foobar2000

foobar2000 is [ wonderful / terrible ] because its [ spartan | outdated ] interface and [ versatile | obscure ] functionality are miles [ ahead | behind ] anything else available for Windows.

It's possibly best to think of foobar2000 as a sort of server rack that happens to come pre-assembled with some standard components. You can open the box, stand it up, plug it in, turn on the master switch, and play back common music files in a basic playlist. It will not impress anyone, but then again, server racks generally aren't meant to.

On the other hand, you can dig into the components that are included, assemble them as desired, and fine-tune them in ways that no other music player can lay claim to. This still won't impress anyone just looking for another iTunes or Winamp clone, but if you want to bridge all sorts of functionality that no other single system can manage, visual aesthetics aren't the priority anyhow. (Heck, if you're like me, you just might prefer the understated, resource-light look instead of all those Playskool busy-boxes out there. There's my bias, and I'll own it.)

With foobar2000 and third-party components, I've been able to:

• freely explore hundreds of videogame music data formats,
• play back files from basically the entire history of sound encoding, lossless and lossy both,
• set up a UPnP service to make my organised music library browsable and playable on any system on my network, including my Xbox 360 (back when I used it),
• mass-edit file tags,
• install plugins to alter the sound to work best with various output configurations, from the most basic stereo headphone playback all the way to full 5.1 surround effects, and
• fill a playlist with original Nintendo game music data files, equalise their volume, add a hint of stereo reverb, grab accurate tag information, and render it all to lossless audio files stored in a logical directory structure on a networked system, simultaneously registering them in my music library so I can browse through them and listenm them them remotely via a compressed stream.... all within minutes, and fully automated (save for desired confirmation dialogs, natch).

That having been said, there are negatives:

• The core program code is closed. This is the same evolutionary dead-end that's killed so many other programs in the same space.
• The developers have an unnatural love of undocumented proprietary formats for configuration and playlists. The stated reason is to keep developers of third-party components from not bothering to comply with the unified configuration UI, but all it's done is force workarounds and prevent advanced troubleshooting.
• As the program evolved toward version one-point-zero (it's at v1.3.15 as of this writing) the internals changed dramatically, meaning a whole slew of old plugins stopped working in part or in full because their developers never went back to update them.
• Visualisations come in two flavours: exceedingly basic, or dubiously bridged via an unstable Winamp plugin bridge that hasn't been updated since before Windows 7 came out.

The long and short is this: If you just want something simple and glossy that'll play your haphazard MP3 library, foobar2000 isn't what you're looking for. If you want something that can be (mostly) bent to your will and sculpted into a personalised music conversion-and-playback powerhouse, the effort in setting all that up will be rewarded in full.

[Edited by ElectricKeet, April 15]

Foobar2000 is arguably the best music player on any platform.

The GUI is hideous, it can be made slightly less hideous with arduous tweaking. There used to be plugins to do literally anything, but those no longer work. It used to be possible to instantly search though all the lyrics in your library, but the developer decided that was not cool, so they removed it. To enable that requires some obscure hacks that I cannot find anymore.

The source code is closed, and the developer, being a moron, makes idiotic decisions.

Good programs like this are a cancer, they stifle innovation because nobody wants to write the whole damn thing from scratch, and they block the possibility for incremental improvement because nobody can fork or contribute to the project.