foobar2000 is an application to manage your music library and play songs, a task in which it excels, however a quick glance at its interface will reveal which appears to be it’s biggest flaw — yet might be its salient benefit. It has an interface which seems not to have evolved beyond the Windows 95 days. While most media management applications have heavily customized interfaces which look like a operating system from a SciFi flick, foobar2000 keeps it simple and focuses on the task at hand. If you are the kind of person who is only distracted by the shiny interfaces and skins, you will find that foobar2000 offers the same utility in a much less distracting package.
foobar200 is a heavily configurable and extensible application, through its support for themes, you can change minor visual parameters. With plugins / components however you can completely change the looks of the application and add powerful new features. foobar2000 has a free SDK available to those who wish to write components for foobar2000 and hence there are a good number of third party components available which do everything from completely changing the UI to adding support for mass-tagging, Last.FM, iPod management, different file formats for input and output etc.
As for the application itself, it comes with a number of components to begin with and has some powerful features, such as:
- Powerful media library which can scan your media folders
- Very flexible UI which can be fully configured to display your music collection the way you want
- Support for a virtually all media formats, natively and through extensions
- Support for playing pack entire albums from inside a zip / 7z file
- Can convert media files between formats
- Can rip Audio CDs
- Gapless playback
- Unicode support
- Advanced tagging
- Replay Gain support
- Supports streaming audio
These are just a few of the features. As we mentioned before foobar2000 can be extended with components, which can add additional features. The latest 1.1 version even includes a new simple to use mechanism for installing components which anyone can use with ease — earlier versions required manually extracting files to the foobar2000 directory. The foobar2000 application is a small 3.1MB download which can even be installed in portable mode on an external hard disk or pendrive.
You can download foobar2000 from here. For a list of all features download click here.