Foobar2000 - Support and Discussions
 

I know I'm not the only one who's learning Foobar2000 these days. It's not super easy to those who know nothing of scripting and so on, so let's get our heads together in this thread and see if we can solve our problems. :)

If there's anything, ask away!


I installed Foobar only yesterday, but it is coming together quite nicely. It takes a little while, but I'm figuring stuff out.

However, there are a few problems. Number 1 is that I have a problem with playlist sorting. I have a library tree which is set up with different filters or queries if you want. One shows all Mixed Artists Compilation albums (%album artist% IS Various artists). A problem I had when I first did this was that it was sorting by artist, then albums. However, I managed to sort out that by fiddling with the playlist sorting rules. I rewrote it to this :

Now I wanted to add another level to the playlist sorting hierarchy, one for disc number since many albums are on multiple discs - especially compilations.

I added a line so that my playlist sorting follows this script :

This works beautifully :) Check out the result here!

However, the problem comes when I'm looking at albums which do not have multiple discs. The level of the sorting hierarchy is still there, but since it has no information to sort by, it shows up as just a line basically.

You can see the problem here. Check out the top album - under the line with the band and the album title, there's another line. I would like to be able to have a conditional sorting hierarchy where that line doesn't show if the %disc number% tag is empty!

Can anyone help?

Ah, nevermind!

I just did this all in one line :

and it works fine :p:

edit - too late! anyway i'll leave my post:

as far as i know, the existence of a line cannot be conditional.

your best bet is to put it all on one line.

by the way, you can also use this syntax which will return the first value if the tag is present, and the second (in this case null) value if it is empty:

$if(%disc number%,CD %disc number%,)

here is the script i use, and the result for multi-disc albums

http://imgkk.com/t/5kiqBt.png

Strange, I tried out your script, but it splits up my compilation albums. I can't see why as it organizes by %album artist% first which is Various Artists on all my compilation albums :confused:

edit :

Ah, nevermind. It was the date tag!

edit 2 :

By the way, can I have conditions in my library tree?

Compilation albums are like this :

which shows like this :

• 100 Disco Hits
  • Disc 1
  • Disc 2
  • Disc 3
  • Disc 4
  • Disc 5

However, if the %disc number% is empty, this happens :

• Absolute Christmas
  • Disc ?

I'd like it to be conditional so that CDs only come up if the %disc number% tag has a value. It's not a biggie, but why not? :D

edit again :

Sorry, I'm figuring out stuff on my own again .. :p

.. works nicely!

I've run into another problem which I can't figure out. All my soundtracks and compilations are sorting nicely, but with one exception. Blade Runner just won't and I can't for the life of me figure out why :confused:

Screenshot

Any ideas?

ok firstly, you can use square brackets [] to make things only show up if they are present

so [Disc %disc number%] will only appear if the tag is filled.

for sorting on your blade runner - it might have to do with the option in the Library Tree dialog where you can tell the component how to sort files when it sends them to the playlist.

Ah, nice tip .. Thanks again :)

did you fix the blade runner issue?

sometimes if i just remove the tag then fill it out again it will fix little issues like that...

No, I couldn't find the cause of it. I tried removing nearly all the tags and so on and then retag, but - same issue. I also noticed conflicting album arts could perhaps cause something like that, so I removed that as well and so on .. What I did is I gave up and redownloaded the whole thing. :p:

ok now i have a question for you :D

how do you keep your comps and soundtracks from showing up in your Albums/EPs/Singles area?

Right now, the solution is rather unrefined. Here it is :

I'm using library tree (as you know) and that's my active filter for that particular branching order :)

edit :

I wrote it more to get the effect if you understand what I mean. I guess I might make a type tag or something which says what kind of album any album is, then use that .. or some other solution in the future.

For now it works :p:

I've now made a %type% tag where I have information about what kind of collection it is, if it's a studio album, live album, single, ep, bootleg, mixed artist compilation, soundtrack and so on. I've put it in the sorting and it works beautifully. :)

I've also made tags for debuts (yes (TRUE)/no (missing)) and bonus tracks that I use in grouping.

So far it's all woking out great and I'm loving it :D

But, I got a question - how (or where) did you get that nifty stuff with the flags, information and so on on the right hand side of your foobar?

talking with you also inspired me to fix up my type categories, and now i have a great categorization system for everything from 7" vinyl to remix albums. sweet.

ok so the stuff on the right side is a mix of things. the artist image at the bottom i do manually, and just point the CUI album art viewer to an artist.jpg image i keep in each album's folder.

the middle bit i use a component called Track Info Mod. i script it to pull flag images out of a directory based on a %country% tag, and filetype images based on the codec. the rest gets scripted to display standard file information.

behind that is a biography tab which uses the Biography Panel plugin to pull artist biographies off of last.fm

and behind that is foo_uie_lyrics_panel showing the contents of my %unsynced lyrics% tag.

i'm happy to share my scripts, so let me know if you want them :D

I think I found the biography script and I have a different solution for lyrics, but I'd love the Track Info Mod stuff. It looks very neat the way you've done it, I must say. :)

ok here it is. it's a real mess, apologies for that. hopefully you can follow it well enough to be able to change some things to suit your system. you'll have to change the paths to the image directories since i didn't use relative paths in the script.

the height is fixed, but the width should adjust to the panel you put it in.

bitrate changes color red to green depending on how good it is :D

flag images are from here, just rename to suit your tags:
alpak on deviantART

filetype icons:
A set of icons for different audio file types - Hydrogenaudio Forums

oh, and you need the Playback Statistics component to display some of the info.

