Id like to know all the ins and outs of customizing it and where to find this stuff out. Anyone here use it and really trick it out? Is it a thing where one has to know programming code and shit like that?

I used it for a long time when I was on Windows, miss it sorely. Make sure to get the colums_ui plugin and the azarel theme. The theme is kind of tricky to find.

Ever been to www.hydrogenaudio.org? There's an entire subforum there devoted to foobar with tons of great info.

I think Sketch is your best bet regarding FOObar, Dr. PH. He's a known genius when it comes to that.

And yet that bastard is nowhere to be found. I bet the two Chrises ran him off.

i really want to like foobar. it could be like the firefox of music players, with all its extra goodies. however, they extremely hard to find, then to install them, while making sure that your version is compatible with the plugin, not to mention the stock interface looks like ass.

The best FAQ is in French but I think it has been translated to English. I dont have my bookmarks from my office computer but if you havent been helped - bump this later on. (After Im done moving) Hydrogenaudio is the BBS for Foobar.

To answer your question though- it isnt hard to get Foobar to do what you want once you understand how the coding is implemented. I havent 'tricked' my Foobar out graphically because I like to maintain the small memory footprint but getting plugins to work hasnt been a problem.

Foobar will never be pretty like some of the other players, but I'll continue to use it just for features like replaygain support. I haven't really taken time to learn how to trick it out though. I installed columnsui and someone's theme and that's about it. I'd rather listen to a media player than look at it so that's good enough for me.

is it better than winamp 5, and if so, why?

Dude is only a PM away.

Ubernet.org had a good setup guide that I can no longer find. Might have it in PDF format, though. This may be the best of any place to start (and has some selling points for partlycloudy):

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php ... Foobar2000

ok I found the manual that I believe was translated from the french- since I am in the process of reinstalling foobar and I remember this post, I figured Id put up the link here

http://eolindel.free.fr/foobar/accueil.shtml

for those who were interested in foobar but the amount of customization required put them off; the new release is much more user friendly.. thought I would bump this since I just upgraded.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Thanks, Paul.

I've just kept my customizations from the past few releases and still enjoying it greatly. The wiki (in my post above) is still getting frequent updates.

nice, thanks paul. i like the new interface.

Back in high school when I was taking C++, my professor would use this instead of traditional curses when a program didn't work.

yeah, i wish they would make it work better for linux

does anyone use replay gain?

My sense is that it does more than standardize levels ; sound seems to get muddy when normalized.

Im listening to mainly mp3s on Grados SR-80s.

I haven't noticed anything RG-specific... when the sound is grating enough to be annoying on Vorbis q5 + RG + Shure SE310s / Senn PX-100, I find the same annoyance with FLAC on my home stereo without RG. From there I usually blame it on lousy mastering.

I'm officially on the foobar train. I am pretty impressed so far.

I'm sick of Winamp crashing and having last.fm log in problems. The portable USB version works much better.