Lots of work and quite a learning curve (for me at least), but I've finally got the components, panels, etc. where I want them. Theme is pretty basic still, but there's plenty of time to spruce that stuff up. Ratings I'm still playing with (I can get it to display ten stars, but I can't get any more than 5 to actually fill), so they're not shown obviously.

Pretty much a ripoff of noise/tore, but what can I say, noise's picture in the thread on the general music forum was what finally inspired me to give foobar a shot:bowdown:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1142/foobar2.th.jpg

hey, looking good!

post the script you're using for ratings, and describe how you want it to work. i'll see what i can do to help :D

I have encountered a problem with my foobar >.<

I have no "foo_freedb2.dll" in my components directory. It's used for auto-tagging stuff against the freedb database. It says on the developer's site that the file should be included in the installer so there's no download for it. What the hell? Versions I have found from other sites are outdated and not accepted by the program ..

Could any of you send me your file? :(

edit :

I'm terrified of reinstalling cause I'm scared my lovely setup is gonna disappear :p:

edit :

By the way, I've found a simple way to make foobar download album art for me. It happens when you play the albums and requires no additional work on your part once you've made the few changes. It completely eliminates the time you might have otherwise spent getting cover art - as least as long it can find the pictures online of course.

Lemme know if you're interested and I'll explain it. :)

hey tore,

i don't have that dll either. you have to specifically tell the installer you want to include freedb tagging support during setup.

here's what you do - grab the installer, run it, and choose a portable install. then send it to a temp folder some place. be sure to tick the option for freedb. once it's done, go in and grab the dll you need.

or, just unpack the installer with Universal Extractor...

i actually use a portable install all the time. that way, my entire foobar folder is self-contained, so i can keep it on a non-system drive and nothing happens to it when i reinstall windows :D

and by the way, you can export your config. there's also a component called foo_jesus that 'saves' your config every time you run foobar :D

Yay, that worked. :)

Today, I completely revamped the style of my foobar only to find out many hours later I preferred it the way it was. This program sure can be a timesink :p: Still, I think I got most of the visuals sorted out now - although I do tend to tweak stuff constantly.

Here's what my setup looks like at the moment : Screenie

I'm quite happy with it and, of course, a lot of it came from you. Without your help, I would've struggled and spent a lot more time. Thanks again!

Gotjuice, yours is looking good too! :)

yeah it can suck up your time, but i just love doing that sort of thing.

my file manager (Directory Opus) is similar. not so much scripting, but you can customize/tweak everything you see. it took me months to get it just right!

anyway happy i could help. i learned what i know off of other people, so there's a great big chain of foobar script sharing that must stretch all the way around the world. i love the internet :D

By the way, does foobar adjust volume once replaygain information is in place or do I have to do something first?

it's automatic, you should notice a difference the moment a track's gain value is written to the database. but be sure you go to Preferences/Playback and set the source mode - album or track - then decide how to apply the gain. below that you can adjust the preamp if you need to.

there are two further ways to fine-tune how replay gain works.

first is with a component called Replaygain Override. it lets you choose which gain source is applied to which playback mode. for example, you can set Default mode to apply album gain, and Shuffle to apply track gain. i use this and it's very helpful.
Zao's foobar2000 components

second, you can get a different component called Playlist Attributes. this let you assign certain properties to individual playlists, and one of those properties is the gain source. so you can set one playlist to apply track gain, and another to apply album gain.
foo_playlist_attributes - Hydrogenaudio Forums

not sure how well the two play together, so i would choose one or the other :)

Super! That works brilliantly :)

The only thing left which bugs me now are two things. There's no way to include drive letters in relative paths which makes portable installs just slightly trickier. It means I have to make sure my external USB drive has to be the same drive each time. I'm surprised the devs haven't done anything with this (?) as portable install is an option.

Then there's the context menu. There are a few things I'd love to get in there, for example quick ways to write some of my custom tags to the files. Hopefully they'll make it so I can without having to write my own component from scratch!

Other than that, I'm very satisfied. :)

1. not sure about relative paths. it's a new feature in 1.0, which was just released a few weeks ago actually. i do use a portable install, but only so i can keep foobar on a different internal drive to keep it from being wiped when i reinstall windows. i actually do this with most of the apps i use...

2. it sounds like you need Quick Tagger :D

foobar2000: Components Repository - Quick Tagger

i use it mostly for ratings. i have bound CTRL+[1-5] as a global hotkey so i can rate the currently playing track no matter what i'm doing on my computer.

