Wow, that looks great; I'm on 0.9.4 and it's nothing like that! I didn't think he cared about interface, since the Columns GUI isn't part of the main page anymore... guess I was wrong. Will check it out tomorrow.

Your selection of Porcupine Tree for your GUI shots is also well-advised.

Some nifty new interface features in there, but still far from attractive, and far from easily configurable.

Yes, phil, yes it does.

Foobar is very simple on the surface, but buried in a rather Byzantine interface lurks amazing power. The masstagger/file renamer is particularly powerful, albeit somewhat dangerous. And the freedb autotagger is a thing of beauty.... load a bunch of untagged MP3s from the same album, highlight them, and choose 'get tags from FreeDB', and foobar does an absolutely amazing job of figuring out the correct album and getting the right tags for you.

It may not be pretty, but rules supreme in low-impact playback. iTunes will take several percent of your CPU and a bunch of RAM; foobar takes about 15MB and barely registers on the CPU meter at all.

I got mine configured in under a few minutes. I just right clicked to add what I wanted and dragged it to where I want it.

War crimes horrible.

It used to be my favorite player.

Right now, I'm playing "It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like Fishmen", with the visualizer running, and it's showing 16,936K.

If you have a large library, maybe it holds the paths in RAM?? I generally just drag single CUE or MP3 files onto it, I don't use it as a playlist manager.

What I need foobar to be able to do is handle the iPod well, including correct podcast handling.

Basically, everything that the libgpod library can do in Linux.

I'm thinking more in-depth configuration I suppose. Yes, I easily configured mine into one of the generic looking styles from the example screens but i'd like a wee bit more control than that. Hell, I wouldn't even complain about control if it didn't still look fugly. I'd also kill for a better Library system. I miss Amarok

Hmm, that's interesting, I wonder if there's a bug somewhere? You should mention that to the author.

That's the beauty of FLAC, though... if you want another format, no problem! And the mass convert functions in Foobar make it about as easy as it gets.

I must be an idiot, but I can't figure out how to get album art to display inline once for each album. I've been fiddling with a number of components, but I must be missing either a component or an option somewhere. Any thoughts?

edit: Nevermind, it was an option I couldn't find. I'm using the FofR mod as a 'robust' GUI version and the vanilla foobar as a low memory app. It's actually working pretty well, and it's very simple to switch between the two.

Sadly, podcasts and foobar don't seem to mix - can't find a single decent plugin.

Nor does the Last.fm plugin appear to scrobble iPod-played tracks.

I really can't wait for Amarok to be completely ported to Windows. As long as it runs well, that's the true iTunes replacement (for complete iPod support, podcasts, scrobbling and all)

iTunes takes noticeable CPU and installs a bunch of system drivers and Quicktime, whether you want them or not. It's a bloated pig of a program.

Foobar installs absolutely nothing beyond its own directory and, optionally, filetype associations. It's incredibly lightweight in terms of CPU and RAM use, and fully supports bitperfect playback, which is awkward to do on Windows. If you don't want the extra GUI stuff, you can just turn it off and use it as the simplest of all possible players, or you can spiff it up some, while still taking minimal resources. It also supports FLAC natively, and can support other formats with plugins; the APE plugin, for instance, is on the main site. It ALSO understands and supports CUE sheets, which is thoroughly awesome and very handy for me, because I store all my music as CUE/FLAC images.

And then you get into the masstagging and FreeDB stuff -- it can take a bunch of untagged tracks, and use FreeDB to figure out what album they came from, and tag them appropriately. That's an amazingly useful feature. It can tag from directory structures, and can rearrange your entire music library in seconds based on tags. It can also do huge batch conversions between formats, automatically scaling to however many processors you have. On my quadcore Mac Pro, running Windows, I was able to re-encode my FLACs to VBR MP3 at over 100x realtime.

It's a gem of a program, with incredible power lurking underneath. iTunes takes far more resources to do far less.

System resources and customizations are the biggest thing for most people who use foobar over things like iTunes and WMP10+. Users that want something that 'just works' will get a lot of functionality from iTunes off the shelf, but it's not really well optimized, in my opinion.

iTunes consumes 50-70 megs of Ram, even if it's minimized and just playing music - not counting extra, unwanted apps, as *Legion* points out. Running the FotR mod, with fancy things like background transparency turned on, uses 35-40 while you're browsing in it...and 2-10 when it's minimized. I mean, come on, it's like it's not even there. Using a barebones version like Edwin has up top uses about 15 for me when I'm browsing. I can navigate a 3000 song library smoothly in foobar, while iTunes gets choppy, and have more options to sort and build playlists.

It's not for everyone, but it's a damn fine option for those who like to customize

jmdanny, this is one of the possible screen combinations from the mod package I'm using for full GUI interaction. There are navigation bars built in to switch between the screens, as well as close any of the ones open by default.

APE? No, but remember all lossless formats are the same. Find a player that supports any lossless format (I think the Archos line supports FLAC, for instance), and then transcode. No loss of quality.

Danny, on that layout you posted does the albumartdownloader work for you? It crashes instantly when I try it and for some reason foobar isn't showing the albumart for 90% of my stuff. It's there, the images are in the folders and labeled correctly and they even worked in another foobar layout. But they don't in this one.

Any ideas?

I followed the directions for it from that image to the letter and it doesn't work