foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, iOS, Android,

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, and formerly Windows Phone, developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Standard "skin" elements can be individually augmented or replaced with different dials and buttons, as well as visualizers such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters, which all of them are analysis-oriented, at least for built-in visualizations. foobar2000 offers third-party

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

modifications through a software development kit (SDK). foobar2000 supports many

audio file format An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or audio compression (data), compressed t ...

s, has many features for organizing

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

, files, and folders, and has a converter interface for use with command line encoders. To maximize audio fidelity in cases where resampling or downscaling in bit depth is required, it provides

noise shaping Noise shaping is a technique typically used in digital audio, Image processing, image, and video processing, usually in combination with dithering, as part of the process of Quantization (signal processing), quantization or Audio bit depth, bit-dep ...

and

dither Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and video data, and is ofte ...

ing. There are a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. The core is

closed source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

, whereas the SDK is licensed under the Three-Clause BSD license.

History and development

foobar2000 was first released on 20 December 2002 and developed by Peter Pawłowski, who had previously worked at Nullsoft and developed plugins for Winamp. He created foobar2000 with the audiophile community in mind. The software's mascot and logo icon consists of a white "alien cat". foobar2000 supports Windows, though the support of older versions for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

and Vista has been dropped as of version 1.6 (released 2020).

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...

support was dropped as of version 0.9.5 (released 2008) and Windows 95/ 98/ ME/ NT4 support was dropped as of version 0.9 (released 2006). Most functionality also works as intended under

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, although the program's crash reporter will detect Wine and direct the user to the Wine Bugzilla. The vast majority of plugins and themes work fine, however, certain plugins may cause issues. Safe mode allows users to disable all plugins temporarily to debug the issue. foobar2000 versions since 0.9.5 feature a revamped default interface, with embedded support for album list, album art, spectrum visualization, and some other features and improvements. In May 2016, versions for mobile devices were released, and in January 2018, an early beta version for

was released. In April 2023, version 2.0 was released out of beta with native support for 64-bit, dark mode, and ARM.

Features

Core

At its core, foobar2000 natively supports a range of audio formats, including MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, Audio CD, Speex, and Opus. foobar2000 also has a highly customizable user interface, advanced tagging capabilities and support for ripping Audio CDs, as well as transcoding of all supported audio formats using the Converter component. The player can read inside ZIP, GZIP, and RAR archives. Additional features include ReplayGain support (for both playback and calculation), gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts and support for DSP effects such as equalization and crossfade. Users can configure the foobar2000 Media Library with automated folder watching and Windows Media streaming. The client is built with an open component architecture, allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

Optional

With addons or plugins, foobar2000 can read the APE, HDCD, AC3, DTS, SACD and DVD-Audio formats. Other optional features include playback statistics, CD burning, kernel streaming,

ASIO ''Asio'' is a genus of typical owls, or true owls, in the family Strigidae. This group has representatives over most of the planet, and the short-eared owl is one of the most widespread of all bird species, breeding in Europe, Asia, North Ameri ...

support, WASAPI output compatibility, and a UPnP/ DLNA renderer, media server and controller for networking. Third-party support is also present in the audio client. For instance, foobar2000 supports Last.fm scrobbling and integration with Apple iPod, including album art support and automatic transcoding of audio formats not supported by iPod itself.

Derivative works

foobar2000 developer Peter Pawłowski has also made other audio software, including Boom, which his website describes as an "easy to use audio player intended for casual computer users". It runs on Windows.

Notes

References

External links

*
Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase (HAK)
– official knowledge-base for foobar2000. {{Media player (application software) 2002 software Windows media players Tag editors Windows CD ripping software Android media players Media players Software that uses FFmpeg