Component system

shanecavanaugh · Post by **shanecavanaugh** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 8:52 pm

I've never used foobar2000, but its reliance on plugins for extended functionality sounds interesting because it seems that everyone wants something slightly different from their music player, and just having a basic installation that can be built upon would ease the burden of having to be everything to everyone. I mention this because there are many things about foobar that look and sound cool, but I know that requesting that they be put into Play could come at the expense of either its ease of use or someone else's preferable experience with it, and I'd like it to be a premier music player for OS X.

krmathis · Post by **krmathis** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 9:06 pm

It is now more than three years since I last used foobar2000, but I still miss parts of it.

Especially its modular system, where you first install a basic player which barely play MP3 file. Then add your own modules for the features you need. Like; audio codecs/container formats, CD burning/ripping, ABX tester, etc...

I understand that this probably would be a lot of work, and perhaps hard for the novice users to understand. But the advanced users would love it.

Something to consider maybe?

Maurits · Post by **Maurits** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 9:53 pm

It may be a lot of work to reach where Foobar is now but you can keep it in mind from the start. If you know now that you might want to introduce skinning or modules later on I think you can take that into account in the early development stages already.

Furthermore, maybe one of the biggest benefits of modules is perhaps that it can cut up the development process in smaller pieces. Although software like Max is Open Source it must be hard for someone else to make big contributions to it because of a steep learning curve getting to know someone else's code. A module system can let people work on smaller things they'd like to see themselves, it motivates and keeps codebases small.

Yonzie · Post by **Yonzie** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 1:51 am

Maurits wrote:It may be a lot of work to reach where Foobar is now

It's been a few years under way though

What attracted me to foobar way back when it was very new was the notepad player. No crap, fluff, bloat, etc. All I want is the iTunes library view with the ability to move the "song title" column.

Mike1 · Post by **Mike1** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 9:36 am

krmathis wrote:It is now more than three years since I last used foobar2000, but I still miss parts of it.

... ABX tester ...

I'd heard it had this feature. Am I right in thinking that it can also check the integrity of a FLAC file via the file's internal MD5 sum? I've heard that program described as "Spartan", but I suspect there's quite a few other nice features in it that aren't in other programs that have more in other ways.

I've no opinion on the overall topic of "modularity" - not even having dabbled in programming I'd not like to venture a guess as to what's best. But the discussion is also interesting from the aspect of the discussion of the features it's throwing up. I'm not sure just how useful some of them would be, but since some of them are unlikely to be available in anything else, I'll bet Stephen has been mulling them over.