foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. Featuring a minimalist interface, it also boasts many features for metadata support and high-quality audio output. The theoretical maximum sampling rate and bit depth for audio output are both far in excess of the capacities of even professional-grade audio equipment. To maximize the audio fidelity of consumer-grade equipment, it provides noise shaping and dithering. It features a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. While the core is closed source, the author provides an extensive SDK under the BSD license. Since version 0.9, foobar2000 supports Windows 2000 and later releases only. Image File history File links Foobar2000v0. ... In software engineering, software maintenance is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the Anno Domini era. ... April 21 is the 111th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (112th in leap years). ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, and audio files. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... Proprietary software is software with restrictions on using, copying and modifying as enforced by the proprietor. ... The BSD license is a permissive license and is one of the most widely used free software licenses. ... A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos and other digital assets and hosted on a particular domain or subdomain on the World Wide Web. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, and audio files. ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... Nullsoft is a software house founded in 1997 by Justin Frankel. ... Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features and core self expression. ... Metadata (Greek meta after and Latin data information) are data that describe other data. ... Similar to dither, noise shaping is a bit reduction technique used to minimize quantization error. ... Dither is a form of noise, or erroneous signal or data which is deliberately added to sample data for the purpose of minimizing quantization error. ... Third party is a term used in several contexts, including: Third party (politics) Third-party manufacturers: See aftermarket. ... A plugin (plug-in, addin, add-in, addon or add-on) is a computer program that interacts with a main (or host) application (a web browser or an email program, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function on demand. ... The text below is generated by a template, which has been proposed for deletion. ... A software development kit (SDK or devkit) is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system or similar. ... The BSD license is a permissive license and is one of the most widely used free software licenses. ... Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptible, interruptible, graphical and business-oriented operating system that was designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor 32-bit Intel x86 computers. ...

Features

Core & minimal installation

• Unicode support.
• Tabbed playlists.
• Gapless playback.
• Low memory footprint.
• Customizable context menus.
• Basic single- and multi-file properties editor.
• Command-line support for named actions supported within the player.
• Media library featuring high-speed searching and arbitrary meta-data field names.
• Native cuesheet support, including internal cuesheets tagged into certain formats.
• Support for many tagging formats including ID3v2^[1], APEv2, Vorbis, ASF and others.
• Rebindable application- or system-wide keyboard shortcuts for any action supported within the player.
• Tone generator for generating pure tones of arbitrary frequency and duration. In the Add Location text box, type tone://Hz,seconds.
• Silence generator for generating silence in between tracks. In the Add Location text box, type silence://seconds.
• Playback of MP1, MP2, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP4/M4A, Musepack, WMA, Speex, WAV, AU, SND, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg FLAC, and WavPack.
• Playback of high resolution audio sources.
• Standard user-interface which integrates seamlessly with Windows and provides a minimal learning curve for new users.
• Titleformat scripting language, commonly called Tagz, which allows the user to change what metadata is shown by the player in various locations like the playlist.^[2]
• Extensive component API which allows developers to change or add almost any feature, including the user interface, decoding of unusual audio files, output to unusual devices, visualizations, and DSP effects.

Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... In the area of graphical user interfaces, a tabbed document interface (TDI) is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs to navigate between them. ... Gapless playback is the seamless playback of digital audio formats. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Cue Sheet in Notepad A cue sheet, or cue file, is an ASCII (plain text) file that specifies how the tracks of a compact disc should be laid out. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... APEv2 tags are used to add metadata, such as the title, artist, or track number, to digital audio files. ... A Vorbis comment is a metadata container used in the Vorbis and FLAC audio file formats. ... Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format) is Microsofts proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ... A keyboard shortcut (also known as an accelerator key, shortcut key, or hotkey) is one or a set of keyboard keys that, when pressed simultaneously, perform a predefined task. ... Pure tone is a single frequency tone with no harmonic content (no overtones). ... This page may meet Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2, sometimes Musicam) is an audio codec defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3. ... MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding format. ... Vorbis is an open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph. ... Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. ... MPEG-4 Part 14, formally ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003, is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. ... Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160-180 kbit/s. ... Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a proprietary compressed audio file format developed by Microsoft. ... Speex is a free software speech codec that claims to be unencumbered by patent restrictions. ... WAV (or WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. ... The Au file format is a simple audio file format that consists of a header of 6 32-bit words and then the data (high-order byte comes first). ... Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data on personal computers. ... FLAC, an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec, is a popular file format for audio data compression. ... WavPack is a free, open source lossless audio compression format developed by David Bryant. ... In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. ... API may refer to: In computing, application programming interface In petroleum industry, American Petroleum Institute In education, Academic Performance Index This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Digital signal processing (DSP) is the study of signals in a digital representation and the processing methods of these signals. ...