Wow, great post :) Thanks so much yet again, noise!

Just a quick question, though. What exactly do I do with the script? I'm not sure where it goes!

well you need foo_uie_trackinfo_mod. once you've installed it, restart foobar, then put a Track Info Mod panel into your config. right-click, go to settings, and paste the script.

Okay, much thanks to you noise, I finally have a foobar which I like :)

I'm not done with it - there are text colours, icons and other little tweaks I wanna get to - but the main stuff I want for now is in place!

SCREENSHOT!

I thought the way you had done artist images seemed like too much work, so what I did was just use the biography panel. It has an option for showing picture, text or both (default) and so I'm using two as you can see. One is now called picture and that fetches a picture from the artists' last.fm page and the other is called Biography and has just the text.

By the way, the country pictures work well but I seem to have a bit of renaming to do as I'd like to have filenames in english. However, the codec picture is acting a bit strange. You can see it in the screenshot .. it's not one of the pictures from the pack so what's the problem? :confused:

Anyways, awesome program and I'll definetly retire old Winamp :D

Any particular reason foobar doesn't want to import ratings I've given certain songs? All I get is a question mark whenever I try to create a column to display them.

I just wrote my own column after reading a quick guide.

If you don't have foo_playcount (you might, so check!), then get it from here and move the dll file to foobar2000/composites folder.

You can now rate your files by right-clicking them and choosing "playback statistics" and then "ratings".

To make a column, you can write one yourself. Right-click the columns, choose "edit this column", then make a new one and call it ratings. Click the scripts tab and then in the script field under the display tab, add something like this :

or, if you'd like some colour :

This should give you a column where ratings are represented by stars. It's a quick way to do it although I'm sure there are more refined ways to do it.

Thanks tore. I was more talking about songs that I had already rated (something like 5k songs), they're in the tags as %RATING MM% but I can't seem to get a column to display that particular tag. I'd really like to carry them over if possible from MediaMonkey.

Easy peasy. I assume %rating mm% is a value from 1 to 5 or something similar? Just rewrite the code snippet and change %rating% to %rating mm% ..

Like so : $rgb(250,173,69)$if(%rating mm%,$repeat(★,%rating mm%),☆)

;)

edit :

By the way, if you want to "rerate" your songs with the foo_playcount context menu, it should be easy to do by filtering only the files you wanna rate from your playlist view.

What I mean is if you could make a filter query like : %rating mm% IS 3

.. Then you would get all songs with that rating. You could then easily mark them all and rate them with 3 stars from the context menu. Afterwards, adjust the filter to say "%rating mm% IS 4", then rerate them to 4 and so on until you've rated everything over again. Should be done in a few minutes.

Just ask if you wanna do this but have some trouble making it happen.

Hmmm...for some reason foobar doesn't show the %rating mm% value as existing in the tags, even though Mp3tag tells me quite clearly they're there.

gotjuice, i remember having the same issue with media monkey ratings. i don't remember the technical reason foobar won't read it, but it has something to do with MM using non-standard tag structures.

so here's what you do. in MM, make a seperate playlist for each rating (1 star, 2 star, etc). import those playlists into foobar, select all, set the appropriate rating, all will be well :D

tore - looking good!

your issue with the filetype ratings is odd. look at the path in the script, especially the filetype. i remember converting the ICO files i sent you a link for into PNG files to use with my config.

don't forget to make use of Replay Gain, it's a great tool to apply lossless normalization at either an album level or a track level.

also there's a scrobbler plugin if you use last.fm at all, it works great.

as you start to work on your playlist, let me know if you need any of my scripts :)

welcome to the wonderful world of foobar!

Well guys, I'm installing and configuring foobar as we speak. Just as a warning, expect lots of cries for help. I have no idea what you guys are even talking about in this thread...

Thanks noise, I'll try that tomorrow. One thing I'm not sure of, can foobar handle 0.5 star ratings or is there something special you need to do with the scripting?

Although my experience is quite limited compared to noise's, right off the bat I'd recommend Columns UI. It made it very simple to set up foobar in the way I wanted it - the overall layout.

foobar2000: Components Repository - Columns UI

Aside from foobar.org, there's also a list containing quite a lot of components for foobar on wiki.hydrogenaudio.org.

anybody know anything about getting foobar to work with rainmeter? All the plugins I have tried so far have caused it to crash or say its outdated.

Got it fixed today :) I thought your %codec%.png was a typo so I changed it to say %codec%.ico and thought the program should just read the ico files as pictures. Sometimes I'm a complete newb .. Making pngs of them all and changing the code back to what it was worked brilliantly!

