Making foobar2000′s interface awesome 2 Comments

9:44 PM on 2009/08/18 by Ryan Schultz Music

I’m spectacularly picky about music players. Any player application is something that I’m going to be looking at many, many times during the day — anytime I want to pick a certain song, change playlists based on what I’m doing, or try new music. It makes perfect sense to try to get exactly what I want out of an application with such a usage scenario. My most basic requirements: tree-based library view, album art, OSD, tray icon & keyboard commands, quick search (jump to), a decent tag editor, and OGG/flac support.

Obviously iTunes, the most popular player, fails at this most basic level, not to mention its huge memory consumption. Open source player Songbird, does a lot better here and in fact fits all of my needs, but its interface feels decidedly laggy on my Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory available, which just doesn’t make sense. I’ve tried just about everything else, too. I think the last music player I was really happy with was Amarok1 for KDE3, which is now ancient history, replaced by the wacky UI of Amarok2 and KDE4. Neither are available in any sane form for Windows.

foobar2000 with plugins

Enter foobar2000. Described as a simple, low memory usage music player with a customizable UI, this program has finally filled the gap in my heart that Amarok1 left. Fully equipped with numerous plugins and with my entire music library loaded, its natively-Windows interface is spectacularly snappy. It displays Japanese properly, has a fully featured tagger, an OSD, a quicksearch, and instant playlist swapping — when configured for these things. foobar2000′s only issue is that the default interface is just a little bit awkward to me, but fortunately with a few plugins, it’s perfect.

So I’d like to share my configuration, in hopes that it will help another person who’s lost without Amarok1 and is now using Windows. There are a few plugins needed to get foobar to look like my screenshot above.

• ColumnsUI: This is the most important part. This provides the album tree panel and playlist view that make up the core of the apperance.
• Quicksearch: Provides the Quicksearch pane that goes above the playlist (or anywhere else).
• OSD: Provides a simple transparent and configurable OSD.

That’s really all that’s necessary. Configuring all of these can be a bit of a bother though, but fortunately foobar2000 has the option to export its layout to a file, which leaves only the OSD and art plugins to be configured — and both of those are going to vary between people, anyway. So here is my layout as a .FCL file, which can be imported into ColumnsUI.