Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats (MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA).

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Issues fixed for Beta 7

• Bug: Properties / Capitalize not working correctly on multi-line values.
• Bug: Crash when processing certain RAR archives created in store mode.
• Bug: Added files sometimes appear in the wrong playlist.
• Regression: Slow decoding of certain file formats (wrong compiler settings).
• Usability: Certain single-keystroke keyboard shortcut mappings such as +/- keys still clash with typing into editboxes.

Beta 7 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats (MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA).

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Issues fixed for Beta 6

• Usability: Single-keystroke keyboard shortcut mappings taking priority over typing into editboxes.
• Bug: Main window size not remembered on first run after installing.
• Bug: Incorrectly formatted file size in Playlist Manager, Selection Properties and Properties dialog.
• Usability: File Operations component sometimes creates files or folders that are not accessible for Windows Explorer.

Beta 6 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats (MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA).

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Issues fixed for Beta 5

• Bug: File Types preferences page - incorrect icon order after sorting the file format list.

Beta 5 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Issues fixed in beta 4 :

• Bug: "Reset Page" doesn’t reset playback state display formatting settings in Preferences / Display / Default User Interface.
• Glitch: When starting playback of slow-to-open files/streams, status bar still shows "stopped".
• Glitch: MP3 decoder was using wrong compiler settings, resulting in a slowdown.
• Regression: Some Converter error messages less readable than in pre-0.9.5.
• Usability: "Send to Playlist" dialog is modal.
• Usability: "Create Album List View from These Items" dialog content doesn’t update with moving/deleting files.
• Bug: When using the copy command in album list and pasting the result in search filter the last letter is not copied
• Usability: Open Audio CD dialog: "Add To Playlist" button not disabled when currently active playlist is an autoplaylist
• Usability: Open Audio CD dialog: "Open Audio CD…" menu command spawns another dialog instead of activating already existing one when one already exists
• Usability: Open Audio CD dialog: "Rip" button not always grayed out when Converter component is not available

Beta 4 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Issues fixed in beta 3 :

• Regression: Installing 0.9.5 beta 1 or beta 2 on Windows XP requires administrator rights
• Bug: Notification area icon reacts when a neighbouring icon vanishes after being double-clicked
• Feature: Option to have mouse wheel affect the UI Element under the mouse pointer
• Bug: Can’t undo sort operations on non-force-sorted autoplaylists
• Accessibility: Keyboard focus is trapped on the menu in certain situtations
• Bug: Certain layouts are not rendered correctly after loading until the window is resized
• Bug: Tab characters not expanded properly in status bar (temporary workaround)
• Bug: Can’t load theme files into scratchbox through drag&drop
• Bug: Hitting page up button after selecting an album through clicking on group header navigates to the top of the playlist instead of just up by one page
• Bug: Weird selection behaviour when selecting several playlist in the playlist switcher with the right mouse button and shift

Beta 3 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Click here to see changelog for Foobar2000 version 0.9.5.

Beta 2 has been released. Test it out now!

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

A new beta version has been released! Changelog below and screenshots!

• New Default User Interface

  • Allows embedding of Album List and other components in the main window

  • Quick setup dialog on first startup allowing easy UI customization

  • Theme import/export support for transferring appearance-related settings easily

  • Built-in playlist view supports columns and grouping

  • New Playlist Search dialog

  • Embedded album art support

  • New built-in spectrum visualisation

• New Album List component

  • Updates automatically with Media Library content changes (“Refresh” command no longer needed)

  • Embeddable in the main window

  • Supports direct creation of autoplaylists from Album List tree branches

• Properties dialog improvements

  • New commands: “Format from Other Fields”, “Capitalize”, “Clean Up”

  • Improved “Automatically Fill Values” functionality

  • Improved Windows Clipboard interaction - now you can use copy/paste to transfer values between fields or between different sets of tracks

• Converter component improvements

  • Replaced “show output directory when done” functionality with a new dialog showing a list of created tracks

  • Built-in support for writing AU/SND and AIFF files

  • Updated FLAC support - FLAC encoding now requires FLAC encoder 1.2.0 or newer

  • Improved handling of hung command-line encoder processes

• Audio format decoding updates

  • Updated libFLAC to 1.2.0

  • Rewritten support for AU/SND and AIFF audio formats

• New “File Operations” component, for moving, copying and deleting audio files

• Old Masstagger component no longer included with the installer (available for download separately)

• Windows XP or newer is now required

Screenshot of new default interface. You actually can choose how you want your UI to be.

Quick setup for you to choose already preset UI and components.

You foobar2000 can look like this.

Or like this!

Or even like this and many more.

Click on Images to enlarge.

As usual, with the new default user interface, it still is the same “dull” interface compared with the interface that many people craves like Winamp’s interface. But, as I have mentioned before, who in the hell looks at the interface when listening to music? Don’t expect it to have Winamp like interface now or in the future.

Well, foobar2000 is an audio player for audiophiles yet good enough for beginners out-of-box and it really lives up to it’s reputation.  If you still in doubt, why not try it and see for yourself?

Want to try the beta? Grab it here!

Foobar2000 has released version 0.9.4.5!!! Download it here!!!