Hah! You're the man, noise :p:

happy to help!

to be honest, it's great finding someone else who's as enthusiastic about this sort of thing as i am :D

It's just the sort of stuff the slightly compulsive side of me thrives on :p:

If you'd like some more ideas on stuff to do .. Today, I was thinking if there was anything else I could do and I thought why not add a background picture to that track mod info box based on genre? I googled some pics, grayscaled them and put'em in there. It's a hasty job and I might change the pics for better ones, but it's good enough for a demo :)

http://t/bgs.jpg

Here I've just slapped 3 such panels together in photoshop. They're based on my supergenre2 tag, from left to right : rock, jazz and country. I got more, but the image got a bit wide and I see now the jazz picture isn't even fitted correctly, grr. Anyways, they interfere just slightly with the visibility of the text so I might change some colours too.

I also made an "album rating" tag so now stars show up in the group title as well!

ooh i like that a lot! perhaps you can share the images when you're done :D

i played with genre images for a while. i actually set my lower image viewer to cycle between the artist picture and the genre picture. but i was going crazy with them, doing one for all of my genre-style combination. it got a bit intense.

but i love the background image idea, it looks really great :D

album ratings - yikes. for me, the only way i could do that is by manually calculating it based on the mean of all the track ratings. i really wish there were a component that did it for me, but alas, nothing like that exists...

Will do! :)

I have a habit of listening to albums so I have a pretty clear opinion of how I overall compare them, but I'm not really sure if it's going to be useful. It might turn out to be a bit redundant considering there's already track rating .. we'll see.

When I first thought about the images and genres, my first thought was also to make pictures for genres, but I thought it would be too much work. The supergenres are excellent for the purpose though!

Another idea I had which I eventually dismissed or at least pushed way back on my priority list is mood icons. It's easy to download packs of mood icons used on sites like livejournal and so on. I thought using a mood tag to display such mood images could be fun, but then I noticed I have nowhere to squeeze in another picture and then I got dizzy from thinking about all the tagging I'd have to do .. I prefer tags I can sorta do by bulk at the moment. :p:

i've also thought long and hard about moods, but it's so hard to judge what category to put an album in! some are slow and happy, others slow and sad...

then i saw this: Moody - Mac OS X / Windows app to mood tag your music in iTunes

it's for mac, but the idea is pretty basic. one axis is tempo, the other is mood.

it would be very possible to implement a panel like this in foobar with either 9 or 16 colors.clicking a square in the panel would write the appropriate value to the %mood% tag. of course, this would work best at a track level.

then in the playlist, you could make a column with showing a solid square graphic of the appropriate color.

anyway just something i was considering. it could probably done in Track Info Mod even. maybe i'll work on it this weekend :D

Wow, something like that would be really cool. I have to admit it sounds like quite an undertaking as well, but if you're feeling ambitious, why not? :D

So this is my foobar so far... not much at all. There are two things I'm wondering right now; how is it you make the column of artists on the side, and not at the top like this? And, is there a section to make playlists?

edit: and a freaking search bar! It seems to have disappeared... am I just being stupid?

It looks like you have UI Columns installed, so then all you have to do is set up your panels right. Go to preferences -> Display -> Columns UI and press the "Layout" tab.

I'm guessing you've played around there already - you have some filter panels put up. Just play around with it and you should get an idea how it works. At the most basic, just think of your foobar as a canvas you're going to fill with panels and each panel contains one thing, for example album art or a playlist. There are two main kinds of splitters you should know. Splitters can "contain" other panels and are used to organize them.

If you have a horisontal splitter, adding panels into it will align them horisontally. New panels will be added to the right of the one you added last. In a vertical splitter, they will be aligned vertically.

To add a panel, splitter or whatever, just right click and choose "insert panel".

The basic setup I'm using has First one horisontal splitter, then three vertical splitters underneath it in the hierarchy dividing the screen up into 3 horisontally split parts. Library tree, playlist view and album art/info/bio.

At it's most basic, my setup looks like this :

• Horisontal Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter

That gives 3 empty sections split horisontally. Then I've basically just populated those vertical splitter panels with more panels like artwork view, track mod info, NG Playlist, library tree and more.



As for playlists, I'm still a little puzzled by them myself. They're not quite as intuitive as they were in Winamp .. I installed "foo_queuecontent" which gives me a playlist called Queue that I can view the playback queue in. It's almost like your typical Winamp or whatever playlist except songs disappear from it once they start playing as it's actually a queue and not a playlist.

Read about it / Get it here

However, I'm also looking for some better solutions to this. I'd actually quite like a plugin which has similar functionality to Winamp's. It's the feature I miss the most at the moment.

http://t/winamp_playlist.png

Unless some of you are unfamiliar, it's just a list of songs and it goes down the list, playing one song after the other. If you want, you can set up a playback queue inside the playlist by marking a song and pressing the Q button. A song's place in the queue shows as [#], # being a number indicating it's place in the queue (in the pic, first Jessica, then Ramblin' Man, then Melissa). When no more songs are queued, it just resumes going down the list .. unless shuffle is on. Then it'll jump around the list at random.

