Foobar2000 Review – The Firefox of Media Players!

I have a decent collection of music on my system consisting primarily of mp3, ogg, and wma formats of around 200 GB (yes at the cost of most of my pocket money when I was growing up and then lots more when I started earning). I have been using MediaMonkey primarily to maintain the entire collection in a library format and also to tag and sort them. I have, however, noted a few errors in the tagging function of MediaMonkey and have also noted that MediaMonkey uses RAM in the vicinity of 25-35 MB. Another con that I noted with MediaMonkey is that it never sounds as good as Winamp and especially in some songs the difference becomes very pronounced and noticeable. Winamp on the other hand sounds great, uses RAM in the vicinity of 15-18 MB, but of late it kept crashing whenever I wanted to add my entire collection of music to the Winamp Media Library. This led me to search for an alternative media player that would have the strengths of both MediaMonkey and Winamp, but without their weaknesses. Do note that both are excellent players and would serve 99% of all purpose music playing. It is just that I need a media library and an inbuilt music tagger too along with some additional functionality thrown in. During my search I dabbled with J. River Media Center, which does more than asked for and takes care of your entire media in terms of music, movies and images, but J. River Media Center too was ruled out as it did not integrate with Last.fm, which meant it had to go too. I also tried MusicMatch Jukebox, which did not even play and kept giving the error "MMJB Soundcard problem – waveout format not supported" so even that had to go.

It was at this time that I ran into Foobar2000 thanks to Google, and must say I was and still am thoroughly impressed so much that it has now become my primary music player. Foobar2000 on the initial download is a lean music player with no frills attached and it does its job of playing music exceptionally well. Of note though is that it is just at the beginning with many more good things to come. Foobar2000 like Firefox has many plugins available that you can use to tweak and customize Foobar2000 to your heart’s content, and if you are any bit the fiddler/tweaker that I am then you will surely be installing the plugins for yourself and customizing Foobar2000 just like any Firebox user would be. Let me state however that Foobar2000 is an exceptional player on its own without any plugins and will run just as well right out of the box, but the real fun part is always playing with the plugins and tweaking and finding out for yourself what works best for you. For instance there is a Kernel Streaming support plugin. What this plugin does is it allows you to bypass the Windows kernel mixer and you can get the sound exactly as it is without Windows adding or removing anything from it. Do not worry or fret, it just sounds complicated, though it will take some settings to get it to function, but when it does function you will notice the difference in the sound immediately. There are also a lot many other simple GUI or playlist generating plugins as well as plugins for many other simpler functions. You may or may not need the plugins to fiddle with the interface/GUI, but from my experience many people want their media players to not only sound good, but also look great, and with Foobar2000 even that is possible.

Another good feature of Foobar2000 is that you can load multiple playlists in the main menu and they are displayed as tabbed playlists much like multiple tabs in a tabbed browser and these tabbed playlists will stay even after a system reboot and will only be removed if you choose to remove them, the same like tabs in a tabbed browser. This way anyone can have multiple user generated playlists in the main menu which makes switching between genres very easy and also because of this there is no need to have physical playlists like the kind we have had to use till now (never liked or used them myself anyway).

Foobar2000 also has many other advantages like using very little in terms of system resources. It also has a simple and uncomplicated interface, and of course is totally free. However, a note of caution though. It does take some time to learn and tweak it and you have to set aside some time to tweak the settings so that you can get the best output there is. If you do not do this essential bit of learning and tweaking then you might be wondering what all the song and dance about Foobar2000 is since it will sound just like any other media player. Plug in the Kernel Streaming plugin and Foobar2000 will take off and give sound like it’s from another realm and you will be left wondering how you listened to music all these days without Foobar2000. Mention should be made here however that every tech geek and audiophile will have Foobar2000 installed on their systems and also have tweaked it to the max for the best audio experience ever. The strength of Foobar2000 lies in its ability to process raw sound without letting Windows OS make any changes to it since it bypasses Windows mixing altogether. Another drawback with Foobar2000 would be its plain Jane and simple look (it’s not much of a supermodel), but this can be fixed with plugins though why would anyone want to look at a media player beats me. As for me, I like the lean and mean look and also Foobar2000 is always in the background playing music and not in the foreground or taking up any important system resources. This by itself should justify its existence on your PC, but combined with the best sound output ever (backed with Creative or equivalent hardware) and also that it is freeware makes it just unbeatable as of now.

Do go ahead and try it out for a while and do not write it off immediately. Very soon (and I can assure you of this) everything else will seem inadequate and just not good enough if you are someone like me who plays a lot of music on your computer, and wants the best output in terms of sound there is. Well you got it all in Foobar2000.