run into any skins that require the panels ui component, don't bother with them as panels ui does not work with foobar 0.9.5 or later and is no longer developed.

Visualisations

f2k comes with a number of inbuilt visualisations but what you probably want is Milkdrop from WinAmp. To get this running you need foo_vis_shpeck and a MilkDrop 2.24 package for foobar.

Links

foobar2000 Official Website
foobar2000 wiki
foobar2000 forum
Title Formatting Reference
Deviant Art foobar skins
Official components repository
The old thread

Feel free to ask questions as there are a bunch of us here that are pretty knowledgeable about f2k and should be able to help you out with most issues.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2011 08:05

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 18:10

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

The Milkman posted:

Is there a way to get the total duration of an album? I'd like to add it in my SimPlaylist config.

Use %length% in the header section. Also works in Sub headers so you can have total length for multi disc albums and then individual disc lengths.

More here.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2011 21:38

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Another plugin I quite like is the Biography Viewer foo_uie_biography which does pretty much what is say on the label, displays a biography for the currently playing artist or reviews for the currently playing album.

By default it gets bios from lastfm and/or wikipedia, however you can run external scripts and scripts have been written to get bios from amg.

The two scripts are in this zip file

Save these to a scripts folder in your f2k program folder.

And below is how you set it up.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2011 22:05

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Woebin posted:

I don't know if it's the best, but the Discogs tagger component's always served me well when it comes to fetching album art.

But that is only one album at a time, unless I have missed something.

Try this...

Album Art Downloader XUI

# ¿ Oct 10, 2011 02:58

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

kode54 posted:

For the same reason that it defaults to storing play counts and dates in its own internal database. Of course, there is an option to synchronize playback statistics with file tags, but it's all or none, so you'll be getting your play counts written to the file as well. Of course, maybe you like that.

Just to add to this, the reason the playcount component doesn't update tags by default, is that the developer has decided that changing the actual file without the user agreeing first is not good practice. f2k in general will never alter your files without you specifically telling it to.

Also if you update tags on files while they are playying this can interrupt playback, particularly on large files that only have id3v1 tags as they are at the beginning of a file and rewriting them means rewrting the entire file on the disk (I believe, feel free to correct me if I am talking poo poo).

# ¿ Oct 14, 2011 01:35

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Master_Odin posted:

Is there someway to make foo_uie_lyrics3 (Lyrics Show 3) to not be useless? It can never seem to ever find lyrics(I guess all but one of the databases are down at this point?) so it never gives me lyrics. I guess, I need to manually download the lyrics at this point if I want them or what's the best option here as it seems like a neat feature, but completely impossible to use at the moment.

Apparently the fuckwit music companies are coming down on lyrics sites hard these days becuase what a disaster it would be if people could see the lyrics of the song they are listening to in text format.

Sites are either disappearing or the lyrics can't be grabbed via an API.

So it isn't that lyrics3 is useless, it's that music companies still don't have any clue in how to not piss off their customers.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2011 04:53

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

LooKMaN posted:

Is there a simple way to make my foobar look like Winamp? I like foobar but i prefer the simple Winamp look. I'd like to be able to see all tracks at once. Here's how my

Well you could do a search for "ALL" without the quotes, then make a Autoplaylist from that and that playlist would always contain all your music.

Other than that, I just played about with the scratchbox and got something reasonably similar pretty quickly. It depends what those visible playlists behave like.

It's probably important to realise that foobar doesn't have a "now playing" playlist like winamp.

I usually end up with dozens of playlists that build up over time, changing between them depending what I want to listen to or creating new ones all over the place. Lots of them are auto playlists, so are dynamic.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2011 03:48

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Red_Fred posted:

I'm giving Foobar yet another go.

Is there built in functionality to manage my music library? I want to be able to put new music into a folder and have it automatically moved to my library folder and renamed (if applicable) and put in (or make new) folders for it.

Third party component?

The move file command in foobar is pretty powerful. In the context menu it is in File Opertations -> Move to. You can then setup a title formatting script to set the file pattern you want to use and then save that and run it on new files. This will create folders and so on if they don't already exist.

I have
\%album artist% - %date% - %album%\[%discnumber% - ]%tracknumber% - %title%%fileext%

Foobar will not move files without user intervention though, so you'll have to run this manually on any new files.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2011 20:34

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

GreenBuckanneer posted:

Ah that did it, I wanted to do the inverse of this though.

Save from file to tag? Right-click, Tagging, Attach pictures, or Batch attach pictures

# ¿ Nov 28, 2011 07:27

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

metachronos posted:

My new foobar install keeps randomly crashing. It spits out this log when it does

What does this mean?

