I use iTunes and WinAmp. I see alot of people here seem to use foobar. I'm a little confused as to how to set up the skin, and the settings. Also not sure If I should install any addons for it. I'm wondering whether It'll beat using WinAmp for me.

I personally Love foobar. I love how small it is and how quickly it loads my library. I migrated from winamp to foobar about 5 years ago now, and haven't looked back. I just didn't like how bloated the software was getting. This was in the winamp 3.0 days.

I don't really change much for settings. I like the Album list + Properties (tabbed) layout the best as it gives me quick organized access to my music. To get the albums to show up go to file>preferences>media library> then hit add and point it toward your music folder. Takes a minute or two the first time you set it up but it will incrementally update the list every time you open the program.

Here is mine as I've got it.



I like to set up hot keys for volume up, volume down, next track, and pause/play. I primarily use a laptop so it's handy.

That can be set up through file>preferences>general>keyboard shortcuts>addnew

The only other thing I set up is the conversion stuff, as I need to compress flac files to vbr 0 for my mp3 player.

Right click on file in playlist>convert to>...

you can set the output file settings there as well as the naming scheme I use %artist% - %album% - %tracknumber% - %title% which comes out as Jackson Browne - Solo Acoustic Vol. 1 - 01 - Barricades of Heaven

Thats just preference though you can set that stuff how you like.

Flac is supported out of the box. Mp3 compression will require the lame.exe which can be easily found with a quick google search.

As I'm a function over form kind of guy I haven't messed with skins or other addons but I did find this tutorial which looks fairly thorough.


If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to help you out with those.

I think for addons, all you have to do is extract them and place it in the Components folder (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Installing custom skins very much confuses me as well, so don't feel overwhelmed =p.

True.


I don't know how complex skins can get but for me it's just "File->Preferences->Display->Default User Interface->Import Theme". Then I select the theme file and everything is done.

is my layout. preferences > display > default user interface > import theme

I used to be a Winamp lover, but as someone mentioned above, it is too bloated and in my case, it keeps crashing all the time :(. Now I use Foobar and don't look back :). As for skins, there are a few masterpieces. And yes, installing them is quite confusing, but I managed to install the one that I like. Here is a screenshot:

I spent almost a whole day setting it up, but it was worth it, I guess. However, these skins turn Foobar into an almost different program so I had to learn how to do some things again :).

used to have that fooBear skin awhile back, its a nice one