Foobar 2000 Order of Play

I downloaded Foobar 2000 for Windows as a music player many years ago, and now there is a Mac version.

I'm sure I'm like many in not understanding much about how it works.

An example being that I didn't know it can rip a CD to FLAC. I'd been using EAC previously and was quite confused where it would put the rip. I'm sure there will be others who easily understand, but for me it simply isn't intuitive.

Neither is Foobar 2000!

But, it has a form of set-up for the destination file that is more intuitive for me, and so I'm not hunting around for ages looking for where my rip ended up.

One thing I was being plagued with was the playback order of my rips, sometimes it seems Foobar 2000 is doing it "automatically" or it's just luck.

I could not get it to playback the tracks of some of its rips in order, and I'd not set them to shuffle so it was a mystery.

I forget where I found the answer online, but here it is.

It needs to be told how to sort the music files, and sometimes that isn't transferred on ripping, so if you're stuck with it loading the tracks in alphabetical order instead of track order, this was the solution which worked for me.

Clicking Library from the menu, and choosing the configure option, you get a box titled "Preferences: Media Library."

You then see an option called Shell Integration, and clicking that opens its dialogue to the right, and in there is a field called "Sort incoming files by:"

I highlit what was already there and pasted the line,

%album artist% - %date% - %album% - %discnumber% - %tracknumber% - %title%

Then clicked Apply and OK.

It now plays in track number order, rather than in alphabetical track title order.

I suppose Foobar 2000 makes more sense to me than the badly written/illustrated human interface descriptions of dialogue boxes (batch files) of some music software. It must be difficult for a developer to select the most suitable DLL seeing there are thousands of them.

Foobar 2000 is no frills, and has a shell type feel, by which I mean a basic representation like DOS Shell which visualised DOS 3.1 onwards (circa 1989). Some might believe you have to be a developer to be able to use it.

I both agree and disagree. The reason I can say that is because I worked in the confusing world of DOS and batch files -complete with- early Windows dialogue. I never really understood how the early bastardisations between DOS, modem language, and Windows and/or DOS Shell based databases held together, but that was the earliest representation of today's online shop. That's how we ordered parts.

Compared with that, Foobar 2000 and its no frills presentation, has a particular logic that, with more practice, I think I could really get on well with.

Apart from that, it grabs audio data from a CD, requiring nothing more than a basic laptop CD reader (as most can), and Foobar 2000 defaults to Free Lossless Audio Codec v.5 (FLAC 5), and anything from Chris Montgomery is good enough for me (https://xiph.org/).

Plus Foobar 2000 has a load of add-ins to make other filenames play, such as Monkeys for .APE, and FLAC can be converted to WAV.

It has a good ripper and music converter, that can convert to most music files, even some I've not heard of before. The online support can be a bit hit or miss as it's done by users mostly, don't get me wrong you do get answers but sometimes it can take a long time. I have had problems with it but that has to do with going over to windows11 (my advice don't move to Windows11) It use to give you cover artwork with your rip but for some reason when your file moves over to the music folder it doesn't move over with the file, that's if it goes to the music folder at all, it sometimes moves over automatically and you can't find it.

SORRY I can't, this is do to me not being very good with computers, I have had loads of problems in the past and sometimes I've come to this forum for advice. (I just thought I'd let you know) again sorry.