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foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

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superboyac:
I know I have a lot of posts and threads to catch up on, and I should be studying right now, but I was just checking out foobar, and I like it's features...

However, trying to configure this thing the way I want is making me lose my mind.  Freakin A!  I'm no slouch with computers, but this is just insanity.  Am I really stupid, or is trying to find the answer on "How to's" for foobar an extremely illogical and frustrating experience?!  I've been on the forum, the wiki site, various plugin places, and read the FAQ's.  Almost all of them all completely uninformative.

It took me an hour to figure out where the volume slider was, and then I wanted to actually have a volume slider visible on my main UI, so apparently there's this plugin I need "foo_uie_volume", which is NOWHERE to be found.

Then, on the freakin main website, they have these nice screenshots showing how the various albums in a playlist can be colored separately.  But is there any documentation on how to do it anywhere?  NO!  I searched the forum for the obvious words like "color" "album" "playlist", etc., but nothing turned up.  What the hell are they talking about on those forums in all those threads?  I have no idea.

Anyway, I know somebody here must use foobar, so I'll probably need some coaching.

I think foobar is one of those software where, because it's aimed at powerusers, they have intentionally made the software as hard to figure out as possible.  OK, it's a poweruser program, but it's also a freakin media player, not some complex, flight-simluation software for corn's sake.

Renegade:
I think foobar is one of those software where, because it's aimed at powerusers, they have intentionally made the software as hard to figure out as possible.  OK, it's a poweruser program, but it's also a freakin media player, not some complex, flight-simluation software for corn's sake.
-superboyac (September 24, 2006, 03:15 AM)
--- End quote ---

You're pretty much bang on the money.

Foobar is like 7-zip (and quite a few others). Good software, with an impossible interface. Neither of the rise to the level of decent usability. The programmers aren't interested in that aspect of software. They're much more interested in the 'guts'. And since they're both open source, anyone could come along and create a decent interface for them.

But then again, they're free. You get what you pay for. In this case, you're paying nothing to get what some kind programmers are interested in. And they're just not that interested in fancy GUIs.

Lashiec:
To make the volume slider appear, do a double click on the status bar (where it says "x.xx" dB) in foobar 0.9 and above. In 0.8.x you need a plugin indeed. To learn Tagz (foobar2000 own script language), this is an excellent tutorial: http://tagz.brother-john.net/

mouser:
someone showed me a column-ui addon for foobar - without that i found the program unusable, but with that it's not bad.

 http://music.morbo.org/columns.php

Renegade:
Learning a scripting language just to play some music is a bit overboard. Is there any real benefit?

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