Today I realized I had mentioned my favorite MP3-playing software Foobar 2000 a few times but never really said much about it. Foobar is a highly underappreciated MP3 player, IMHO. It’s not fancy like WinAmp, iTunes, and QCD – it doesn’t have a bunch of cool visualizations and skins and stuff. It plays music – MP3s, ogg, and all the others without the bloat.
Some key features (for me):
- It has configurable global keyboard shortcuts. While I am coding, if someone comes up to talk to me, I hit Ctrl+NumPad5 while still in my editor to pause it. I press the same key combo to start it back. If a song comes on I don’t want to hear, I can hit Ctrl+NumPad6 to go to the next song or Ctrl+NumPad3 to go to a random song. If a song comes on and I want to see the artist and trackname, I hit Ctrl-NumPad0 and a text bubble pops up near the Foobar system tray icon showing me the info. I don’t have to double-click the tray icon then find the button on the GUI to do any of this. Once you get used to the global keyboard controls, you’ll never go back. (Again, the exact keys are configurable).
- It has a very low memory footprint compared to other MP3-playing software. I can have hundreds of songs in the queue and when minimized it takes up about 2MB of memory. This is important to me because there are times when I am running two instances of WebLogic and one instance of JBoss all on a machine with 512 MB of RAM. I need that RAM for real work, so a 2MB MP3 player fits right in.
- It has an AudioScrobbler/Last.fm plugin so it can keep track of everything I listen to. Now that I have tried Audioscrobbler, I’m hooked…but that is fodder for another post.
Yes, Foobar looks rather plain and bland when compared to even a basic WinAmp install, but it really kicks the…uh…Alpaca’s ass. If you want a player that plays music and has no bloat, try Foobar 2000. If you want visualizations, tons of plugins, and lots of skins, try one of the other players mentioned above. I’m sticking with Foobar though.
Speaking of small MP3 players, I tried one I stumbled on today called Billy…. it claims it is fast and lightweight. The download was quite small (456kb) but it took up about 2.5MB of RAM when running (about the same as Foobar)….and no Audioscrobbler plugin and no global keyboard shortcuts. I uninstalled it shortly after installing it.
I entirely agree with you, but you didn’t mention that foobar2000 is also extremely powerful for tag editing and converting, handle efficiently a large collection of songs, and has plenty of plugins. :)
You can get album art display, and other pieces of GUI to make very nice:
Foobar2000 gallery thread on hydrogenaudio.org:
http://tinyurl.com/cjjza
RESPONSE: I didn’t mention those things because they aren’t important to me :) I mentioned the things about Foobar that I like/use, and I use a separate program (The Godfather) for tag editing. –Brian
Forgot:
Caveat about foobar: like Firefox, foobar2000 can be customized a *lot*, so maybe a novice (¿non geek? ;) ) should better stay with winamp or itunes, until a special packaged version of foobar2000 that includes plugins like column ui, album art panel comes out.
RESPONSE: That’s pretty much what I said :) –Brian
One of the lightest players I could find: 1by1
http://www.mpesch3.de/
Plays mp3. Plus vorbis, musepack, flac, monkey’s audio, wma, etc via support of winamp plugins.
RESPONSE: Yep -I know about 1by1, but it doesn’t do all I need/want so I didn’t mention it. –Brian
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You can actually use visualizations with Foobar, with the main difference between Foobar and other media players (WinAmp and such) being that they run in separate windows. My favorites are GForce and Whitecap, and you can download them at http://www.soundforge.com.
RESPONSE: I know you can use visualizations, but my point is that by default, it comes with just the bare-bones player.
–Brian
So does Foobar actually play wma files? I’ve never been able to find a plug in. One reference I found said that wma support would become available after foobar came out of beta. Well here we are!!
RESPONSE: Idunno. I have never needed to play a WMA.
–Brian
Yeah, the latest version of Foobar 0.9.x does play wma. I don’t prefer the whole DRM ridden .wma’s myself.. but well if u ever need to.. u can use foobar2000 for it..
Hey there, I found your blog doing a search for foobar visualizations… I’m already a firm user of foobar and decided to check out if there were any visual plug-ins for it… also I saw you said it has a last.fm plug-in, which is also awesome, because since switching to foobar2k a long ass time ago, my audioscrobbler data hasn’t changed, I surfed to the site and tried finding where I can hook up the party, but don’t see any options of that nature… do you know if I need to create a new profile in order to link it to my foobar?
Thanks in advance, and great blog, HHGTTG for life!
@Tausif Is that something you have to turn on? My foobar is not playing what I downloaded from Ruckus (with ugly DRM, but it costs me nothing…except integrity). I’m using 9.5.4
For starters let me state that I also LOVE Foobar 2000 and have also posted about it as well, but recently I’ve come across the little known player XMPlay. If you want an audio player that’s accurate and small, check it out. It’s VERY small, like: 372 KB.
Also it’s standalone, and accepts plugins and themes. Not going to win awards for being pretty, but it’s a super player.
Also, loving MC Frontalot, I loved your captcha :)
For me “the blandiness” you speak about Foobar is one of the biggest traits. If I want to listen to the music I am using my ears not eyes. And its customizable and minimalistic just the way I like it.
New powers have revealed to me the day I changed Winamp & Firefox to Foobar2000 & Opera.
http://www.last.fm/user/KimJackie
hi,
I am trying to configure the looks of my foobar, but everytime i download a dll file it ends up displaying that its for an older version. im using 0.9.5.5.
Please suggest where can i get my foobar to look good from?
thanks