ITunes has its problems, but I think I'll stick with it as a media library. Currently, I use Foobar2000 whenever I need to convert from lossless to 320 or some other file format, but otherwise...

What are the main advantages to using Foobar over ITunes or other programs for managing my music/playlists?

It depends on what programs you compare it to, but the different ways you can access your library and autoplaylists is something I personally appreciate.

For example, I have a library tree with various ways to access my music, one of them which looks like this :

• Jazz
• Rock
  • Prog Rock
  • Hard Rock
  • Folk Rock
    • Cat Stevens
    • Simon & Garfunkel

It also goes deeper into albums and songs .. I'm sure you get the jist of it. I have another one which goes by country as the root instead of genres, then alphabetically. Basically, you can define yourself how you want to access your library and by what information you want to use to do so.

For autoplaylists, I have a canterbury playlist for example. It stays updated with everything I tag as canterbury. I also have a "Canterbury favourites" list which is a dynamic list that plays all songs tagged as Canterbury which also have a rating of three and better.

Basically, you can use your imagination and if you can think of something that will fit your needs, you can make it happen. That's more than any other media player I've tried.

Will try that out soon.
Problem is, even though I have a library, I still think the most brilliant thing about foobar is 'sort by folder structure'.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't want iPhoto (if I had iPhoto) to organize his pictures. Want to do it myself, dammit!
And my windows XP was always gray and without animations.
So I guess Columns won't do much for me that foobar can't.
Using foobar from now on though. I love the standard interface :)

Can anyone tell me, step by step, how I should get foobar to update the 'watch folders' as they're called in winamp, automatically? I read somewhere it doesn't do that by itself.

I haven't noticed that it doesn't actually. If I add something to my library, then search for it in foobar, it comes up.

Allright. I'll try that first, then :D.

WOW. :thumbs:

Ok first, i've just gone through this entire thread, and this has answered so many problems that google wasn't really giving me.
THANK YOU to tore and Noise for your wonderful help.

now until I can post images of my current foobar setup (i need 15 posts) i am looking for some scripting help.

I have made the switch to foobar2000 from iTunes as I don't need it to sync to my phone any more. However some parts of iTunes were nice, and didn't make the transfer. Specifically, three things have not made the switch: play counts, date added and (this is the big one) album artists. Since I group all of my soundtracks with 'original soundtrack' as the album artist, it allows me to sort my library so all soundtracks stay together. I also use the play counts to make autoplaylists for my favorite songs.

so here's what i know:
1) SOME of the album artist metadata has come over, but not very much (like 5%) and I haven't found out a pattern to it.
2) iTunes stores some of the more unique data, such as play counts, in an xml file and not on the metadata for each file

so any ideas/ help on how to transfer that info over to foobar2000? i've been fighting this for about a week now...

Play counts and date added are sadly lost I assume since itunes likely saves that information in it's database file which foobar won't read. There could be a way to import that data with a plugin, but I doubt it.

You should figure out a way to easily find all your various artists albums, whether they're soundtracks or mixed artist compilations like Top Hits of the 70s. For me, it would be a breeze since I also keep that information in the filename. F.ex :

• \Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\The Last Nightingale [Studio album, 1980s]
• \Music\!Soundtracks & Scores\1930s\1939 - The Wizard Of Oz [Movie, Musical, 1995 rerelease]

I often use the foo_quicksearch searchbar to find my music and it allows for scripts, so if I wanted to find all mixed artist compilations, I could simply search for for : %path% HAS \Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\

That search would return every file and album stored in that directory. If you don't have this level of organization over your files, it becomes a bit trickier. You might have to start doing other searches like "%album% HAS soundtrack" or "%path% HAS soundtrack" to find the ones where soundtrack is part of the album name.

I'm sure there are more ways, but that's what came to my mind at least :)

hey Steezebe, download MP3tag and open your library in there. tell me how much of your metadata you see. it could just be that your metadata is stored in a tag format that foobar doesn't like.

i think tore's right about playcount, but you can get a plugin for foobar that keeps track of playcount and date added. you'll have to start over with your stats though.

mp3tag. PERF. :ar_15s: it gives me @ 75% ID3v2.4, @20% MP4, and a few 2.3apev2, 2.3 and 2.2.

That 75% is mp3 formatted, and all have an album artist showing up in mp3 tag, but NOT foobar.

