Foobar2000 is an audio player that includes full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Does Foobar2000 support video playback?

No. Foobar2000 does not support video, it is a highly customizable audio player only, with advanced features like gapless playback, open component architecture, and audio file converter.

What is "open component architecture"?

"Open Component Architecture" means that Foobar2000 allows you to extend the functionality of the player as needed. You can check Foobar's components section here.

What audio formats does Foobar2000 support?

Foobar2000 supports the following audio formats out of the box: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, and SND. Through additional components you can extend that support to any other major audio format.

Can Foobar2000 rip CDs?

Yes, Foobar2000 supports audio CD ripping and transcoding of all supported audio formats using the converter component.

Does Foobar2000 work on macOS or Linux?

No, Foobar2000 is only available for Windows. For macOS or Linux, we recommend checking out VLC, which offers similar functionality and is also free.

Features

  • Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
  • Gapless playback.
  • Easily customizable user interface layout.
  • Advanced tagging capabilities.
  • Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
  • Full ReplayGain support.
  • Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
  • Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

What's New

  • Fixed lock up on specific playlist + album art + auto sizing column use pattern.
  • Fixed lock up on specific album art tag update operations.
  • More robust radio-browser server discovery.
  • Fixed slow loading of FPL playlists regression.
  • Fixed wrong height & wrong dark mode rendering of popup_message checkbox.
  • Fixed missing URL-decode of WebDAV file names being shown.
  • Album List: Worked around Wine bug #59448, fixed multi selection rendering.
  • Disabled crash report submissions on outdated versions of Wine.

Previous release notes

This release introduces built-in network audio streaming feature, replacing old UPnP MediaRenderer Output component, as well as adds SMB & FTP library indexing from foobar2000 mobile.

UPnP streaming

  • Enable remote control in Preferences / Networking / UPnP remote control, to make this foobar2000 instance visible on the network.

foobar2000 instances with remote control enabled will be shown in other foobar2000 instances as output devices.

Network share indexing

  • Native FTP/SMB/WebDAV support is read-only and intended for scenarios where you do not want your operating system mounting the network share.

On Windows, we recommend keeping network shares as they are, that is, mapped by operating system, either drive letters or \server\share.

Full list of changes

  • Built-in UPnP media renderer, both client (play to another device) and server (be controlled by another device).
  • Other foobar2000 instances on your local network, with UPnP remote control feature active, will be listed as output devices.
  • foobar2000-to-foobar2000 playback shows tags with album covers on the other end, using Ogg FLAC as stream container.

Media Library

  • Can natively index FTP/WebDAV/SMB network shares.
  • Improved response to enabling/disabling/installing/uninstalling decoders - only reloads info from affected music files.
  • Made retain info whether specific folder was scanned completely; fixed upgrading from foobar2000 v1.x causing no-scan-on-startup folders becoming empty.
  • Made not touch files with .bak, .bk, .off extensions, in addition to .tmp and .temp which were already ignored before.

Codecs

  • FFmpeg updated to 8.0, added native support for xHE-AAC decoding.
  • Allowed = character in tag field names. Will be converted to _ in formats that don't allow =.
  • Rewritten Ogg FLAC tag handling, properly implemented embedded album art.
  • Fixed ReplayGain tags not being saved in multichapter Ogg/Opus files.
  • Fixed ID3 tags in AAC radio stream causing playback to stop.
  • M4A metadata field mapping updates (atID, cmID, geID, sfID, plID, xid).
  • More robust reading of malformed MP3 LAME tags.
  • Fixed a bug that made exotic FLAC configurations unplayable if muxed into Ogg/Matroska/MP4.
  • Tweaked MP4 tag padding to rewrite large files less.
  • Added advanced preferences toggle for alternate multi-value MP4 tag storage - more compatible with specific apps but less compatible with others. Old versions of foobar2000 read both schemes.

