Foobar2000 0.9.5.3

After going to Foobar2000′s website I almost didn’t even bother to download this media player. The website is VERY plain it does not do justice at all to this media player. Right after you install Foobar2000 it give you a series of choices. These allow you to pick a color scheme, a layout, and some others. I really like this because I got a media player that I like to look at by default.

The overall UI is very simple to use. In respect to its look it is not quite up to vista’s par but it can play ball quite well with the looks of XP. The UI is somewhat broken up into two sections, a mini player at the very top of the screen which has only the needed buttons, and then it has all your different panels for viewing the different listing you chose to see at the startup. To my surprise, this is the only media player that made use of tabing. The bigger more well known media players can learn a great deal from this underdog. This media player by far has the most user friendly interface.

The best feature of Foobars UI is the ability to change it any way you want. You can split area into smaller areas, change a specific listing into a different one or anything that meets your fancy. I cannot stress how nice this feature really is. To do this go to View > Layout > Enable Layout Editing Mode

Like songbird Foobar has a built in search feature allowing you to quickly find music that is in your library.

A really simple feature that I havent seen in any other player is a button that lets you play a random song. I am not talking about a shuffle setting, every decent player has that), this button just lets you play any random song. You no longer have to start the first song in your library then his next, to get a random song. I am really surprised more players do not have this.

My Suggestions:
The album view is pretty bad, It needs to be redone, its to hard to use and not very visually pleasing. Another suggestion is that there is not a minimized version, or minimize to tray option. The resource usage is around 30k thats not terrible but its not to good either so some work here would be good.

My rating: 7/10

Summary:
- Most user friendly UI (with the exception of the Album view)
- Excellent ability to customize layout
- Search feature
- random song button
- bad album view
- no minimized version or tray version