That 20% MP4 is Apple lossless, which is held in the MP4 container. Ergo, all of those have the MP4 tagging, and the album artist shows up for SOME of them. For example, the album "Everyday" is tagged with "Dave Matthews Band" under album artist in iTunes, but the album artist is blank in mp3tag. Thing is, all of my Dave Matthews tagging is MP4. And since my tagging in iTunes is 100% full for album artist, the fact that it's not there in the tag is rather weird. My only guess is that iTunes is storing it either in another meta field, or another database file.

I also found a source of my confusion: I use Columns UI, and it has the Column Playlist. In there, it shows album artists in the column, but the way the script works is that if an album artist tag doesn't exist, then it just shows the artist, which is why I was confused about it existing in my playlists.

Basically, what should I do? :confused:

ps:
I'm wordy, I know.

Where's the album artist information stored? Foobar uses the tag "album artist", but I know some other media players and so on use the "band" tag for example for that kind of information. If you can find that information inside foobar (it shows up in a file's metadata when you right click it and choose properties), then it's simple to remap or copy that to the album artist tag.

If you can't find the album artist info in foobar at all (f.ex it's not stored in a BAND tag or any other tag you can see), is it possible for you to remap or copy that information to a new tag that foobar will find using MP3Tag?

Once you can find that information in foobar, mark the files you want to change the info for, then right click and choose properties from the drop down menu. Down in the bottom left of the properties window, click the "tools" button and choose "automatically fill values".

http://img806.imageshack.us/img806/7870/foobarc.png

It should bring up a window for automatically filling values. Click the source button and choose "other". Write the %NAME OF THE TAG% which contains the information you'd like to fill into the album artists tag in the text box next to it (in my example, that info is stored in %BAND%). Then in the pattern text box, simply write %album artist% and click OK. Then click OK again in the Properties window to write the changes to the files!

well %Band% worked! but only partially. Their are still songs that have no Album Artist or a Band tag. Even songs within the same album are randomly missing the metadata. it seems to be for both MP4 and ID3V2.4 tags. and these aren't showing up in either mp3tag or foobar. The data still exists in itunes too. Soy confused.

I wish I could use images to show the issue...

You can I should think :)

Just get the problem up on screen, press PrtScn, then open paint and press CTRL + V to paste the screenshot. Save the picture and upload it to an imagehost, f.ex ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

I can't post pictures yet because i can't include hyper-links until I get 15 posts. dumb.

While I work on that I have another little issue. noise I recall you mentioned some way to use quick tagger to assign keyboard shortcuts to assign ratings in your music? I have the quick tagger, but I'm not sure how to make the field name and what Values for that. I just can't stand having to right-click every time I want to rate a song.

You can indicate what the link to the picture would be and we can write it up in our browsers. F.ex just write hxxp://picture.address/here.jpg

As for quick tagger and making keyboard shortcuts, try something like this :

http://i52.tinypic.com/28r30g6.png

Here you can see the field at the top is called rating and it has values from 1 to 5 separated by semicolons. Press OK or Apply to save the change ..

Then go to the keyboard shortcuts setup.

http://i51.tinypic.com/91c4ue.png

Filter list by something like quick tagger rating like I've done, find the action you wanna shortcut and click inside the Key box. Do the shortcut key combo you'd like to trigger the action. I use SHIFT+1, 2, 3 etc. for ratings and SHIFT+0 to remove that field entirely.

The first pic is when i filter out Album Artist. This example shows how the Low End Theory album by A Tribe Called Quest only has two songs. The second pic is without the filter, and shows the full album there. The last pic is of mp3tag, which shows the same thing as the first filter. I don't know where the tag is...

hxxp://img517.imageshack.us/i/foobar1w.png/
hxxp://img5.imageshack.us/i/foobar2n.png/
hxxp://img402.imageshack.us/i/foobar3.png/

your first filter is set to %album artist%, which is different than %artist%. if you look again in mp3tag, you'll see that only two tracks from that album have anything set in the %album artist% field. no mysteries here.

some recent screens of my config :)

http://lulzimg.com/i13/8d6b83.png
http://lulzimg.com/i13/a70b45.png

Here's a little piece I find necessary: a way to limit the number of songs in an autoplaylist. I want to make a playlist that has my 40 top played, but I can't seem to find an operator that will allow me to do that. is there any way to do this?

so I'm done putting up with darkone, and I'm taking the plunge into manual foobar customization. I hope you guys can help me.