I'm no expert on foobar crash logs, but at a guess there is something up with foo_audioscrobbler, I'd remove it and try again.

edit: you seem to be using some weird old version. Why not upgrade to foobar 1.x and get the latest version http://mp3tag.de/en/fb2k.html

ledge fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 12, 2011

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 21:36

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Red_Fred posted:

Is there an easy way to get Foobar to ignore 'The'? The iPod plug-in does it by default so I hope it's not to difficult.

Where are you trying to ignore it?

You probably need to use title formatting...

$stripprefix(X) Removes �A� and �The� prefixes from X. $stripprefix(%artist%) ⇒ �The Prodigy� becomes �Prodigy�

$swapprefix(X) Moves �A� and �The� prefixes to the end of X.
$swapprefix(%artist%) ⇒ �The Prodigy� becomes �Prodigy, The�

But facets has an option to ignore leading The when sorting.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 09:34

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Red_Fred posted:

Uh, in columns UI library view. The iPod plug-in just ignores 'The' so The Prodigy is under P not T for example. That would be the best solution.

So anywhere in your columnsui library view configuration replace any occurances of %artist% with $stripprefix(%artist%) and any occurances of %album artist% with $stripprefix(%album artist%)

I don't use columns so don't know how exactly this is configured.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 23:39

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Red_Fred posted:

This isn't quite what I was after. I would like to keep the 'The'. Is that possible?

So you want to display The Prodigy but sort by Prodigy?

Set you sort order to use $stripprefix but use %artist% in your display.

Or do you want Prodigy, The? Then use $swapprefix.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2011 23:52

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

pokecapn posted:

Can it do this sort of thing with MP3 players that just show up as mass storage? I used to just manually pick and choose 40 gigs of stuff I wanted, but I've started switching over my library to FLAC, so some sort of manager would work really well.

You can just use the normal converter, just setup a preset to convert to mp3 with the output going to the drive the mp3 player shows as, you can even apply replaygain when converting so volumes aren't all screwy.

As an example...

# ¿ Jan 17, 2012 02:57

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

GreenBuckanneer posted:

If I've got some songs that show up as 0:00 in foobar and don't play and show up as 0:00 in MPC but it plays it anyways, what can I do to fix the files?

in foobar right-click on track -->Utilities-->Fix VBR MP3 header or Rebuild MP3 stream.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2012 06:55

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Shogunner posted:

It's mega frustrating too because it does sound way better than Winamp, but, gently caress if I know how to make it nice.
Help

a) It does not sound better than winamp.

b) check the first post for links to the foobar skins section on deviant art if you want a pretty interface there. There are plenty to choose from that work with foobar 1.x

# ¿ Jan 31, 2012 20:13

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

GreenBuckanneer posted:

It can sound better than winamp if you're going asio or whatever

There is literally no reason to use ASIO for a music player unless you have issues with broken sound drivers. ASIO is great for music production where low latency is important, but won't improve audio quality at all.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2012 06:57

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

TOOT BOOT posted:

How do I make foo_playcount statistics show up as columns in a playlist? I'm using Columnsui if it matters. I tried adding %play_count% as a field and nothing ever appears in that column no matter what I do. I know the statistics are being collected because the menu option works.

%play_count% works for me in sim_playlist in default ui.

Must be something you are doing wrong with how you are defining the column at a guess.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2012 06:32

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

internet inc posted:

Is there a way to make a "add to favorites playlist" button or keyboard shortcut? I've been looking around and trying to get something to work but the best I come up with is "add to playlist..." and then it asks me to chose what playlist, but that's not quick enough for my tastes.

EDIT: I know making lists is easy and I have tabs for metal/study music/whatever that I've carefully planned but I want a quick, easily-editable favorites playlist for songs I can't stop listening to lately or new songs or whatever.

Do you use ratings currently? If not you could have a shortcut/button to set the rating to 5 or something (which is possible), then create an autoplaylist for songs with a rating of 5.

# ¿ May 2, 2012 07:47

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Master_Odin posted:

What's a good replacement for iTunes "Automatically add to iTunes" folder that renames files and puts them in proper folder format and stuff. Its the one thing I miss about iTunes really is its outstanding dedication to keeping things organized if you let it as opposed to something like foobar which just doesn't care about folder structure.

You could have a folder (say d:\music\new\) where you put all your new music, then have an autoplaylist with the definition

%PATH% HAS "\music\new\"

The you can easily run a saved File Operation to move the tracks to the right place based on tags, like this

Of course the tags have to all be correct, so you probably also want to tag your tracks properly first with discogs tagger or the freedb tagger.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2012 09:28

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

chippy posted:

Anyone know why I can't change the fullscreen resolution of Milkdrop? The selection just seems to keep reverting.

If you are using Windows 7 then you have to either run foobar as Administrator, or make sure milkdrop is not in \Program Files\* as otherwise foobar doesn't have the rights to update milk2.ini which is where the settings are stored.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2012 01:58

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Yep, it just runs into a problem with albums with more than one disc. I found a few posts on the subject, but no fix. I ended up working around it by using the full path to the file.

