The Official foobar2000 Thread

I've finally decided to give foobar2000 a try after years of using WinAMP. It's the ultimate in media player customizing. The only problem is that doing so is confusing as hell. I figure that there are other people on GFF that would like some help cuztomizing their foobar, so here's the thread.

Hopefully the GFF members will be more willing to help out with code than the people at the other forums.

Useful Links
Brother John’s foobar2000 Scripting Tutorial
columns_ui:manual
foobar2000 Manual
Hydrogen Audio foobar2000 wiki

I'm sort of in the same boat here, wanting to get rid of WinAmp since ages but never really got into foobar (or away from WinAmp, for that matter).

I've seen a few customized foobars that looked really good, but I never quite understood the components plugin system and how to do all the customizing. Besides, the official foobar site and forums aren't helpful at all, so this thread might really come in handy.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of organizing music by database and tags, so if there is a way of just keeping the feel of WinAmp and loading files by folders, be sure to let me know.

Yes! This thread is awesome. Every time I see a cool foobar setup in post your desktop I PM them asking how they did it. This thread is perfect for people to show off their foobar setups and teach people how to recreate it and other fun things in foobar. I hope something awesome comes of this. =)

To start things off, I really like this foobar appearance, but I have no idea even where to start as far as customization goes.



What components do I need? How do I install this skin?

First off, you need columns UI, which you can get here for foobar2000 0.9. Make sure to download libpng as well (you need it for custom buttons etc). All dll files that start with foo_ go in the components directory of foobar2000. The fcs (which changes the look of the playlist) is here. To use it, go file > preferences > Columns UI > Main Tab > Import and select the fcs.
I suck at writing guides so let me know if I didn't explain it well, cos i can always put together an image guide or something.

I might jump on this project is well. Still using Winamp2.9 here, so I'm gonna keep an eye out for what comes up in this thread. Great stuff so far!

Heres my attempt at an image guide: Customizing foobar2000 - Part 1.zip let me know if it helps anyone. (this is only for the playlist)

Originally Posted by Rock

To start things off, I really like this foobar appearance, but I have no idea even where to start as far as customization goes.



What components do I need? How do I install this skin?

Well, what I did was send a PM to a guy with a setup that I liked and I asked him to send me his foobar folder. I'm planning on working my way up to being able to code something similar, but a little more to my tastes.

The columns that are in that setup are awesome. They're more or less like how I want mine to end up looking like.

EDIT: Useful links in first post.

How do I use the foobar built in tagger to add an Album Artist tag? Do I need to download a Masstagger plugin?

Originally Posted by Mucknuggle

How do I use the foobar built in tagger to add an Album Artist tag? Do I need to download a Masstagger plugin?

First, you need to make sure that you installed the masstagger--only the "full" install has the masstagger.

If you have already, right clicking and bringing up the properties menu should allow you to change the ID3 tags.

(pardon bad compression) That's my current setup. I stole the formatting strings and this is my attempt to convert a 0.8.3 to a 0.9.3.1 setup.

It creates problems when I resize my window, and I don't like the borders between my panels. I should probably get prettier buttons too and tweak my formatting strings (I have a playcount section yet playcount isn't working in .9 for me)

An important thing for me (which I don't have well implemented) is differentiating between albums and singles. I like foobar because it organizes albums better than any other media player. However, when you have a mix of albums and singles things get messy.

Anyone know how to get Foobar to show the current selected album's total time? I used to be able to highlight all of the tracks with the time listed on the bottom of the screen, though, it's not working since updating to the latest version...

To do that, you just select all the tracks and right click. Select properties, and the duration will be on the second tab.

My Current setup, after a bit of copying & pasting from various configs to make it look the way I wanted it to:



I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

Originally Posted by Dalkaen

To do that, you just select all the tracks and right click. Select properties, and the duration will be on the second tab.

That's kind of a hassle, it used to show up without cklicking anything. That said, thanks for letting me know. Was starting to scratch my head as to where it could be...

Does anyone know how one can enable the media library to ignore the word "the" at the beginning of album titles? In other words, how can you make the media library use proper alphabetization?

Quote:

Anyone know how to get Foobar to show the current selected album's total time? I used to be able to highlight all of the tracks with the time listed on the bottom of the screen, though, it's not working since updating to the latest version...

Are you using columns UI? If you are go to file -> preferences -> Columns UI -> Status Bar/Systray

The last check box, "Show selected tracks total length, accurate to either 1,2 or 3 decimal places".

When my visual style reports compression, it bases the percentage by bitrate / 1411.2kbps, but not all audio streams uncompressed do this. I was wondering if I could make it work more like this:
bitrate / (samplerate * number of channels * bitdepth (for lossy codecs have it just assume 16 for this value). So for example for 22050Hz 16bit Stereo it'd use ~705kbps for the compression calcualtion as opposed to 1411.2kbps. And for AC3 files it'd use something like 48000 * 6 * 16.

Anyone know the proper syntax for this?

Here's line of text as seen in my trackinfo column:

$get(head)Compression: $get(info)$div(1411,%__bitrate%).$substr($muldiv(1 411,100,%__bitrate%),2,3):1 '('$get(info)$muldiv(%__bitrate%,100,1411)$get(ann o)'% of original quality)'$char(10)

I've more or less given up on playing around with foobar ATM. I simply don't have the time required to read through all of the tutorials to get it to look the way that I want. It's a really great program though and I'm hoping to be able to use it.

Anybody want to share set ups that they found particularly good? I need some more inspiration in order to design the "perfect" foobar for myself. Oh,