REVIEW: Foobar 2000

Hello!

This is my first review on my new website *HOO-RAH*.

Okay now we’ve gotten the celebration out of the way, lets begin.

For my first software review, I shall be giving you my opinion/thoughts on Foobar 2000. Please note that you should not expect a super high-quality review here, no where near as ‘good’ as those found in PC magazines at your local newsagents. These are more my opinion, thoughts and experiences with the program.

Foobar 2000 is a free to download, and free to use media library program. I had heard of Foobar a while back, but never endeavoured to look into using it. But a few weeks ago this changed, when I was using my current music library software, (iTunes 9, not 10…), decided to play a game of Lets not respond and just piss dan the fuck off. Although I don’t want this to turn into a review of iTunes (that’ll come later)… I had been having a week of problems with the software; and with my ever increasing music library – you can really start to feel it lagging at times (also seeing as i usually turn indexing off).

Now I had heard that Foobar was a really good program for large music libraries (like mine)…. so I set out, and downloaded it. The installation was fine, no hiccups or glitches there. I began using the software; getting it to read my beautifully organized directory structure where my music lay; one of the first things I did notice was how much ‘quicker’ Foobar was over iTunes. Everthing loaded up really quickly. Now not many know this but Foobar is a pretty much completely customisable prog’. And so I decided to take ‘advantage’ of this. After a few clicks i found the ‘editor’ – which took about 5 minutes to get used to, and then I was away… making panes for this and that. I spent about 10 minutes just on that alone, and was pretty happy. But something was just not right. I looked at different add-ons available. One of the things I missed is the ‘audio-wall’ that is in iTunes 9 (where you can browse by album cover) – which I soon found out there wasn’t an add-on. But I thought, well I’ll still give it a try.

I ended up installing a new UI plug-in called Columns something-or-rather. Which was alright, but I felt it bottlenecked my ‘creativity’. But sooner or later I got a layout that I was happy with. I then looked to the music itself. Seeing as I had ID tagged all of my tracks (I’m very anal and organized when it comes to music tagging, and already have a system in place) in iTunes i wanted to see what had been transferred over to Foobar. Well Artwork, Title, Artist, Album, Genre and all that stuff came over all right – and it made ‘new’ categories for things like Grouping. But there was one thing that was missing – Lyrics. Now I know most people are not bothered by the lyrics ID tag – but I am, and although there were plug-ins for Lyrics, I wanted to just see if i could get the ID tag to show up in the area I had allocated for the tags to be displayed. But no, that did not work – the thing about Foobar is it pretty much revolves around Coding, and unless you have any clue on how to code ID tags (which honestly, I dont) – you’re fucked.

Im not going to drone on about how certain Tags wouldn’t show properly – but I sooner or later had a headache from it all, and just closed the program and went back (reluctantly) to iTunes 9.

I dont want to put users off using Foobar – it IS a very nice library program – being that it is so ‘basic’ in its looks and has such a small footprint. It just isn’t for me; because I have an existing music collection its just too hard, and would take too long to just sit and fiddle with it until I got it to ‘meet’ how it was in iTunes 9. If I was restarting my collection, a-fresh, then I would definetly consider using Foobar as my new library program.

My rating on Foobar, from my experience with it: 8/10