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.

http://img328.imageshack.us/img328/8...r7kujk8.th.jpg

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: Attachment 9987 let me know if it helps anyone. (this is only for the playlist)
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4...ujk8rm4.th.jpg

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?

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.

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/4...tjpgec5.th.jpg

(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:

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/1229/myfoohx3.th.png

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

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? :p

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, and is there a version of this program for Mac OS X?

Well, in order to "use" foobar, you don't really have to go through and learn all the scripting, as it's quite more than functional on it's own. Hell, I just use a set of display preferences that I copied off the internet that displays everything in an album view. And this is just the default UI, no fucking around with ColumnsUI whatsoever.

After having to reformat my computer, I've decided to move on to more "leaner" applications, moving from Winamp 5 to foobar2000 0.9. After getting the "essential" plugins (Last.FM, AMIP, Convolver, etc.) and adjusting to the differences in the UI from 0.8, I'm pretty content. Then again, it doesn't matter what I use to play my music, as long as it's playing my music.

I could always post my foobar2000 config so you can immediately have my settings (with some customization needed of course). I modified the first theme shown on this thread and made the color theme more like my ever favorite fb2k dynamic theme.

http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/627...ynamic2cf4.png

Yeah, please do that. I like that theme a lot.

Here's a stripped down version, if it doesn't work, I'll just show you what I did. All the components should be there along with the buttons.

KAPOW

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3...obaric6.th.png

Thinking of changing the arrows to something a little less trendy...

That looks absolutely sweet. What's the name of that song display component on the top? And how did you customize the playlist to look so damn good?

The song display panel could just simply be a Track Info panel with what looks to be some easy coding done to it.

http://content.imagesocket.com/thumbs/foobar7bf.jpg
Here's my ColumnsUI setup, nothing really fancy. Messing with the layout alone is enough for me.

That's a lot of wasted space in the album art panel.

Also, my foobar setup with track info panel:

http://img414.imageshack.us/img414/9449/foowc2.th.png

Album list is on auto-hide, so it only comes up when I need it. What I'd like to know is wether there's a way to have different font sizes in the formatting string of the track info panel?

Kaiten i put al those files into my foobar directory but i doesnt look anywere near the same, can you help or explain how to make it look like yours?

Are you using 0.9? Because some of these components won't work with previous versions of foobar.

Beyond not sorting the files to their proper folder:

Do you have user accounts enabled, or is the fb2k config the same for every user?

Do you have the font Calibri installed? I'll supply a link later if you don't.

What's your resolution? If you don't use 1440x900 (or above), your look might be much different.

A screenshot will help immensely in me helping you.

Well i got it working, well my flatmate did, just one other question though is there any way i can make the red shaded bits the same dark blue color as the rest of the programme.
Thanks for your help and ur imba foobar setup, really appreciate it =D.
Rock

That's done though the Album Art Panel properties under Display.

Right click the album art tab -> preferences -> display

Anyway I might aswell post my foobar

http://home.lyse.net/mmanojlo/Foobar02.jpg

Double Post:
Anyone know how I can change the green square's in the playlist viewer?
That's decided by windows I think corresponding the current windows skin i have, but i don't know where i might find the option to change that.

Great its all done =D. It looks amazing thanks for your help everyone =D.

Yeah, it's just a trackinfo panel with some super basic coding.

The playlist is the single column playlist plugin, which I have actually stopped using because I find it to be much more difficult to work with than the normal columns ui. (I cant get the row sizes to change, so often the text of my song titles is cut off.)