First steps with foobar

Are you a new user and confused how to configure this program? This step by step guide will help you get started on customizing your foobar to your needs. Foobar is a very modular and configurable program. It can be the simplest audio program you've ever used (when used out of the box), or the most feature-rich and configurable audio program (when used with 3rd party components). It's up to you to configure foobar to your taste. However, it's important that you understand what you're doing before making changes to the default options.

First step: Install, basic configuration

Download foobar latest stable version Official page .

Install it, You can install all optional features, it may be useful later and won't increase the CPU or RAM use.
If you use per user installation, the configuration file of foobar will be located in your documents and settings/Username/applicatiuon data/foobar2000 folder.

Now, open it and go to the File preferences menu.

Go to Playback , Resume playback after restart if you want to automatically start listening to your files on start up.

If you know something about Replaygain , configure it. Just know that Replaygain is a standard to give to your files the same audio level however they had been encoded or recorded without changing files themselves. Don't forget to replaygain your files if you use this standard.
Go to Media library and select the folders with your music. A Media library makes tagging and management of large music libraries much easier than having to deal with multiple playlists. If you have a large collection ,it is recommended that you enable this feature.
Go to DSP Normally only the Advanced limiter should be enough to avoid any clipping problem. ( crossfeed for headphone users, a resampler for people using audio card working at high frequencies to add "dead data" above 41000Hz or people listening to files with low frequences (radio streams for example ))
Choose your Output Device . Normally you just have to select your audio card. (kernel streaming and ASIO are now optional, you can download them from the official component page)

Second step: General use

Use File menu to add files or directories and manage your playlists.

You can lock your playlists in the Edit menu with Read only and change the playback order with the corresponding toolbar. (Comes only with foo_utils developed by foosion)

In the playback menu, you can choose interesting options such as Playback follows cursor (the selected file will be played after the current song), Cursor follows playback (the next file played will be selected on change) or stop after curent

Several options are available from the contextual menu (right click when a track is selected)

Third step: components

All 0.8.3 components don't work with 0.9 version.

To add a component, just put the (uncompressed) dll in the "Components" Directory. That's all.
See this page to get the complete list of plugins available.

Some components are really useful.

Masstagger to move/rename your files according to their tags, or tag them with semi automated scripts
Freedb to automatically get tags and write them into your files thanks to a remote Database.
Play counter, ABX comparator, Text tools etc..

Fourth step: Improve your foobar style

You will need to create your Title format script with the default UI. New users can have titleformatting scripts here

You can use UI columns with its Panels (to display album art, have an explorer in your foobar, display your lyrics etc..) and Toolbars (with customizable buttons, etc..) to enhance the visual style of your foobar. New users can import .fcs files to save time. Links have been provided in the UI columns pages to well known .FCS files.

If you want to create your own UI columns .fcs, you can read my tutorial. Else go to the UI columns page (see above) to get already existing .fcs files.

Continue with foobar

You can read carefully this website to know more about foobar, read Hydrogen Audio forums or the Wiki.

Go back to the website

August 30 2007 02:10:11.