Normal installation

• Replay Gain support.
• Audio CD support, including secure CD ripping.
• DSP plugins for equalization, audio limiting, and channel conversion.
• Album list component, displaying a customizable, hierarchical view of media library contents.
• Converter component which allows transcoding from any playable source to various formats.^[3]

Replay Gain is a proposed standard published in 2001 to normalize the perceived loudness of computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. ... A Compact Disc or CD is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. ... Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion from one (usually lossy) codec to another. ...

Full installation

• freedb component for lookup and tagging
• Transparent reading and playback of ZIP and RAR archive files.
• Advanced Masstagger component, capable of complex manipulations of metadata fields using Titleformat scripts.
• ABX comparator, allowing for scientifically-valid distinction between subtle differences in two variants of one track.

freedb is a database of compact disc track listings where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Codec listening test. ...

Additional components

• Convolver DSP component for impulses.
• Batch binary comparison of decoded output.
• Null output component for testing speed of decoding.
• CD burning component which uses Nero Burning ROM.
• File verifier to check for decoding errors that halt playback.
• Autoplaylist component for dynamic playlist generation and updating.
• Playback of Apple Lossless and Monkey's Audio, including .APL links.
• Playback statistics for individual files, for data such as last time of playback and times played.
• Kernel streaming and ASIO output components, which can bypass theoretical problems involving Windows' kmixer.sys.

Nero Burning ROM is a popular optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Linux by Nero AG, formerly Ahead Software. ... Please wikify (format) this article as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ... ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) is a protocol for low-latency digital audio specified by Steinberg. ...

Third-party components

• Last.fm support.
• foosic support.
• Apple iPod support.
• ColumnsUI for adding columns to the user interface.

Last. ... foosic is an automated music database and a playback statistics tracking system which is supported by foobar2000 and AmaroK players. ... Apple Inc. ... iPod (fifth generation) in Apple Universal Dock, iPod nano (second generation) and iPod shuffle (second generation) iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple and launched in 2001. ...

Trivia

• The abbreviation FUBAR sounds a bit like the name Foobar.
• Foobar is a common placeholder name also reffered to as metasyntactic variable used in computer programming .

Look up FUBAR in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with foo. ...

See also

• Comparison of media players

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of media player programs. ...

Notes

1. ^ Reads all, but writes v2.4 UTF-8 by default. As of 0.9.4, supports writing v2.3 tags by demand but advises against it.
2. ^ The official name of the language is now "Titleformat syntax," but the name Tagz is still commonly in use. The language gave rise to the Advanced Title Formatting used in Winamp 5.
3. ^ Output formats are extensible through third-party command-line encoders. Prior to v0.9, the Diskwriter component handled transcoding.

UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, a subsidiary of Time Warner. ...

External links

Official links

• Home Page - foobar2000.org
• Forums - discussion and support
• foobar2000 Knowledgebase at Hydrogenaudio
• #foobar2000 on freenode - discussion and support

The title of this article should be freenode. ...

Components

• List of components for v0.9 from the foobar2000 Knowledgebase including third-party components.
• Third-party Component Listing, including components for all versions of foobar2000.

Other

• Fooblog2000 News blog with configuration and component tips (0.9 version)
• Complete manual (for latest version)
• ShSc.info Wiki A new user guide and FAQ (0.8.3 version)
• User-compiled list of important foobar2000 sites