Changelog:

• Musepack SV8 decoding support

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Features

• Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.
• Full unicode support.
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component (requires external commandline encoder executables for different output formats).
• ReplayGain support - both playback and calculation.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

Source : foobar2000.org

Yup, most people dislike the interface, because it is bland and looks just like any normal windows in Windows. Well, here is what I think though. Is the interface really important? or is the sound that is produced that is more important? I know Winamp has thousands and thousands of skins, but when you are listening to music and songs while doing something else, skins or not it is not important, that’s of course unless someone out there actually listens to music while looking at the Winamp player, is there anyone like that?

Anyway, I don’t really care if the interface is dull, bland or even looks like age old windows. What is important is the sound that is produced! Yeah, maybe some people might argue that because Peter (he is the developer of foobar2000) which he was a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft, Peter’s Winamp directsound plugin which Winamp used as the default output plugin is(might be) the same as the default output component in foobar2000. Well, I can’t say anything about foobar2000’s default output component, since I don’t use it. I used Kernel Streaming instead. Kernel Streaming or ks for short, honestly it sounds better than the directsound plugin. In my opinion that is. Don’t come shooting at me after you tried it yourself and found that it doesn’t make any differences using directsound or Kernel Streaming .

Another feature that I like about foobar2000 is that it has “tabbed playlists” (which is something like Firefox’s tabbed browsing.

Click on Image to enlarge.

I can have multiple playlists in foobar2000 which saves me the time to load each playlists one at a time. I just just tabbed to the next playlists with a click of a mouse.

Another feature that foobar2000 has is able to playback audio files from archives! Meaning that you can zip/rar your audio files and foobar2000 can playback from the archives without you having to unzip/unrar the audio files. In a way it helps free up more space on your computer. (You need to install the component though, default installation doesn’t install the archive reader component.)

Even though it is an advanced audio player, it is good to go after you install it, even without changing any options at all. It’s just that simple. Why don’t you try it?

Download foobar2000 v 0.9.4.4 NOW!
Beta version can be found here!

Note : foobar2000 only runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit edition, Windows Vista.

Original software is very expensive for the “normal” people to afford. What some “normal” computer/internet user don’t know is that there are many “free” alternatives out there that is just a good or even better than the “Paid” Original Softwares.

My computer is full of these Freewares/Sharewares/Open Source software programs. They might be “free”, but their functionality is just a good as retailed software.

Here is a list of Freewares/Sharewares/Open Source software that I used.

Freewares/Open Source

• foobar2000 - It is a free audio player. It’s light, it’s compact and it’s simple(out of the box). And it also sounds better.  For advanced users, there is TONS of options to tweak and additional components to maximize listening value! Download foobar2000 v0.9.4.4 now!
• Firefox -  It is an alternative web browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox is more secure, fully customizable and has lots of new features like spell checker, tab browsing, advanced bookmarking/history functionality (upcoming version of Firefox) and many more features that Internet Explorer lacks. Highly recommended and it’s FREE! Latest version is 2.0.0.7
• Thunderbird -  It is an alternative mail client to Microsoft’s Outlook. Thunderbird aims to be a simple mail,newsgroup and news feed client. It also has junk-mail filtering, multiple mail-box management, themes and many other features. Highly recommended and it’s FREE. Latest version is 2.0.0.6
• 7zip - It is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. It also supports unpacking all type of file archiver like RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS. My experiences of using 7zip is very pleasant, as it is hassle free and simple to use. It’s shell integration with windows is very neat and you don’t even have to open the main program to uncompress an archive file! Latest version is 4.42
• irfanview - It is a very compact and simple graphic viewer for windows! You can view, convert, optimize, scan&print, create slideshows, play movies and sound and many many more with this software. The installation file is small and it only takes up a few megabytes of space. It loads fast and has tons of options for image manipulations. And best of all, it is FREE. Latest version is 4.00
• Spybot Search and Destroy- Detects most spyware/adwares and removes them. It also can immunized your system from future spywares/adwares attacks. Latest version is 1.5.1.15
• Spywareblaster - Prevention program against browsing related spywares. (ActiveX based) Works with Spybot Search and Destroy. Latest version is 3.5.1
• Media Player Classic - It is a compact video/audio player. I like to use this software because of it’s user friendly interface and it can play almost any video filetypes you throw at it (mkv, avi, ogm..etc). Latest version is 6.4.9.0
• Filezilla - This is an Open Source ftp client. It’s very easy to use and has lots of features like site manager, message log, file and folder view, and the transfer queue. I only used Filezilla recently, and I feel it is a very good open source software to upload your files to your ftp, webhost..etc. Latest version is 3.0.1

Sharewares/Free Version

• Avg Free anti-virus - AVG Free is the free version of AVG Anti-virus software. Even though this free version has limited functionality compared with the paid version, but I feel it is good enough for the normal users. The free version has realtime protection, auto-update of virus definition and modules, auto-scanning. Which is more than enough for normal daily use. Latest version is 7.5.488

The above are some of the Freewares/Sharewares/Open Source software that I used daily. They might be free but from my experiences of using them on a daily basis, they are better than retailed softwares out there. I would say some of these freewares/sharewares/Open Source software are even better than retailed softwares. Why pay when you can get free alternatives?

Note : All versions are correct as of 12th October 2007.