Feng's Distorted World : 鋒言鋒語

Foobar 2000 is one of my favourite audio players. It's known to be light on system resources and easily customizable and configurable with the use of third-party components. Best of all, its free!

Download the latest version of the foobar player from the official site.

Here are some of the foobar components I've tried and used for my own foobar player. All the plugins featured below are recommended for use in foobar 2000 version 0.9 .

How to install the plugins:
1. Download the plugins and unzip them
2. Copy the dll files into your default foobar component folder (i.e C:/Program Files/foobar2000/components)
3. Restart the foobar player and you're ready to go!

1. Columns UI

Columns UI is an alternative user interface for the foobar player. It allows interchangeable elements through the use of panel and toolbar components. It is a prerequisite of many other foobar components such as albumart_ui and track info mod.



Download - Columns UI from musicmusic's foobar stuff


2. Album Art Panel

Another example of customizing your foobar player is to enable it to display a song's album art. Using the component foo_uie_albumart, you can easily modify the desired image's source, height and even configure it to cycle through several images.




Download - foo_uie_albumart v0.045

3. Track info panel mod

Track Info Panel Mod is a modification to the Foobar2000:0.9 Track Info Panel (foo uie trackinfo) panel by Terrestrial. It allows you to display a track's data such as length, artist, album, and year.



Download - Track info panel mod from Hydrogenaudio wiki

4. Quick Search Toolbar

Derived from foo_uie_search and ported to foobar2000 0.9, foo_uie_quicksearch provides the ability to include a search panel in your Columns UI layout, displaying results in a chosen playlist. The search parameters can be customized according to your own needs. I just left to for default.



Download - foo_uie_quicksearch

5. Audioscrobbler

This is a plugin that allows submission of data of the tracks you've listened to last.fm. It employs audioscrobbler technology to retrieve your listening data. Last.fm's client is good as well, but I just prefer using foobar and this audiosrobbler plugin rather than last.fm's official client.

Download - foo_audioscrobbler

6. Crossfader

This is a simple dsp plugin that adds crossfading functionality into the foobar player. I don't really bother with crossfading but listening to ambient and instrumental tracks with this feature will take your entire listening experience to a whole new level. Do try it!!

Download - foo_dsp_crossfader at Acropolis' Blog

7. ProjectM

ProjectM Visualisation is a visualisation based on the ProjectM project, which is a reimplementation of Milkdrop under OpenGL. The version available here is a modification of bleh's ProjectM Visualisation for Foobar2000 0.8. The forum thread for both the original version and the modification available here can be found here.



Download - ProjectM Visualisation

8. Whitecap

Whitecap is another visualisation plugin for foobar. It features 190 effects, a morphing slideshow, savable and scriptable effects, video file export capabilities, and control over specific effects. WhiteCap is designed to be visually engaging and extremely dynamic, yet flexible enough to allow for customization, control, and scripting. I don't really use this plugin much.



Download - foo_whitecap from soundspectrum

9. Lyricsdb

This plugin allows you to search and upload lyrics basing on song's artist title and sometimes album. Lyrics are download from a database and saved to the %lyrics% tag.



Download - foo_lyricsdb

10. Queuemanager

This plugin provides a panel which shows the queue's contents and allows you to remove tracks from the queue. It also allows you to have playback automatically starting when you create a queue.

Requires .Net 2.0 framework. If you don't have it you can get it here.

Download - foo_uie_queuemanager