Foobar2000
foobar2000 (preferred spelling is un-capitalized) is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. Although it has a utilitarian, graphics-light interface, it boasts many features for metadata support and ensuring audio quality (so far as that is possible,e.g. 24-bit, 96kHz output; dithering; noise-shaping), as well as a number of official and third-party plugins for a variety of purposes. While the core is closed-source the author provides a quite extensive SDK under the BSD license, which includes the source of most components.
The strengths of the player are:
- Display of songs in the playlist, in the database and various other places can be modified through a rather complex script language called TAGZ.
- Tabbed playlists
- A highly flexible and well-designed plugin-API allows developers to change or add almost any feature in the player (User interface, input, output, visualizations, DSP, etc...).
- Built-in Replaygain support.
- Diskwriter (transcode from any playable source to various formats)
- Kernel streaming
- Low memory footprint
- Default user interface integrates seamlessly with Windows XP Themes
