Software Review 1: Foobar, The Greatest Music Player Ever

A long time ago I discovered iTunes, and it did everything I wanted it to. It would search my music, it would play my music, and had some nifty visuals. However, as my Music collection grew, iTunes wasn't enough anymore, so I started shopping around. I was a HUGE fan of Amarok on Linux right up until the 2.0 update. Amarok 1.3 was the greatest music player I have ever used until Foobar2000 on Windows.

I tried out the Windows music player called Clementine, based on Amarok 1.3, and found it solid, but lacking in the feature department. When I fired up Foobar for the first time (Several months ago) I was given options on how to customize the GUI. Right off the bat I'm starting to like this. Then, I see a very materialistic interface that does exactly what I want. I want to see what's playing now, and browse one artist or album at a time. So that's how I set mine up.

After a bit more digging, I found the preferences menu. More options than you can shake your mouse at. With added components (there is a catalog on the Foobar website) you can add even more options and interface tweaks. There's an API for writing your own components as well.

Natively, Foobar supports almost any audio codec from flac, ogg, mp3, aac, wma, and wav (that i've tried). There is an equalizer, and the option to split stereo into 4 chanels, so if you have a 5.1 setup, you can use more of your speakers than iTunes will use. There is a component for mp3 player syncing, including iPod and iPhone.

The visualizations are the only part of this player that aren't top notch. I have to hand it to Apple when they made the iTunes visualizer (the original, not the new one... bleh...) because nothing has beaten it yet. Foobar does use significantly less memory than any other player I've tried. Weighing in at 41MB of RAM usage after 36 hours of up time when I took that screenshot, it's using less memory than windows explorer.

If you're looking for a basic player with a small footprint, check this one out, it's free, it's easy to install and uninstall, and if you have iTunes, it won't interfere with your music collection sorting like other players will.