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

  • UPnP: Made send icy-meta style song titles to devices that ask for them.
  • New additions to saved M3U/M3U8 playtlists: #foo-subsongs - list of subsong/chapter indexes for the next file in playlist.
  • Changed ARDFTSC resampler profile mapping to quality scale.
  • Changed resampler_manager default resampler choice if no user preference is set - chooses faster resampler (Speex) for <0.5, slower (ARDFTSRC) for >=0.5.
  • Improved behavior of shared worker thread pool on dual core systems (also mitigates lock up of foo_playcount on affected machines).
  • Installer now detects Wine and offers to configure Wine compatibility options to work around known compatibility issues, especially with old Wine bundled by certain Linux distros.
  • Removed Wine workarounds from UPnP Tools component, no longer needed with above fix.
  • Default UI: Restored pure GDI HBITMAP rendering of album art by default, addressing various reported annoyances.
  • Default UI: Fixed weird behavior of theme importer - custom columns & grouping values from imported theme are added to your configation after approving theme preview, not first time a menu showing them is opened.
  • Code signed all utility DLLs bundled (FFmpeg, zlib, sqlite) to prevent foobar2000 being blocked by "Smart App Control".

Converter changes

  • New preset format, presets stored as .ini files in profile subfolder. Old presets imported on first run.
  • Better error messages when receiving unexpected data format change in mid-conversion; made discard blank chunks before checking for format match.
  • Added extensible post-conversion actions which can be used for ReplayGain scanning, integrity testing, etc.
  • On conversion error, encoder's stderr output is forwarded to foobar2000 console.
  • Ogg chaining is now off by default, Ogg chapters written by default instead.
  • Added %source_list_index% & %source_list_total%, only for multi track image naming pattern use, to allow use of list indexes in the pattern.
  • Made file name preview recognize newly added %source_list_index%.
  • Made show output of command-line encoder program in error popup if conversion has failed.
  • Made "no DSP reset" explicitly shown in overview, as it's dangerous if enabled unintentionally.

ReplayGain Scanner changes

  • Added new interface for components to access ReplayGain scanning options.
  • Added option to write REPLAYGAIN_ALGORITHM tag.
  • Default mode is now more accurately named "ITU-R BS.1770".

Resampler technology updates

  • New resamplers: ARDFTSRC and Speex, replacing SSRC and libretro from previous versions. New resamplers provide better quality at comparable speeds / better speeds at comparable quality.
  • Cleaned up resampler settings, removed pointless "exclude rates" checkboxes, added explicit hints about formatting.
  • Made resampler priority setting accept short names of resamplers, e.g. "speex;ardftsrc".

Playback & file format handling changes

  • Added support for decoding TrueHD & MLP streams in Matroska.
  • New info field: container (MP4, Matroska, Ogg, etc)
  • Improved handling of Matroska Segment Title field.
  • Improved recovery of malformed UTF-8 text in various tag formats.
  • Made print name of file format handler used to console, after "opening track for playback".
  • More accurate on_playback_dynamic_info() timing, restored correct operation of OpenMPT visualizations.
  • Added advanced preferences toggle to turn off all subsong support, forcibly present 1 file as 1 playlist entry.
  • Faster opening of Matroska files.
  • Monkey's Audio format is now handled via FFmpeg.

MP4/M4A/M4B improvements

  • Tagtype info (Apple, Nero)
  • No longer writes Nero tags by default for single chapter files, only for multi chapter where other tagging formats can't store per track tags.
  • Added support for some rarely used Apple tag elements.
  • No longer alters binary structure of Apple tag elements which are not affected by edits.
  • More robust handling of unusual Apple tag fields.

General usability changes

  • New title formatting field: %_cpu_arch%
  • Added drag&drop from Internet Radio pages to playlist.
  • Attempt to play a password-protected resource such as radio stream now shows a password prompt.
  • Equalizer now accepts presets via drag&drop from Explorer/Finder.
  • Added "Play on" feature from foobar2000 mobile - accessible from playlist & internet radio context menu .
  • Made playlist sort operations recognize %queue_index% and other playlist specific fields.
  • Added "Playback Information" section to View menu, meant for components.
  • Made "Verify with AccurateRip" command available if your tracknumbers don't strictly match most common numbering scheme.

Added Help / Search Query Syntax.

  • Smarter "remove duplicates" code, made aware of various scenarios where different perceived paths point to same file.
  • Restored LargeFieldsConfig feature - https://www.foobar2000.org/LargeFieldsConfig-v2
  • Updated title formatting help with some recent and some not-really-recent additions.
  • File Operations: Made gracefully refuse to rename archive contents.

Networking

  • Improved reading of RAR archives on network shares.
  • Improved SMB read throughput over high-latency connections.

Windows specific changes

  • Advanced Preferences: Disabled Wine treeview workarounds if running Wine newer than 11.12.
  • Default User Interface: made render album art using Windows Imaging Component / Direct2D.
  • Enabled reading of EXIF orientation info from album cover pictures.
  • Libraries updated to newer versions: FFmpeg, Opus, zlib, RAR, 7-zip, SQLite