It's such a simple design, there has to be a component out there which supports this? Anyways, I've been a bit busy with other things but I'm definetly gonna look for one. If I find it, I'll let you know.

hey tore, just right-click and choose 'add to playback queue'. if you have a queue manager panel set up you'll see it there.

but really, it's not so different than making a new playlist. which is a better system once you get used to it. you could even make a hotkey (or button) that sends selected items in the current playlist to a 'now playing' playlist and get the same effect.

how do you have your library filter set up? when you click things - artists, genres, individual albums - do you send them to a new playlist? that's a good way to do things.

playlists are just so quick and easy to make in foobar you might as well use them!

When I choose "add to playback queue", it plays that song next. What I'd like is a way to map a hotkey so that it can send the current selection to the bottom of the playlist I'm listening to at that moment in time. It should then get played eventually.

I've looked and looked, but I haven't found a way to do this. All I've found are ways to send songs to specific playlists, but that doesn't make much sense from a hotkey point of view.

edit :

By the way, I modified your play icon column slightly :)

In addition to whether a song is playing or not, now it also shows any song's position in the queue (as long as it has been added to the playback queue). I've also been looking for a text pause symbol, but I can't find one! Let me know if you do. :)

After much searching, I've not yet found a component which adds a simple "add song(s) to end of playing playlist" functionality. Why this is not out there is a mystery to me as I think it would be a nice way to build up a playlist.

I have, however, found two components that have the functionality "add song(s) to the playing playlist after the currently playing song". In other words, it can add songs to the currently playing playlist, but not to the end of it unless the last song in the list is playing.

I don't get why I can find no components that add to the end and two that add after the playing track. To me it makes more sense to add them to the bottom and if you want to skip some of the songs in the list and listen to the selection straight away, you use "play" or the playback queue.

have you looked through the settings of your Library Tree component?

i use Filters, and i can right-click tracks and send them to the end of the active playlist.

you can also drag/drop tracks and drop them into a playlist.

or right-click, choose 'send to playlist'

there are any number of ways to do this...

also see this component:
http://members.multimania.co.uk/musi...nd_to_playlist

or this:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...hp/t18276.html

Thanks for the help. I can indeed send to active playlist, but active playlist only means whichever playlist I'm looking at - not necessarily the one which is playing. I get search results and so on in my playlist window, so I'm often looking at a playlist which is not playing.

I already checked out foo_utils and while it has a lot of functionality for sending stuff to playlists, it will only send to specific playlists. Like you can send stuff to your "party music" playlist. The problem is that's not useful as a hotkey.

The other component there is outdated :(

I'm gonna register on hydrogenaudio forums and complain :p:

haha well good luck! they can be pretty vicious over there :D

so where exactly are you trying to send tracks from??

i guess i just can't relate, i don't use my player like that. i either listen to an album, a pre-made playlist, or i shuffle through artists/genres/whatever...

Viciousness doesn't scare me one bit. ;)

Quite often I'm not looking at my currently playing playlist. One reason is I have a searchbar which I use frequently. All search results are sent to the playlist window and thus become the "active playlist" (though not the "playing playlist").

I'd love to be able to mark a selection from my search results, press a button and WHAM - have them added to the playlist I'm listening to.

edit :

By the way, I noticed %path% also contains filename at the end. Do you know if there's a way I can remove the %filename% bit from %path%?

edit again : Nevermind, found out! $directory_path(%path%) :D

http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/6...000newc.th.jpg

I tweaked my foobar a bit today. There's still a few more things i want to change such as the play buttons cos they're a bit on the small side. I also cant seem to figure out how to get the filter to ignore 'the' when sorting artists, could someone help me on this?

$swapprefix(X)
Moves “A” and “The” prefixes to the end of X.

Example: “The Prodigy” becomes “Prodigy, The”

Cheers. Yeah it pretty much worked for me, only i used $swapprefix(%artist%,The) cos i don't really mind the 'A' prefixes. I can't seem to find a way to sort it like that but still display the artist as 'The Artist'. Facets gives you this option but Filter in columns UI doesn't. I know it's only a small thing but it still bugs me haha.

hmm never noticed that, but now it's gonna bug me. i'll post back here when i find a solution.

with foobar, there is always a solution :D

The solution is simple here. If you have a code for view format, just show %<artist>% or $meta(artist,0) or something there, not $swapprefix(%<artist>%).