...

So it was really two issues, one, giving it a full path to folder.jpg, and two, replacing the - so that it could display art for albums with a colon in the title. Between the two, every album now has cover art.

I had run into the same issue, where the album art wouldn't display for multi-disc albums. Ends up I had to add ../coverart.jpg to the album art search patterns on the Display preferences section and make sure that each disc was in a sub folder. For whatever reason the facets/simplaylist developer decided that he wouldn't use the current directory to search for album art.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2012 01:27

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Mak0rz posted:

Neither of the two options do what Master_Odin wants. Shuffle chooses tracks based on a seed that's selected when foobar is launched. Random picks a new seed every time a new track is played.

Essentially, shuffle just plays a playlist whose tracks were chosen randomly at launch. Random does not have a pre-determined playlist. This is why it's possible to go to previous songs and even get repeating orders in Shuffle, but not in Random.

I'd go with either mixing up the playlist and just letting it play through, or just using Shuffle with repeat off. The latter may not always work, though.

Just to clarify a bit more, in shuffle, if you manually select a track to play then after that track plays, play will continue from that tracks position in the playlist.

This means that you can hear repeated orders of tracks. The way around this is to right-click and add to playback queue. This will play the track then resume from where you were avoiding repetition.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 22:05

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

The playlist attributes plugin has the option to remove played tracks from a playlist. http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_playlist_attributes

So you could use that.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2012 01:29

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Lyrics 3 seems pretty stable for me as well. Certainly nothing out there as good.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 22:03

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

tjume posted:

Hi,
is there a plugin that lets me bookmark a position/time in a track and then let me jump to it later?

Yep.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=46612&hl=

# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 04:51

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Your best bet would be to ask the person who made the skin via the comments on deviantart.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 22:13

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Maybe this?

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=52235

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 00:17

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Panel Stack Splitter is what you are after, I believe.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 08:47

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

You probably want to be added the facets plugin which supports that layout/functionality.

You'll still need a playlist, and but facets can populate it automatically.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2012 21:21

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Did you read the first post?

# ¿ Feb 5, 2013 23:59

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Well try this page then...

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Layout_Editing_Mode

But lots of the functionality beyond just plying music is provided by components, so you need to add these (In preferences->Components then click install and find the compnent you previously downloaded.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2013 06:26

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

You need to add it as a panel in your layout.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2013 00:10

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

In Preferences under Media Library -> Album List add a new view with %ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE% in the sort order. Then select that new view in the playlist library. Or use the above tag as a column in your playlist view.

I think that answers your question.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2013 02:44

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Off the top of my head I think the facets plugin will do this. The preferences for it might allow you to create a new playlist on double click.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2013 10:22

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

The playback_statistics component can limit to added within the last x days/weeks/etc but that fails of you don't add anything for a while.

It does however give you the %date added% tag which works better as last modified gets reset if you modify tags or move or rename a file.

Random pools doesn't auto update so you'd have to recreate the play list manually all the time.

Short answer is, no you can't do that

# ¿ Mar 18, 2013 10:44

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

WASDF posted:

Anyone have foo_wave_seekbar.dll? I keep getting this message.

Read the first post in the thread for it on hydrogenaudio. It needs a specific version of a couple of things related to direct x and visual studio

# ¿ Jun 5, 2013 21:05

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Foobar doesn't really have a current playlist, the playlist that is currently active is what will be played. There is a queue, but it is hidden and normally empty, this queue allows you to, for example, add an album while you are listening to a playlist in suffle mode and foobar will play the album then return to the shuffle of the playlist without resetting it.

What you probably need to do is create a playlist called whatever you want, then you need to change the behaviour of clikcing on things in your album list or facets (depending what you use).

For album list set the Actions preferences like this:

And for facets, set the Library preferences like this:

Now when you click on an album or whatever nothing will happen, but if you double click the album will be added to the end of whatever playlist you currently have active.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2013 01:25

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

foobar supports multiple genres in the Genre field, they just have to be separated by semi-colons. Then tracks are listed under each genre in facets, so Radiohead will appear under each of those genres.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2013 08:14

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 18:10

ledge: Jun 10, 2003

Geemer posted:

Does anyone know of a way to make it so that the shuffle playback order doesn't automatically include repeat? Back when I still used Winamp these things were independent and I'm really missing it now.

There is a way to do it, create a playlist with the songs you want to play, then select all, then right click -> Sort -> Randomize then use the default playback order. Achieves the same thing. But yes having repeat and order separate would be far more sensible, no idea why this isn't done.

Also, I remember reading at some point that the playback order settings are not accessible via the API so someone couldn't even make a plugin to fix this.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2013 22:30

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