Foobar - A minimal fully featured media player [Hack Your Day]

[EmptyNest]

I’ve been using Foobar for a while now and it just struck me that this is a great little app to show you guys. It shows that you can even find productivity in your media player. The application is very small, it’s memory footprint is around 5,000, very small compared to other players, and the design is extremely simple, minimalistic. Stop, play, forward, back, repeat and loop seems to be all there is to it.
If you look a bit deeper though, you’ll find that you can download (or write) plugins to transform it into a monster media player app which can easily outdo the best of them in looks, and functionality. Making it look and handle exactly like you want is not that easy, but at least it’s possible. Read on and I’ll introduce this cool application in a bit more detail.

When you first start the application and load in some music, you’ll see something like the screenshot to the right. It is extremely simple, no flashy skins and cool looking, but utterly useless icons. For people who have an older laptop this is essential if they also want to run a browser, MS Word and Photoshop too. With an album loaded and playing the 5,000 K memory usage only went up to 6,000 which is pretty good considering that Windows Media player eats 13,000 K, more than double.
One of the most unique features Foobar offers is “tabbed browsing”. it allows you to work in tabs just like Firefox does, which is great if you want to have two compilations open at the same time. You can double click on the tab name to rename the tab any time for easy navigation and you can easily close any one of them using the middle mouse button. Overall navigation is extremely simple, especially if you use the music library.
Go to the Library menu and click configure to set an directory for your music. The catalogue will be built and you can add files and albums easily to your compilations. The way this works is quite the same as other apps, but somehow it feels different. I can’t really explain this, try it out for yourself. I listen to whole albums almost all the time, so I can just click on the album viewer option, click on the album I like and in the tab only that selection is shown. I can then immediatly click to play. in many other applications, like Winamp, if I add an album to the playlist there is usually a 1 second time lag. Here there isn’t, and although this is not much, this smoothness applies to the whole app.
My usage of Foobar ends here, but there are oh so many ways you can use it. Visit The this great Foobar extensions page to find some useful tools, but be warned this is not as easy as installing plugins for Firefox. Some plugins require other plugins, so you will need to spend some time here. However there are great ones, so the time is definitely worth it. You can change the simple app pictured at the top to the one you can see here to the left (skin here), add other functions and a lot more!
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