Customize your foobar

I will post some tips to customize your foobar and help you to have something nice.

Some tips may require you to perform tasks that were not the intended behavior of the plugin.
Extreme customization could use a lot of your CPU. Customize only if you are ready to dedicate a bit of your CPU and RAM to foobar2000.
The main Core is ALWAYS lightweight, if you discover that foobar uses a lot of CPU and RAM resources, it's because of third party plugins. Try to remove some panels or plugins. foo_uie_trackinfo uses a lot of resources. (foo_uie_browser also for huge libraries)
For very complex UI scripts, use Speed test, normal values are under 10ms (for Navigator suite, 9 ms is a maximum for a VERY complex script, I'm under 1ms with a quite basic script)
Speed tips for users with large libraries

Get a special character

Star character?, Which fonts have this?
Characters available depend on the font you use. Microsoft fonts genrally have a lot of characters.

First go to (in Windows): Start All Programs Accessories System Tools Character Map.
Choose the font you are using and then browse characters available.
Now for example, I want a music note, I click on it then I have the code of this letter: 266B. It's the number of the character but in hexadecimal, we need the number in decimal. Unless you know how to translate from hexadcimal to decimal, you can use this converter: Hexadecimal to decimal.

The character number is 9835. Now, if I want to use this character anywhere, I just have to use $char(9835)

9835	9834	8902	8730	8729	8728	8362	169

Get rid of the panels edges.

For all your panels, use style edge: "none". Very thin lines will remain, then you must choose a background color where those lines are not visible. The lines' color is $rgb(236,233,216)

Display several pictures to enhance the visual style of foobar 2000

Use the last album art plugin (0.2.0 or higher) multiple instance of album art are available. Choose a specific image as source

Have a special background color for each album/artist/genre.

There are 9 parameters, 3 for each of hue, saturation and lightness (starting with h, s and l correspondingly). they are wideness (_w), multiplication (_m) and base (_b). resulting component is computed according to: component = (value modulo wideness) * multiplication + base. component shouldn't be outside of 0-240 interval.

	//Based on spex04's job, remodded by mazy $puts(hb,0) $puts(hw,240) $puts(hm,1) $puts(sb,100) $puts(sw,10) $puts(sm,10) $puts(lb,50) $puts(lw,5) $puts(lm,10) // $puts(crc,$crc32($replace($lower(%artist%), ,))) // $puts(h,$add($mul($mod($div($get(crc),1),$get(hw)),$get(hm)),$get(hb))) $puts(s,$add($mul($mod($div($get(crc),$mul($get(hw),$get(hm))),$get(sw)),$get(hm)),$get(sb))) $puts(l,$add($mul($mod($div($get(crc),$mul($get(hw),$get(hm),$get(sw),$get(sm))),$get(lw)),$get(lm)),$get(lb))) // $puts(col,$hsl($get(h),$get(s),$get(l))) $set_style(back,$get(col),$get(col))

 

August 30 2007 02:08:35.