Foobar2000 ScreenshotOne of the tools I've been a very happy user of for the past couple of years is Foobar2000, a nifty, simple and lightweight Win32 music player. Plenty of reasons I like it:

  • It has a great plug-in models, with several plugins available for almost anything you want.
  • It has a dead-simple UI, though you can get pretty fancy with it if that's what you like.
  • Extremely flexible; pretty much every part of it can be configured or manipulated one way or another.
  • Very light weight. I use it when I just want to listen to some music and I already know what I want, and it beats the crap out of having to open iTunes for that.
  • Plays pretty much any format out there (with the right plugin). Granted, doesn't care much (that I know of) for heavily-DRM ladden formats, but I don't use those, so that's not a problem (my entire music collection went to DRM-free MP3 a long time ago)
  • Has a very flexible masstagger and file renaming feature.
  • I also use it to rip my cds into MP3 with the help of LAME.

All in all, a pretty sweet and small package to keep around.


Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.