A new category… Cool Free Software. The first entry will be my audio player of choice:
It’s called Foobar 2000. If you’re looking for pretty skins and flashy visual plugins you should go elsewhere. Foobar 2000 is all about function:
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.
I can listen to MP3’s on my hard drive and rip more CD’s to popular formats at the same time. I don’t have to do one or the other. It’s that powerful.
One plugin I personally utilise is the XM Online (foo_xm). It allows me to listen to Opie and Anthony without having to use the horrendous Windows Media Player based version at the XMradio site. You still need an XM subscription, but the freedom of having a decent player with which to listen is welcome.
There’s also a plugin for audioscrobbler (foo_audioscrobbler)so you can keep track of your listening tastes at last.fm. Here’s my user profile on the site so you can have a look at the crap I listen to.
![\"Mike](\"http://blog.mikebrowne.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Browne-190px.jpg\" "\\"Mike")