Foobar Love

Foobar is a desktop audio player that is ugly, faulty, strange, painful and absolutely wonderful in every way. There’s just no other software that comes close to it’s ability for total transformation and usability except maybe for Firefox. If you think that something should work differently it’s just a matter of changing it but where Firefox is really easy to customize Foobar can be extremely difficult to handle.

Here’s a link to the Foobar category at DeviantArt which shows what’s possible and below is my simple config with Columns UI:

On the left there’s an explorer panel that shows selected folders in ‘My music’. Click on nodes to navigate. Double-click on a file/folder and it replaces the playlist and plays the opened files. If you for example double-click the country folder it will play all of the country albums. If you middle-click a file/folder it adds it to the end of the playlist. There’s also a menu with more options if you right-click. You can choose to show playlists in the tree as well if you have a special playlist for an album or have a folder full of radio station playlists. The beauty of using the explorer panel is that it doesn’t rely on a database and albums and singles are separated if you want them to be. It gives access to standard explorer right-click menu which is handy if you have for example MP3Tag installed and drag&drop works as a standard Windows folder.

On the bottom of the explorer panel is a search bar that searches Foobar’s media library and adds all that it finds to the playlist.

On the right there’s a playlist with sorting by clicking the column titles and below the playlist are lyrics and albumart viewers.

The colour scheme and layout for the columns playlist is a slightly modified version of brumal which can be found here. Below is a screenshot of the columns ui layout:

Foobar has recently been updated with a new user interface which is much simpler to configure and you can mimic the above configuration pretty closely without much effort using the albumlist panel and browse by location. It does use the medialibrary though.

Other options if you want a directory view of your music library are Dynamic Library for Winamp and 1by1 but both lack simple features that makes them unusable. Mediamonkey has a file browser and is pretty good but it doesn’t let you set your own root which makes it a little cumbersome. Windows mediaplayer has a folder view if you click show more in the browse panel. ATunes also has a folder view but you have to go through too many steps to actually get something to play and the application has always been very buggy when I’ve tried it. ATunes does have a feature that I wish Foobar had though and that is the excellent integration with Last.FM.

Other audio players that are useful are Songbird which is great for hunting down new music and Amarok if you’re using Linux. A Windows version of Amarok should be available pretty soon.

Edit: There is an addon available for Songbird that gives a folder view called Directory Browser. It misses some features but hopefully it will be updated.