Foobar2000 Mobile

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foobar2000 Mobile playing a song.

foobar2000 Mobile is a free jukebox program for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone and first released in 2016-05-02. It is a version of foobar2000 for mobile devices and is developed by and large by the same team who works on the main program.

Personal

As the quality of Rockbox began to dwindle, I became more and more eager to replace it with something better. One day while browsing the foobar2000 forum, I saw that the team had begun working on a mobile version of my favorite music player. I bought into their startup and waited patiently as they began development. Eventually, I started using the program, and, after becoming familiar with it, stopped using my old DAP entirely. I have been using foobar2000 Mobile as my sole jukebox program on mobile devices ever since.

Review

Good

  • Right out of the box, foobar2000 Mobile supports all of the common audio formats, and several more obscure ones including: MP3, MP4, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, and a variety of modules.
  • It also supports many features found in more impressive jukebox programs like replay gain, gapless playback, streaming from UPnP media servers, and album art for all formats (even those that don't have internal support!).
  • You can setup multiple folders on your device, external storage, and servers from which to load audio.
  • It has a nice feature where you can scan all tracks for missing replay gain, and apply it right from the interface.
  • You can quickly search through your library by artist, album, composer, etc.

Bad

  • Playlist support is very limited. Importing playlists is a time-consuming process (see below), and, once modified, they cannot be exported. So, when you switch to a new device, you'll have to rebuild them all over again. Many people on the forums have requested this be fixed, but it seems like the developers have no plans to do so.
  • The two default skins are both pretty ugly, and, since the skin web site has crashed, the only way to get more is painstakingly finding them online or making your own.

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Tricks

Transferring Playlists from Your Computer

The built-in playlist support is weak, but, thankfully, you can move a playlist from foobar2000 into the mobile app. This assumes all of the songs in your foobar2000 playlist also exist on your device with foobar2000 Mobile. The process is pretty involved, so here are the steps:

  1. Create your playlist in foobar2000 and save it as an .fpl style playlist.
  2. Transfer the fpl file to your mobile device.
  3. Open the Browse menu of foobar2000 Mobile.
  4. If you placed the fpl file on your internal storage, select Internal Storage, otherwise, select External Storage. If you don't see either, make sure foobar2000 Mobile has access to all files in your OS.
  5. Use the file browser to find the fpl file you transferred over and select it. It will open in the "Playlist" menu with all your songs listed.
  6. Click the Wrench icon at the top right to open the "Tools" menu.
  7. Under "Context Menu", select Context menu: last active view.
  8. You will see a list of all the songs. Click the button at the top right labeled, Proceed.
  9. In the "Choose Tool"menu, select Add to playlist.
  10. In the "Add to playlist" menu, click Create a new playlist.
  11. Press Back several times until you return to the "Browse" menu.
  12. Select Playlists.
  13. In the "Playlists" menu you will see a playlist titled New Playlist. Press and hold on it to bring open the context menu.
  14. Select Rename.
  15. In the "Rename" screen, enter a new name for your playlist and click OK.

Links

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