Filed under: Audio, Windows, Freeware
Foobar 2000 - alternative audio player for Windows
by Jason Clarke Oct 2nd 2006 at 8:30AM
If you're not happy with your options for playing audio content in Windows, like Windows Media Player, iTunes or WinAmp, you might be interested in trying Foobar 2000. Foobar 2000 is "an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.", although rather than tout it as an advanced player, I think it would be more accurate to pitch it as a pared down player that does what it does well. You're not going to get the glitz of the other media players mentioned, but Foobar does include support for add-in components, so its functionality can always be built upon.
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The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
James said 2:27PM on 10-02-2006
Foobar is very extensible and you can make it look very cool. Unfortunately to do this you have to wrangle with configuratoin files. It's a form of hazing which someone with a life doesn't really have time for.
An advanced user could put together a complete Foobar 2000 package, replete with funky interface, but they're too bitter about having wasted their own time setting it up that they're not about to help out a bunch of n00bs.
My vote for most annoying user community ever.
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Pasha said 2:28PM on 10-02-2006
Foobar is the player that i use, but a lot of people will install it, look at the default interface, and say this is ugly, and walk away. That's what i did when i first started using it. But, you should check out these screenshots to see what's possible to do with foobar, and then you may be a little more compelled to try it
http://omoikane.minstrum.net/foo_mod_rc1.png
http://img212.imageshack.us/my.php?image=clessfoobaras0.jpg
http://img205.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fubariv8.png
I've gotten all those from the official foobar forums.
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Alex3305 said 2:28PM on 10-02-2006
Try out XMPlay (www.xmplay.com), I think it's far better than Foobar2000 and it has skinning support, winamp plugins support and alot more !! Furthermore the download size is less than Foobar and it only uses up a couple of MB of memory (2.5MB with 73 songs in my playlist, iTunes skin and plugin for Windows Live Messenger) !! Top that :)
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Russell Heimlich said 2:28PM on 10-02-2006
My favorite alternative player is Media Monkey -> http://mediamonkey.com/ it's not as bloated as the others and has a lot of kool features.
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tre said 2:28PM on 10-02-2006
I been using Foobar2000 to play music in the background while playing World of Warcraft but I think I'll switch to Songbird when someone comes out with a last.fm extension.
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Apple said 2:28PM on 10-02-2006
Foobar is by far the best media player that I've used. Its simple, fast, and doesnt look half bad. (Assuming you use columns UI.) I have seen many threads on scripting the default/other UI to make it look "better." (Coloured, better song grouping, display, playing information, ect.) I've even seen sites that have download-able scripts to make the UI better without you having to mess with much of the coding.
With my play list of ~19,000 files, projectM, and ColumnsUI...it has a hard time taking up more than 10mb of memory.
Here's the best part:
Startup time : 0:01.236466
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Emory said 9:58AM on 10-03-2006
Well, I've been looking at foobar for quite some time, but I've been way to scared to try to figure out how to customize it. Is there any place that automatically installs a good looking ui? I don't have the time/ waay too dumb to figure out how to do that. Plus, does anyone know if it works with videos/transferring files (+videos) to my ipod? thanks in advance
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