Foobar2000

Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery (mostly through piracy forums) for me in my teens, used to spend hours upon hours customising it and posting the results on Hydrogen Audio while weird and wonderful music was downloading from yousendit, rapidshare, soulseek, and megaupload. Bands I now go see live and support through bandcamp now that I&#x27;m not poor!<p>So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.<p>Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I&#x27;d recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cog.losno.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cog.losno.co&#x2F;</a>

I remember writing a Foobar2000 plugin to emulate the Winamp API so my mIRC song spam scripts still functioned. It was buggy as hell as I was still new to C++ programming and it eventually got added to a hard-coded blacklist in the app for causing stability issues.<p>I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!

I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp&#x27;s. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable &quot;Genre&quot;&#x2F;&quot;Year&quot;&#x2F;... as well but I rarely did).<p>So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.<p>All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don&#x27;t know what I am going to do, I am <i>browsing</i>. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don&#x27;t want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.<p>I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by &quot;Artist &#x2F; Album&quot; or &quot;Album&quot; or &quot;Style&quot; <i>upfront</i>. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick &quot;Artist &#x2F; Album&quot; and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an &quot;all tracks&quot; button, even if there&#x27;s two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...<p>[edit: screenshot to show what I mean: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ipnUiY4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ipnUiY4</a>]

Ah yes, foobar2000 and IrfanView. The 2 tools that I&#x27;ll likely never replace.<p>Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day.<p>Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it&#x27;s safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It&#x27;s hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I&#x27;m pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.

Found foobar2000 in 2005 when I wanted a lightweight music player to play heavy metal while I played Counter-Strike Source.<p>17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I&#x27;ve gone through maybe 6 different UIs&#x2F;skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of &quot;return to form&quot; [0].<p>I&#x27;ve since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.vgy.me&#x2F;Bwv7Eq.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.vgy.me&#x2F;Bwv7Eq.png</a>

I didn&#x27;t use it, but it looks to me like one of the main draws of foobar2000 was library&#x2F;metadata management. I&#x27;ve only ever used directories in the filesystem as a &quot;library,&quot; and have used many players over the years (mainly moc, which I love, but which doesn&#x27;t bring anything especially valuable to the table--I mainly just like the UI and out-of-box key commands).<p>Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software&#x2F;vendor lock-in.

I spent hours and hours customizing Foobar2000 and maintaining my library. At some point my database file was lost, and shortly after that I subscribed to Spotify. I wish I still had the time, because it was the best music player ever, and Spotify is really bad in every way other than cost.

Finally a chance to remind a captive music-piracy-nostalgic audience that Soulseek is still alive and well!

foobar2k + soulseek was a heady combination. one abiding memory was how fragmented the components for fbk2 were and how you had to search through the hydrogen audio forums for updates and they often got abandoned&#x2F;picked up by someone else, and the forum community was incredibly unwelcoming!<p>even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i&#x27;d love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.

Love that this page is stuck in time with Rammstein - Mutter.<p>I remember using FooBar simply because my system had so little RAM, iTunes was off the table.

When I moved to Ubuntu, I installed Wine just for Foobar2000. Eventually moved to DeadBeef, but I&#x27;m thankful to have used Foobar2000. Having a shuffled playlist that stays in that order was enough of a draw for me and the lightweight usage was just a bonus (compared to say itunes).

I frequently use foobar2000 on Linux just because of the Discogs Tagger plugin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;components&#x2F;view&#x2F;foo_discogs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;components&#x2F;view&#x2F;foo_discogs</a> The other great feature is a very nice spectrogram which helps me to easily spot tracks which were converted from a lossy format to a lossless one. I wish the source code was open sourced so that a Linux port could be made without the need to run it via Wine.

My music player for the last 2 decades.

Fond memories of What.cd, waffles.fm amongst others.<p>I remember 12 years ago trying to get 30 or so FLAC albums into Foobar on a windows laptop I was taking with me on holiday. In order to display them as one collection the only obvious way to do this was to create individual playlists of each album and I think group them. When I shut my machine down I had the habit of using Ctrl+w to close everything but Foobar took this instruction as close and delete the playlist. When I revisited the app my library was empty. Back then I did not have the patience to rice Foobar up or explore the display configurations so that&#x27;s where I gave up on Flac playback on a temp win machine.<p>For OSX I was a big fan of the original incarnation of Vox and bought a Swinsian license which is still my primary music player. I hope with the cli app resurgence we get something that improves on Cmus as I have a lot of 24&#x2F;96 Flac that isn&#x27;t supported and would love to have something run near seamless in Linux.<p>Props to all those sticking with winamp or playing .mod files

If it wasn&#x27;t for Foobar2000, I would&#x27;ve stayed with Winamp. It&#x27;s so small, yet so configurable and extendable, that I still consider it the best music player for windows. Also I wished that they had foobar2000 on the Mac, which would replace my dependence on iTunes.

Kinda strange to see all of the &quot;OMG I remember this.. &quot;.<p>Foobar2000 is still what I use to listen to my FLAC collection while on my desktop computers.<p>It&#x27;s ability to let you do everything, rename, transcode, copy, tag, replaygain, etc is a throwback to when software respected your personal agency.

I like Quodlibet, but I had to switch to Foobar2000 in my working laptop (Win10) because some library wasn&#x27;t working properly.<p>On my personal laptop (PCLinuxOS), Quodlibet is working fine.<p>Both audio players are pretty bare bones until you start to customize them with their add-ons.

