Last.fm is a web service that maintains a history of what you’ve listened to. You’ll need a Last.fm account and a player that can scrobble. Scrobbling is uploading the artist’s name and song title of your currently playing track to Last.fm’s server. foo_audioscobbler allows Foobar to keep your Last.fm profile current.
It replaces the Last.fm client application.
It supports the current submission protocol.
It sends “now playing” notifications to your Last.fm profile.
Optionally, it can import played tracks from your iPod via the foo_dop component.
After you install foo_audioscrobbler, you’ll need to log into your Last.fm account in Foobar’s Preferences menu.
Checks specified media files for decoding errors. Note that with most formats, its accuracy is limited to detecting errors that abort the decoding process.
After installing this Foobar plugin, you’ll have two new menu choices under the right mouse click context menu: Utilities > Verify integrity and Utilities > Verify album with Accuraterip
It’s also possible to see more information if you go to File > Preferences > Advanced > Tools > File Integrity Verifier and enable Verbose AccurateRip Output
Frome the same developer who brought you Foobar2000 comes Boom.
Boom is an easy to use audio player intended for casual computer users who do not wish to spend their time on figuring more sophisticated software out. All of its most important features are easily accessible out-of-the-box.
Features:
No installation or administrator rights required! Just download and run.
Gapless playback of properly encoded files. Enjoy smooth transitions between tracks.
ReplayGain support. External software is currently required to write ReplayGain information to file tags to utilize this functionality.
Contents of your music folders are shown, in a convenient structured genre/artist/album/song view.
By default, contents of “my music” folder or Windows Music library folders are shown. You can configure Boom to index music from any other folders though.
You can install Boom to removable media and have it index contents of the folder it is installed in.
Are your files badly tagged or missing tags all together? No problem, Boom can browse your music library by its folder structure.
Supports variety of popular audio formats, including: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Musepack (MPC), WavPack, WAV, AIFF, MP4/M4A, WMA.
For emergency tagging needs, Boom includes a simplified version of the foobar2000 Properties dialog.
You can extend Foobar2000 functionality by increasing the information the player maintains. Installing the foo_playcount component allows Foobar to both keep track of additional data, and adds the following user available fields:
Date and time a track was first played ~ %first_played%
Date and time a track was last played ~ %last_played%
The number of times a track has been played ~ %play_count%
Date and time a track was first added to the Media Library ~ %added%
Song rating ~ %rating%
Song Rating Playlist Display
The songs rating can now be displayed in a playlist viewer in two ways:
On a 1 to 5 scale with %rating%
Displayed as up to five stars, “★★★”, with %rating_stars%
Displayed as five stars, “★★★☆☆”, with %rating_stars_fixed%
Note: This component should be installed at the same time as Foobar2000, if your goal is to have a complete play count history.
Although rarely used, there exists the capability for standardized emphasis in Red Book CD mastering. As CDs were intended to work on 14-bit audio, a specification for ‘pre-emphasis’ was included to compensate for quantization noise. After production spec was set at 16 bits, quantization noise became less of a concern, but emphasis remained an option through standards revisions. The pre-emphasis is described as a first-order filter with a gain of 10 dB (at 20 dB/decade) and time constants 50 μs and 15 μs ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_(telecommunications)#Red_Book_Audio
Emphasis came about because of early converter design. The entire sampling process was new, and A to D converters exhibited low level noise because of bad linearity in the conversion process. This process added some high frequency broadband noise to the digital signal. Manufacturers overcame this byproduct by boosting (emphasis) the high frequencies during the conversion from analog to digital, and then rolling off (de-emphasis) the high frequencies by the same amount after the conversion back from digital to analog. This process was optional and there was a switch to select emphasis on each track during record. A flag was set in the digital bit-stream, which automatically activated de-emphasis during playback. All CD players, DVD players, and DAT machines detect this flag and turn on a high frequency roll-off in the analog domain during playback. If the digital signal contains emphasis and the flag is missing or turned off, then the roll-off does not occur and the audio will be brighter than normal.
This emphasis feature was the biggest reason why different CD players sounded different when playing back the same CD, or DAT machines differed playing back the same DAT tape. The digital part and the conversion to analog were basically the same in all of the machines. The de-emphasis circuit was implemented in the analog domain using the least expensive circuit to perform the operation. There was high-end EQ on the output of every digital playback device, and there was no standard or calibration for how it was performed. If you played back a CD without emphasis, then all of the CD players sounded pretty much the same. If you played a CD with emphasis, then each playback device sounded very different from every other player.
Producers and engineers started turning off the emphasis switches. Converters were getting better so there was less converter noise, and the use of de-emphasis circuits was eliminated. ~ Roger Nicolls
Use post-processing if you want to add correct ReplayGain tags to your files.
Use DSP if you have lossy files that you want to de-emphasize.
Otherwise, there’s no difference. ~ http://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,99394.50.html
Greatly extend the information in your music files by using the foo_discogs component to tag albums with Discogs information. Once the additional Discogs release information is stored in the song tags, it’s possible to search for catalog numbers, secondary artists or studios, etc. You can now also create toolbar buttons which open the corresponding artist or release pages in Discogs, the artist’s own website or other links.
download Discogs album and artist artwork
retrieve more information than most taggers
goes that extra length to make sure retrieved data is correct and well formatted
flexible tag mapping allows you to write only what you want, where you want
use meta-data in tags to display Discogs artist / label / release web pages able to later update specified tags (useful in update ratings)
Foobar2000Playlist Viewers display the current playlist of songs. Different playlist viewers offer various capabilities such as formatting, grouping and visual options. A playlist viewer is usually the central panel and main focus of a Foobar2000 interface. Foobar2000 plays the next song of the current playlist unless the play order has been changed from default, to repeat, random or shuffle. There is a playback queue but it is not visible or used in normal operation.
mtpl Playlist (supports folders, playlist in playlist and sub-tracks)
SimPlaylist (multiple grouping levels, album art, etc.)