Other

  • Added preferences page for network share credentials so you don't have to place them in URLs anymore.
  • Made editing DSP settings momentarily lower output latency to make DSPs appear more responsive.
  • Fixed Properties 'rewrite tags' not working if nothing has been edited.
  • UnRAR code updated to unrarsrc-7.1.10. This is just a precaution. Our copy of UnRAR code has all file access capabilities stripped away. There is no indication of recent WinRAR vulnerabilities possibly affecting current or past foobar2000 versions.
  • Fixed potential resampler issues if attempting to upsample very large audio chunks.
  • Fixed extreme memory usage of visualizations with specific file types.
  • Fixed failure to resume internet radio streams after specific patterns of connection issues.
  • Made Verifier detect multichapter files with FLAC-style audio MD5, now prompts to scan as whole.
  • Improved interaction between Verifier and built-in FFmpeg decoders; more errors get reported.
  • Made "Edit Chapters" show progress dialog when manipulating files, avoid unresponsive UI when rewriting large MP4.
  • Playback prebuffering logic update, should fix stuttering with high-res internet radio streams.
  • Added an option to suppress detection of files with wrong extension, overriding new v2.0+ behavior of recognizing common music formats with wrong extension.

Windows specific changes

  • Portable install: Changed the way relative paths are handled, so cached tags are no longer forgotten after relaunching from a different path.
  • Installer is now hi-DPI friendly.
  • Made system file dialogs invoked out-of-process, to avoid stability issues.
  • Improved screen reader behavior in Verify Integrity results dialog.
  • Enabled RF64 writing in Converter.
  • Fixed Converter failing to function until foobar2000 restart after removal of %TEMP%\foo_converter.
  • Made possible to specify relative no-cover pics in portable installs.
  • Decoding speed test fixed last used bit depth resetting itself to 16-bit.
  • Slightly updated Album List search box, made delay setting take immediate effect; previous behavior required reopening Album List to take effect.
  • Properties dialog no longer garbles lyrics etc with Unix style line endings.
  • Fixed startup crash if importing malformed foobar2000 v1.x configuration.
  • Made ARM reported correctly in crash report OS version field (was "x64" before).
  • Various bug fixes in dark mode listview substitution code.
  • Removed dotted lines from various treeviews, refreshed Album List tree looks.
  • More verbose output on "open containing folder" errors.

Mac specific changes

  • Added keyboard shortcut mapping functionality.
  • Added visualisations: VU Meter, Peak Meter, Spectrum, Oscilloscope.
  • Layout: added font-mono (no arguments) to use system monospace font.
  • Improved handling of multi-line tags in Properties dialog.
  • Fixed blank filter picker text when clicked "filters" with no filter actually selected.
  • Fixed playlist view crash on specific configuration.
  • Fixed main menu rendering bugs (missing checkmarks in submenus, duplicate output device submenu).
  • Prevented mac-volume:// paths being saved in M3U playlists.
  • Cleaned up external FFmpeg decoder preferences.
  • Album List preferences allows multi-line patterns.

Previous release notes

  • Corrected a regression in 2.25.4; incomplete removal of foobar2000 v2.0 beta code leftovers resulted in crashing on a fresh profile.
  • Android version updated to 2.26
  • Fixed very old race condition bugs in decoder merit management, potentially causing decoder to be listed twice.
  • Fixed missing info reload when changing stream via toolbar dropdown.
  • Workaround for stuck visualizations if playback ends while foobar2000 is invisible.
  • Fixed LD & ELD AAC not being reliably sent to alternate packet decoders.
  • Fixed Decoding Speed Test not remembering last used DSP chain.
  • Fixed missing winsock init for SMB operations, causing all SMB access to fail if no other network features have been used first.
  • Fixed bad interaction between WebDAV filesystem and media library.
  • Workaround for foo_tags stuck info issue.
  • Workaround for WAV headers claiming zero length.
  • Fixed File Operations link vs portable relative paths.