I&#x27;ve been using foobar2000 since the 90s. It plays music effortlessly, but I also love the extensive tagging and ripping functionality. Another plus is its interface skinning flexibility. There are recently made &quot;modern&quot; looking themes if that&#x27;s your thing. I&#x27;m currently using Georgia[0].<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kbuffington&#x2F;Georgia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kbuffington&#x2F;Georgia</a>

Good player, too bad i&#x27;ve given up on dreaming for a linux version.(Yes i know it &#x27;works&#x27; under wine [which is what the snap version is based on])

Foobar2000 and its plugin system always impressed me. Another piece of software from that era that had a similar plugin system was Miranda[1].<p>Their speed, small size, and customization with drop-in (like, literally drop a plugin into a folder) plugins has been a standard I try to meet with my own projects.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Miranda_IM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Miranda_IM</a>

Customization still makes this a must for me. It&#x27;s cool to have tree-view playlists that can link to youtube, or whatever else. You also don&#x27;t need to uncompress your zip&#x2F;rar archives to create playlists from them - which isn&#x27;t very common, most other players won&#x27;t allow you to play consecutive tracks from a compressed archive. Saves space and that&#x27;s how I always liked organizing albums.

I like and use Winamp more (mostly out of inertia and the UI), but I&#x27;ll reach for Foobar2000 when I need to tag or convert a lot of files.

I spent many teenage years looking for a GTK Foobar2000 replacement for my Compiz&#x2F;Gnome desktop. Finally settled on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gmusicbrowser.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gmusicbrowser.org&#x2F;</a> For large music libraries, UX on Gmusicbrowser was awesome. Wish newer GTK music players would take cues or I could find something similar.

I used to play all my music using Billy [0]. It&#x27;s very simple player, just a window with list of files to play. Until today I still see my sister is using it, while I have been spotify user for ages.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheepfriends.com&#x2F;index-page=billy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheepfriends.com&#x2F;index-page=billy.html</a>

Ah, Foobar2000. I loved using it back in Windows days. It works great, and supports a whole lot of music formats. I recommend it.

Ugh, I almost got detention in middle school because of this app. I was talking about it and the teacher overheard me, thought I was saying FUBAR. He pulled me into the hall and started chewing me out, and I had to be like &quot;No, it&#x27;s my music player.&quot;<p>I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.

This is by far the best music player I&#x27;ve ever used, and I tried a bunch of them (on Windows, macOS, and Linux). I would love to go back to foobar2000 again, and I hope to someday. And while I hate Spotify with passion, I do see the practicality of streaming services like that.

Question: How do you make Foobar2000 keep playing music when you close the lid of your laptop &#x2F; turn off the screen on your tablet under Windows 10?<p>I&#x27;ve tried the suggested steps in the Foobar2000 FAQ on this (enable an always play feature) but playback still stops for me.

I love foobar. Are there any alternative programs that are similar to Foobar2000 on Linux?

I loved Foobar2000 back in my Windows days. iTunes just wasn&#x27;t as fun an experience.

Foobar2000 and TotalCommander are the only pieces of software I ever regretted moving from the Windows ecosystem. Nothing I found on other platforms came even close to the level of functionality they provide for their respective classes.

My old fb2k - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;WVt3oCU.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;WVt3oCU.png</a>. Loved it dearly before Spotify became a thing... Soulseek -&gt; MusicBrainz -&gt; Foobar2000.

I used to use Foobar2000 back in the day. Tried to set it up on my gaming PC last year, but I didn&#x27;t really have a clue as to how to set it up properly. Ended up just setting up Plex and Plexamp instead.

Foobar2000 has a special place in my heart. Back on an old 486 120MHz machine, WinAmp was too heavyweight to play MP3 files smoothly, but Foobar2000 had no issues.

I use foobar every day for playing streaming radio stations.

Anyone know why there&#x27;s never been a linux version?

Related: Does anyone have contact info for any of the foobar2000 folks? I&#x27;d love to get a portable package up on PortableApps.com.

I still use foobar2000 on my Windows system, and still regularly update it. But once Winamp is alive again, I might change my mind...

&quot;Foobar2000 can do anything.. except a real dark mode&quot; - my friend (I&#x27;ve been hearing about this for years)

It’s nice to see this come up. This was my go to on Windows for many years until I switched to MacOS

<p><pre><code> I switched to FooBar2000 shortly after it was started. IIRC it was mentioned in a &#x2F;. thread and I enjoyed it right away. At this stage the available extensions were almost non-existent but the framework for depth &amp; breath was there and looked promising. It was also one of my favorite interactions with contact directly with the programmer. At the time, there was some conflict in the forums with the developer about the distinction between &quot;shuffle&quot;, and &quot;random&quot;. Whenever you played songs from your playlist with &#x27;Random&#x27; selected the same songs would play in the same order. I&#x27;d have a playlist containing over 100 songs and (for example) it would always play: 13, 72, 55, 31, 85, etc... until eventually restarted that order (without playing all songs in the playlist). The developer insisted the play order was random and he wouldn&#x27;t fix it. He claimed that people were looking for a &#x27;shuffle&#x27; feature and they refused to create one. The interaction always reminded me of this strip: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;221&#x2F; </code></pre> Not long afterwards, I discovered Amarok from the KDE v3.5 days and stopped caring about Windows audio players.

Foobar is my favorite Android music player. The UI is excellent and it&#x27;s very fast.

Foobar2000 was by far the best player I&#x27;ve used on Windows

Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.

Why don&#x27;t they just release foobar 2022? (Or outsource naming to Microsoft?)