SimPlaylist
Adding a custom column to a playlist view: (using play count as an example)
When adding a column view in a playlist, you’ll need to define the column first.
Navigate to Preferences > Display > Default User Interface > Playlist View > Custom Columns
at the bottom of the custom columns windows, click “Add new‘
Name the Column “Played‘ and %play_count% as the ‘pattern’
click apply, ok
Now right click the title bar of the playlist and select “Columns” and make sure ‘Played‘ is selected (checkmarked) and that you can see the column in the playlist, it will be last but you can rearrange it.
ReplayGain is … a technique invented to achieve the same perceived playback loudness of audio files. ~ Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
ReplayGain … allows players to normalize loudness for individual tracks or albums. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels between tracks when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different loudness levels. ~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain
If you’re using track gain, every song is played at 89 dB; no song is any louder than any other. If you’re using album gain, tracks will be played at 89 dB plus or minus a few dB, depending on how much louder or quieter each track is relative to the other tracks on the album. By definition, album gain is not going to make all tracks as loud as possible; the quieter tracks are going to remain that much quieter than the louder tracks, and they’ll average out to 89. ~ Hydrogen Audio
Using ReplayGain in Foobar
(1) First set the ReplayGain target values:
Preferences / Playback / ReplayGain Source mode: by playback order Processing: apply gain and prevent clipping according to peak
Foobar2000 Preferences – Playback – ReplayGain
Recommended Values:
Set Preferences / Preamp / Without RG values: to around -8.0 db
If you are also playing tracks which aren’t RG-tagged, they’ll be playing quite loud in comparison to the RG-tagged ones. To mitigate that, you can set the “Without RG info” Preamp level to, say, -11.9. This will make the player pretend they have -11.9 dB album gain. Thus if you played a non-RG-tagged copy of that loudest track, it would be played at 89 dB instead of its natural 100.91 dB, and would thus match the level that all the RG-tagged tracks are played at. However, then the quieter non-RG-tagged tracks would still be that much quieter. So you may find -8 or so to be a better “without RG info” preamp level, on average.~ HA Forum
I usually set my non-RG preamp to somewhere in the range of -7.0 dB to -9.0 dB. ~ HA Forum
If you listen to modern music -7dB/-10dB value should be correct. If you listen to older music, keep the value a bit lower because the average level of recently released tracks are higher. ~ eolindel.free.fr/foobar0.9/Replaygain
(2) Next scan files:
Select Files / Right mouse / ReplayGain / Scan selection as single album (adds album and track ReplayGain tags)
Once the files are scanned, they can be played.
True Peak Scanner
The foo_truepeak component scans ReplayGain, Dynamic Range, LUFS, PLR RMS values, etc.
Foobar ReplayGain Override Component
For older versions that lack the “by playback order” option, this component provides a way to specify which ReplayGain modes to use for each playback order. Track gain is probably desirable for random playback while with regular playback album gain is more suitable.
Track Volume (-18dB is equivalent to the ReplayGain target volume of 89dB) $if(%replaygain_track_gain%,$puts(X,$sub(-1800,$replace(%replaygain_track_gain%,.,)))$ifequal($get(X),0,0,$ifgreater($get(X),0,$replace(+$substr($num($get(X),4),1,2),+0,+),$replace($substr($num($get(X),5),1,3),-0,-))).$substr($num($get(X),5),4,5) dB)
Album Gain (relative to the ReplayGain target volume) [%replaygain_album_gain%]
ReplayGain’s Album Volume $if(%replaygain_album_gain%,$puts(X,$sub(8900,$replace(%replaygain_album_gain%,.,)))$ifgreater($get(X),9999,$substr($get(X),1,3).$substr($get(X),4,5),$substr($get(X),1,2).$substr($get(X),3,4)) dB))
Album Volume (-18dB is equivalent to the ReplayGain target volume of 89dB) $if(%replaygain_album_gain%,$puts(X,$sub(-1800,$replace(%replaygain_album_gain%,.,)))$ifequal($get(X),0,0,$ifgreater($get(X),0,$replace(+$substr($num($get(X),4),1,2),+0,+),$replace($substr($num($get(X),5),1,3),-0,-))).$substr($num($get(X),5),4,5) dB)
Do you have albums where the artist’s names are in the track title field, and the title of the track is in the artist name field? Here’s how to fix this.
Start by checking the file names. If the file names have both artist name and track title information, then the fix is easy, just retag the files using the Automatically fill values function.
First, select the files, then open the Properties dialog window.
Right click and select Automatically Fill Values…
Then with the source set to File names, fill in or select a Pattern which puts the information in the correct fields.
After you select Ok, Foobar will retag the files properly.
However, if the file names don’t contain both artist names and track title information, you’ll have to rename the files from the tags first. Select the files then right click and select File Operations>Rename
and after the files have been renamed, carry out the rest of the above procedure.
Add-on components greatly extend the appearance and functionality of Foobar2000.
Open the Foobar Preferences dialog (File | Preferences or press CTRL+P)
Go to the Components page (click components at the top of the list)
Click the “Install…” button and select the component archive (zip) file, or drag the component’s file to the Installed components list box.
Press “OK“, you will be prompted to restart foobar2000 in order to load the newly installed component.
If the component has a visual element, you’ll need to add the component to the DUI (Default User Interface) now. Toggle View\Layout\Enable Layout Editing Mode and then add a new panel or tab. Right click the new panel or tab area and select “Add New UI Element …“, then select the new component from the list. You may need to adjust borders to fit. Exit layout mode.
The Audio File 