foobar2000
A free, alternative audio player for Windows that boasts powerful addons
Operating system: Windows
Publisher: Peter Pawlowski
Release : foobar2000 1.4.5 Beta 2
Antivirus check: passed
Foobar2000 is a very popular and convenient audio player, which was created by one of the developers of the world-famous player Winamp - Peter Pavlovsky. But that's not the main advantage of Fubar 2000. This player is rightly at the top of the list of programs for high quality sound reproduction. Very moderate in terms of resource consumption, Foubar has a very wide range of possibilities and flexible adjustment to its specific needs. The player can work with a huge number of various plugins, ranging from support for some exotic audio formats, recording systems Audio CD discs to various systems of visualization and streaming of Internet radio stations. Minimalistic interface of the program by default may be unusual for users who have just migrated to Foobar from any other player, but after a couple of hours of work with this player interface will seem native and pleasant. At the same time, it is possible to customize the appearance and add various extensions, such as displaying an album picture (cover) as a background in the playlist window.
High quality playback is achieved through accurate audio playback, without any "enhancements" or other sound-changing options. The Foobar2000's approximate software audio output can be easily displayed as follows:
Foobar2000 offers high-quality, accurate audio playback with vast customization and plugin support, using minimal system resources.
source → decoder → postprocessor → volume control → bit depth converter → audio output.
The source is a Lossless (lossless compression of WAV, FLAC, WV, APE, TAK, TTA and others) or Lossy (lossy compression of MP3, OGG, AAC, MPC and so on) file format;
Decoder - convert the original audio to PCM (pulse-code modulation) with floating point (32 bits);
postprocessor - in Fubar, it is used to convert or decode HDCD and DTS formats;
Volume knob - The volume knob built into the player;
Bit depth converter - used to convert the depth of audio bits to be played back on the sound card, depending on the plugin that outputs the audio;
audio output - a bridge between the player and sound card, there is support for DirectSound, Kernel Streaming, ASIO, WASAPI Shared and WASAPI Exclusive.
It is worth noting that the player is free of charge, and you can find a lot of ready-made assemblies in the network.
- open architecture of components, allowing third-party developers to expand the functionality of the player;
- supports audio formats "out of the box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC;
- audio formats supported through official extensions: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; on-the-fly extraction from RAR, 7-ZIP and ZIP archives;
- Full support for Unicode on Windows NT;
- ReplayGain support;
- takes up very little RAM, efficiently processes really large playlists;
- more information about the file;
- very flexible playlist display;
- customizable hotkeys;
- most of the standard components are openourced under the BSD license (source included with the SDK).
PROS
Lightweight, low system resource usage.
Supports a wide range of audio formats.
CONS
Lacks built-in streaming options.
Documentation could be improved for easier understanding.
