Anteater

ITunes has its problems, but I think I'll stick with it as a media library. Currently, I use Foobar2000 whenever I need to convert from lossless to 320 or some other file format, but otherwise...

What are the main advantages to using Foobar over ITunes or other programs for managing my music/playlists?

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Guybrush

It depends on what programs you compare it to, but the different ways you can access your library and autoplaylists is something I personally appreciate.

For example, I have a library tree with various ways to access my music, one of them which looks like this :

• Jazz
• Rock
  • Prog Rock
  • Hard Rock
  • Folk Rock
    • Cat Stevens
    • Simon & Garfunkel

It also goes deeper into albums and songs .. I'm sure you get the jist of it. I have another one which goes by country as the root instead of genres, then alphabetically. Basically, you can define yourself how you want to access your library and by what information you want to use to do so.

For autoplaylists, I have a canterbury playlist for example. It stays updated with everything I tag as canterbury. I also have a "Canterbury favourites" list which is a dynamic list that plays all songs tagged as Canterbury which also have a rating of three and better.

Basically, you can use your imagination and if you can think of something that will fit your needs, you can make it happen. That's more than any other media player I've tried.

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s_k

Will try that out soon.
Problem is, even though I have a library, I still think the most brilliant thing about foobar is 'sort by folder structure'.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't want iPhoto (if I had iPhoto) to organize his pictures. Want to do it myself, dammit!
And my windows XP was always gray and without animations.
So I guess Columns won't do much for me that foobar can't.
Using foobar from now on though. I love the standard interface

Can anyone tell me, step by step, how I should get foobar to update the 'watch folders' as they're called in winamp, automatically? I read somewhere it doesn't do that by itself.

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Guybrush

I haven't noticed that it doesn't actually. If I add something to my library, then search for it in foobar, it comes up.

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s_k

Allright. I'll try that first, then .

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Steezebe

WOW. :thumbs:

Ok first, i've just gone through this entire thread, and this has answered so many problems that google wasn't really giving me.
THANK YOU to tore and Noise for your wonderful help.

now until I can post images of my current foobar setup (i need 15 posts) i am looking for some scripting help.

I have made the switch to foobar2000 from iTunes as I don't need it to sync to my phone any more. However some parts of iTunes were nice, and didn't make the transfer. Specifically, three things have not made the switch: play counts, date added and (this is the big one) album artists. Since I group all of my soundtracks with 'original soundtrack' as the album artist, it allows me to sort my library so all soundtracks stay together. I also use the play counts to make autoplaylists for my favorite songs.

so here's what i know:
1) SOME of the album artist metadata has come over, but not very much (like 5%) and I haven't found out a pattern to it.
2) iTunes stores some of the more unique data, such as play counts, in an xml file and not on the metadata for each file

so any ideas/ help on how to transfer that info over to foobar2000? i've been fighting this for about a week now...

Guybrush

Play counts and date added are sadly lost I assume since itunes likely saves that information in it's database file which foobar won't read. There could be a way to import that data with a plugin, but I doubt it.

You should figure out a way to easily find all your various artists albums, whether they're soundtracks or mixed artist compilations like Top Hits of the 70s. For me, it would be a breeze since I also keep that information in the filename. F.ex :

• \Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\The Last Nightingale [Studio album, 1980s]
• \Music\!Soundtracks & Scores\1930s\1939 - The Wizard Of Oz [Movie, Musical, 1995 rerelease]

I often use the foo_quicksearch searchbar to find my music and it allows for scripts, so if I wanted to find all mixed artist compilations, I could simply search for for : %path% HAS \Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\

That search would return every file and album stored in that directory. If you don't have this level of organization over your files, it becomes a bit trickier. You might have to start doing other searches like "%album% HAS soundtrack" or "%path% HAS soundtrack" to find the ones where soundtrack is part of the album name.

I'm sure there are more ways, but that's what came to my mind at least

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noise

hey Steezebe, download MP3tag and open your library in there. tell me how much of your metadata you see. it could just be that your metadata is stored in a tag format that foobar doesn't like.

i think tore's right about playcount, but you can get a plugin for foobar that keeps track of playcount and date added. you'll have to start over with your stats though.

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Steezebe

mp3tag. PERF. it gives me @ 75% ID3v2.4, @20% MP4, and a few 2.3apev2, 2.3 and 2.2.

That 75% is mp3 formatted, and all have an album artist showing up in mp3 tag, but NOT foobar.

That 20% MP4 is Apple lossless, which is held in the MP4 container. Ergo, all of those have the MP4 tagging, and the album artist shows up for SOME of them. For example, the album "Everyday" is tagged with "Dave Matthews Band" under album artist in iTunes, but the album artist is blank in mp3tag. Thing is, all of my Dave Matthews tagging is MP4. And since my tagging in iTunes is 100% full for album artist, the fact that it's not there in the tag is rather weird. My only guess is that iTunes is storing it either in another meta field, or another database file.

I also found a source of my confusion: I use Columns UI, and it has the Column Playlist. In there, it shows album artists in the column, but the way the script works is that if an album artist tag doesn't exist, then it just shows the artist, which is why I was confused about it existing in my playlists.

Basically, what should I do?

ps:
I'm wordy, I know.

Guybrush

Where's the album artist information stored? Foobar uses the tag "album artist", but I know some other media players and so on use the "band" tag for example for that kind of information. If you can find that information inside foobar (it shows up in a file's metadata when you right click it and choose properties), then it's simple to remap or copy that to the album artist tag.

If you can't find the album artist info in foobar at all (f.ex it's not stored in a BAND tag or any other tag you can see), is it possible for you to remap or copy that information to a new tag that foobar will find using MP3Tag?

Once you can find that information in foobar, mark the files you want to change the info for, then right click and choose properties from the drop down menu. Down in the bottom left of the properties window, click the "tools" button and choose "automatically fill values".



It should bring up a window for automatically filling values. Click the source button and choose "other". Write the %NAME OF THE TAG% which contains the information you'd like to fill into the album artists tag in the text box next to it (in my example, that info is stored in %BAND%). Then in the pattern text box, simply write %album artist% and click OK. Then click OK again in the Properties window to write the changes to the files!

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