Regarding the playlist, I'm somewhat at a loss at how to customize it further. Like how can I add a playing icon to the file currently playing or how can I add greyer background colour to every other track in the list just to visually separate them a bit?

I mean something like this where background alternates between white and light blue :

http://sourcetapcrm.sourceforge.net/...vert_list1.jpg

All you have to do is figure out a way to do it. You could perhaps use a system that uses 10 dots or stars so that a rating of f.ex 4.5 can be visualized like this :

⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪

Just an idea!

I don't know what rainmeter is .. is it a winamp plugin?

gotjuice: foobar can handle half ratings - but like tore said, you have to come up with a way to show them using 'text'

Cadrian: try CD Art Display instead. absolutely no better tool for "now playing" gadgets.

tore: no icon option for currently playing unless you change to a different playlist component called ELPlaylist, but then things get incredibly complicated because it's much harder to script.

in my screenshots you can see i just use a little green triangle to point to the currently playing song. when i get home from work i can post the script for it.

and yes you can do playlist stripes, i have a script for that too that i'll post in a few hours :D

Looking forward to it noise :)

Here's a little update on my own foobaring. I'm using library tree which I have to say suits my needs perfectly. I like to access my library in many different ways and the latest way I've worked on for the last hour or so is by genre.

It bothered me quite a lot how there was only one genre tag in Winamp. It made it hard to use genres in a hierarchical system (was that spelled right?). Foobar solves that problem by easily letting you make your own tags, so I've made more genre tags. I call them %supergenre1% to %supergenre3% although I might end up making more. Either way, the old genre tag is the lowest level of the hierarchy.

Essentially, it let's me sort stuff like this :

ex.

Okay, that might not sound too cool, but I quite like it. Finally ordering by genre is starting to make sense :D

Here's a screenshot which is probably more descriptive than my example. Remember I just started this and there's a lot to tagging-wise so it won't look perfect, but you'll get the jist of it!

SCREENIE

hey, nice foobar :D

that's an amazingly complex genre system. i have two levels, and it's stressful enough for me to decide where to put things. but hey - that's the beauty of foobar, it works how you want it to work!

My first genres (supergenre1) are extremely broad, so I might cut those out eventually. We'll see!

Using brackets, I can exclude levels that are non-existant, so that makes it quite versatile too. :)

%supergenre1%\%supergenre2%\[%supergenre3%\]%genre%\%artist%

I can have a simpler system for some kinds of music where I know fewer genres (I don't know electronica that well) and then have a more complex system for those who have more genres or where my knowledge is more extensive such as for prog rock and metal.

well cool, i'm glad you're making good use of foobar's customization capabilities.

now it's time for some playlist column scripts :D

for the now playing column, try this:
of course, you can change the glyph and colours to whatever you like.

for stripes on your playlist, go to Playlist View/Globals/Style and paste this:
note that the stripes cannot appear in blank areas between groups...

Lovely :) The stripes work perfectly!

I don't have a column named "now playing" though ..

this is foobar, you can just make one :D

go to Preferences/Display/Columns UI/Playlist View/Columns

make a new one, then paste the script i gave you into Scripts/Display

Awesome :D Thanks!

edit :

By the way!

I fixed my ratings column script a bit so that it acts like this instead :

http://t/foobar9.png

Click here for a screenie of the whole thang.

Above you can see songs tagged for one album and one where no songs are tagged. The script now looks like this :

The first line just specifies the colour. Change it to suit you! The other repeats full stars X number of times where X is the same as rating. The last line repeats empty stars 5-X times where X is the rating. If there is no rating tag, it repeats empty stars 5-0 times.

Not sure it's the smartest way to do it (I'm a programming newb), but it works. :)

Thanks it worked out a whole lot better then what I was trying to do in rainmeter.... I am looking for a smaller slimmer skin though.

I am still debating on going to media monkey or keep messing with foobar.

I like the way Itunes is categorized and how I can move through it because I been using it for years... but it so slow with all my music on it. I thinking Foobar is the way to go I just gotta find a skin or something I like.

I found a Itunes skin off Deviantart.com, but having trouble getting it to work properly, I just gotta figure out what I am doing wrong.

I'm definetly going to retire winamp. The only thing I'm missing now is the sort of playlist like there is in Winamp. There's the playback queue, but it's not quite the same.

The playlist functionality in foobar might be good enough though. Maybe I'm just not used to it. We'll see.

edit :

And for some reason, I can't edit my context meny much :/

Cadrian have a look on deviantart, there are hundreds of skins for CD Art Display.

tore yes, context menu editing is a feature that got 'removed' recently. you can hide entries, but that's about it. note that if you hold SHIFT while right-clicking you always get the full menu.

as for playlists, that is the one thing about foobar that takes some getting used to. usually people think of playlists as fixed things, but in foobar, they come and go. if you set your filter to send what you click to a new playlist, that becomes your currently playing list of sorts.

also don't forget about autoplaylists. from the main menu, go Library - Search. here, use foobar's regular query syntax, like:

%artist% IS the doors
%added% DURING LAST 1 DAY
%unsynced lyrics% MISSING

then once you have what you want, click the ... button next to the text box to create an autoplaylist. it stays updated automatically.