Just use $swapprefix() code in the sorting code. :)

Here's an example from my library tree config. I've marked the %<artist>% code used to show my music in the field named "view format". Below, in the sort field, you can see $swapprefix(%album artist%).

http://xs.to/image-6A48_4BAC5E21.jpg

This makes "The Prodigy" appear just like I wrote it, but sorts it as if it was "Prodigy, The". If you don't have a separate view/sorting code in your setup, well .. You should!

%<artist>% outputs any artist in the artist field. If the song "Islands in the Stream" has multiple artists in the artists field, say "Dolly Parton; Kenny Rogers", the song will be listed under both.

$meta(artist,0) would only output the first value, Dolly Parton. You can use these features to tag music for example belonging to several genres at once. :)

that works for Library Tree, and you can do something similar in most Playlist views, but unfortunately it is not possible in Filters, because there is no seperate sort code.

answer i got from the official forums:

I might be misunderstanding what filters we're talking about, but at least the ColumnsUI filters have a sorting script option.

http://xs.to/image-8212_4BACA286.jpg

I've marked some code to show where you find the option in the picture. As you can see, artist just shows %artist%, but checking the option to sort incoming files should sort it as if by $swapprefix() :)

Note that I don't use these filters myself much, though!

that sorts the files as they are added to the playlist from the filter panel, but it does not change the way they are displayed in the filer panel itself :)

Isn't that just the thing? He wants artists displayed as they are, but wants them sorted as by $swapprefix() ..

My examples above do that, so unless I'm mistaken, it should be just the thing he's looking for? :confused:

Here's my own filters :

http://xs.to/image-AEEA_4BACC794.jpg

The Prodigy are sorted under P due to $swapprefix(), but still show up as "The Prodigy" in the filter.

woah something is amiss

that Sort field has nothing to do with how the entry is displayed in a Filter. it only comes into effect when you click an item in the Filter - then it gets sorted on its way to the playlist.

yet the Filter in your screenshot is doing what the OP is asking for.

could you past the code for that artist filter here? i want to take a look at it :D

There is no code aside from the sort script really. If you look at the screenshot up there, the filter that shows artist only has "artist" in it :p:

I'll change it to %<artist>% now, though. That's what I'd like it to be. :)

edit :

My sorting script looks like this : $swapprefix(%artist%) $if(%release year%,%release year%,%date%) %album% $if(%disc number%,$left(%disc number%,2),) %tracknumber% %title%

%release year% is a tag I've made which is used when present instead of date. The reason is if I have a "best of the 80s" album released in 2009, I'd set the %release date% to 2009 and hope to tag each song with the original date which is sometime in the 80s. The reason I'm using the left 2 disc numbers is that I sometimes write disc numbers like this "2 - Bonus Disc" (or have in the past anyways), so that's to make sure I only fetch numbers.


more edit :

My Library Tree sorting script looks like this : $swapprefix(%album artist%) $if(%debut%,0,1) $if(%release year%,%release year%,%date%) %album% $if(%disc number%,$left(%disc number%,2),) %tracknumber% %title%

It's much the same except it makes doubly sure anything tagged as debut comes first. This is to sort out conflicts where an artist has a second release the same year as the debut.


edit yet again :

Ugh, I see filters won't accept "%<artist>%" .. That's losing a really neat functionality there!

there's something seriously mysterious going on here.

i cannot reproduce the sorting displayed in your screenshot no matter what i do. changing the sort only changes how the files are added to the playlist.

officially, what you have displayed there is not possible using Filters.

Ohh right, I think I might know what's going on ..

If you check my settings, I've checked off for "By field list above". What that does is it makes artist first sort by the filters above it in the list. Checking this off creates a mess where "The Prodigy" gets back under the letter T. Just remember to move your filters up and down in the list so that they're right in the right position, something similar to what I've done in the screenshot.

I'm proud I've stumbled over something I take it people must've struggled with for a while though. :p:

The code for artist and genre is just artist and genre respectively, but the other two are :

• Artist Index : $left($swapprefix($replace(%album artist%,:,!,.,!,0,#,1,#,2,#,3,#,4,#,5,#,6,#,7,#,8, #,9,#)),1)
• Album : $if(%release year%,%release year%,$left(%date%,4)) - %album%

The artist index code lists the first letter unless it's a number. Then it gets sorted under #. Punctuations go under ! although I add those to the code as they appear in my library so there aren't too many specified cases there.

bingo!

if you choose P, you get The Prodigy, but alphabetically, it's still filed under 'T'

so it's not really a solution after all :(

EDIT

"By field list above" refers to the physical position of a Filter in your config. it only changes how things are displayed if you have multiple filters...