I modified my darkone and changed the background to black and changed some other colours and details, but yeah I kind of getting sick of looking at it now. I usually get sick of certain layouts after a while and change it radically, I might go back to a smaller more compact layout like I had before.

Manual foobar customisation is tricky enough when starting out but once you know what's what in the preferences and how the scripting code works it's not too difficult.

OK, first question. I'm using columns UI and it seems really finnicky.

I included my columns ui layout. All I want is the two items I arrowed on top of each other so they are nice and wide.

Thanks

http://ptpimg.me/24r7bp.jpg

Your channel spectrum panel and your waveform seekbar are inside a horisontal splitter. A horisontal splitter splits stuff horisontally, for example it would split AB like A|B which is what has happened to your panels.

Try changing the horisontal splitter into a vertical splitter ;)

Next up, I'd like it to show which MP3 VBR setting a given file was encoded at. DarkOne had this and now I miss it.

If you have a menu in your foobar, check "help" and then title formatting - OR you can go to foobar's folder and find titleformat_help.html and open it .. OR you can find them on the net (although sites may not be completely up to date).

Here's a site which has this info :

Foobar2000:Title Formatting Reference - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

So, if you want to show something like codec and bitrate, you have a look for it on the page I pasted above and should find something like this :

If you have an info panel, you can add something like the following to it : [%codec%][ %codec_profile%][ | %bitrate%]

If you're listening to a 320 CBR MP3, then the above should show something like : MP3 CBR | 320

http://i.imgur.com/XbyI1.png

I think I'm finally satisfied with my setup. The waveform seekbar is a godsend for skimming through songs.

Having a bit of difficulty with something. I'm trying to create a button that shows the Filter Results (Playback) playlist when clicked, like on the DarkOne skin. I tried to do this by creating a new button in button options and assigning the command 'View/Switch to playlist/Filter Results (Playback)', it works fine for a short while but then just stops working all of a sudden and I have to reassign the button command to get it to work again. Anybody know a better way of doing this?

EDIT: Never mind, got it sorted.

i love foobar2000

http://i25.lulzimg.com/b08ec6.png

http://i25.lulzimg.com/29a135.png

http://i25.lulzimg.com/b2a981.png

My current incarnation:

http://i752.photobucket.com/albums/x...ar2000mk10.jpg

A quick question regarding ipod synchronisation using the ipod manager. Is there a way you can select what albums you don't want put on your ipod without having to manually remove them? My ipod is nearly full because my entire library is on it and there's a few albums I'll probably never listen to.

No, you need to do it manually.

But if you create an "iPod" playlist then use the "Sync with iPod" function, you can just edit the playlist then re-sync and it should sort you out.

Cheers I'll try that instead.

sorting and filtering by country is exactly what i've been looking for since a long time!!! pleeeeease tell me how you do that :p

It's quite simple. If you use foobar, simply tag all your music with something like a country tag. F.ex you give all songs by the band Yes the tag country with the value England and do similar stuff for all other bands and artists. Then you install a foobar theme which has a library tree or add it to a theme yourself and then you use that country tag in the library tree sorting script.

If you've no idea at all what I meant by all that and have no prior experience with foobar and simple scripting, then of course it is a little more difficult.

yeah, i've never used foobar before :(... anyway:

done it ;) (right click/properties/add new field)


mmh... reading through the first pages of this topic, i've installed the Columns UI. And also this ht tp://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/Album_List_Panel_%28foo_uie_albumlist%29

but then i've noticed that foobar comes already with a tree album list (you just need to enable eat going to view/layout/quick setup and choosing one of the layouts with the tree).

So... what's the difference in using the default album tree or installing something like the one i have linked?


MUHAHAHAHH!!!!!!

i've made it!!! :ar_15s:

[IMG]ht tp://i.imgur.com/sILoP.png[/IMG]

(sorry it say's i can't paste external urls cause i'm a new member... :s)


for the ones who have the same problem as me: file/preferences/media library/album list then add a new row called country and write something like this:



tore just to be sure, is this the right way of doing it?

Yup, that looks about right :)

If the library tree you use can do the job and you're happy with it, then just use it!