foobar2000 Is Dead or Dying: Part 1

There’s always been a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tion of foobar2000 users whose pri­mary attrac­tion to the player is its appear­ance, or rather the level of con­trol given to its users over its appear­ance. In its infancy, with the stan­dard (and still default) UI, very lit­tle was pos­si­ble — the main win­dow con­sisted solely of a tabbed playlist and sev­eral func­tional tool­bars — but peo­ple nev­er­the­less took a lot of pride in mak­ing it their own, and some impres­sive things were done with rel­a­tively min­i­mal flex­i­bil­ity. It was in the stan­dard UI that users began exper­i­ment­ing with album-level pre­sen­ta­tion, choos­ing not to repeat redun­dantly the artist and album name on each line of the playlist, but to use the sec­ond, third, and some­times fourth lines to dis­play other info, such as year, label, genre, replay­gain info, etc. Each of these cus­tomiza­tions was unques­tion­ably unique, but most of the broad details of the inter­face were con­sis­tent and inescapable.

The Columns UI com­po­nent began as an exper­i­ment in allow­ing for mul­ti­ple columns within the playlist dis­play, emu­lat­ing the Win­dows Explorer “Detail” view (and many other Win­dows pro­grams), with sorta­bil­ity via click­able col­umn head­ings. Even­tu­ally Columns UI added a side­bar and, later, pan­els, allow­ing the whole foo­bar win­dow to be split up indef­i­nitely into panel-based com­po­nent dis­plays, the playlist viewer becom­ing just another one of these. This granted much greater flex­i­bil­ity, allow­ing users to tai­lor the inter­face even more pre­cisely to their needs. You could now dis­play album art as promi­nently as you wanted, or not at all; your entire library tree could be embed­ded within the main win­dow, rather than tucked away in a pop-up; and with the track­info panel’s excep­tion­ally lax (by that era’s stan­dards) styl­iza­tions, the per­son­al­iza­tion of your foo­bar became even more addic­tive, and, more impor­tantly, rewarding.

Many seemed hell-bent on con­coct­ing the most gar­ish pre­sen­ta­tions imag­in­able: giant gothic blue-on-black cus­tom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spec­trum ana­lyz­ers, all, of course, cou­pled with cus­tom OS “vis.”

While some still pre­ferred the purity and ele­gance of the stan­dard UI, the per­son­al­iza­tions made pos­si­ble by Columns UI were inar­guably func­tional ones, for the most part. Fonts, col­ors, dis­tri­b­u­tion of pan­els, and a rudi­men­tary method of text align­ment were really as far as you could go. At the core of all the boasted screen­shots was a rec­og­niz­able struc­ture, all slight vari­a­tions on the theme of playlist+trackinfo+albumlist+albumart. Out­side of dis­play­ing album art, there was noth­ing pro­foundly new that Columns UI allowed you to do — rather, Columns UI gave you more con­trol over how you did what you needed to do.

And yet, many (and in increas­ing num­ber) seemed hell-bent on con­coct­ing the most gar­ish pre­sen­ta­tions imag­in­able: giant gothic blue-on-black cus­tom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spec­trum ana­lyz­ers, all, of course, cou­pled with cus­tom OS “vis” and the most taste­less col­lec­tions of death-/black-/speed-metal slash indus­trial slash deep house techno. For what­ever rea­son, peo­ple are attracted to this, and these screen­shots rapidly brought more curi­ous foo­bar novices into the forums, want­ing a “cool” music player of their own.

At the time, these peo­ple were not in the major­ity of new enlis­tees. Many con­tin­ued to jump on board for the incom­pa­ra­bly robust pro­gram that was still very much the heart of the foo­bar com­mu­nity, despite all the dress­ing up. The occa­sional rogue thread would crop up, ask­ing ques­tions that had been answered count­less times before; the new user would be chas­tised, sent to another rel­e­vant thread, answered directly, or any com­bi­na­tion of the three. These occur­rences were peren­nial but neg­li­gi­ble, and besides, they fell into the unspo­ken hier­ar­chy of user­ship; it was the role of the foo­bar sopho­mores to help these peo­ple out, because they had only recently been in a sim­i­lar position.

Foobar2000 was in a state of rel­a­tive sta­sis. Ver­sion 0.9, the suc­ces­sor to 0.8.3, was released in early 2006; the set of “essen­tial” core com­po­nents was more or less firmly estab­lished, only wait­ing to be per­fected; users tweaked their inter­faces, inch­ing ever closer to an asymp­totic UI utopia; things were good.

Two seem­ingly sim­ple com­po­nents engen­dered a mon­u­men­tal shift in the way peo­ple thought about foobar.

Even­tu­ally, the inflex­i­bil­ity of the track­info panel began to bother some peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly that each instance of a track­info panel was lim­ited to one font and size. A user named ter­res­trial began devel­op­ing “Track Info Panel Mod,” which allowed for in-panel font changes, as well as the inclu­sion of images. It was this last fea­ture, images, where things really began to get off track. The free­dom to arbi­trar­ily place any image within the foo­bar win­dow is almost strictly unfunc­tional, moti­vated purely by the desire to make foo­bar look good. The intro­duc­tion of this com­po­nent encour­aged a shift in men­tal­ity about foo­bar, pro­duc­ing ever more flashy screen­shots, and attract­ing ever more users seek­ing eye-candy.

As Track Info Panel Mod evolved and grew in pop­u­lar­ity, peo­ple craved increas­ingly more con­trol. The func­tion­al­ity was amended hastily, by sloppy, ad hoc revi­sions of the bizarre, cum­ber­some for­mat­ting lan­guage. Still, it was only one com­po­nent, it had found a niche, and it kept to itself.

A few months later, ter­res­trial began devel­op­ment on a sec­ond com­po­nent, “Sin­gle Col­umn Playlist” (SCPL). This began as a sim­ple attempt to replace Columns UI’s playlist view, which, iron­i­cally, is the one thing that Columns UI was orig­i­nally cre­ated for. Rather than a sta­tic grid of mul­ti­ple columns and rows, ter­res­trial envi­sioned a blank can­vas, much like Track Info Panel Mod (TIPM), upon which images and track info could be laid with almost total free­dom. Addi­tion­ally, SCPL was able to group playlist items into col­lapsi­ble albums, intro­duc­ing the kind of album-level han­dling that had eluded foo­bar users for so long.

One got the sense that peo­ple were begin­ning to believe that foo­bar was TIPM/SCPL.

Mean­while, TIPM had begun to allow foo­bar com­mands to be asso­ci­ated with images, so that images in the panel could act as but­tons. This was nat­u­rally extended to SCPL, and with that, two seem­ingly sim­ple com­po­nents engen­dered a mon­u­men­tal shift in the way peo­ple thought about foo­bar. TIPM and SCPL dom­i­nated huge por­tions of people’s foo­bar win­dows; the album art panel was rejected in favor of plac­ing album art in TIPM and SCPL; sta­tus­bars, tool­bars, and even title­bars were replaced with button-loaded TIPM pan­els. And with glassy effects every­where, huge flame back­drops, and iTunes-like album art reflec­tions, older com­po­nents began to seem just that — old. An album­list panel, with its Explorer tree appear­ance, and sep­a­rated from the pret­tier pan­els by gray bars, was no longer accept­able as part of a seam­less, highly styl­ized UI. Were these con­fig­u­ra­tions func­tional? In some cases, yes, but largely, no — or rather, func­tion was of a dis­tant, sec­ondary concern.

The effects of this were twofold: first, the forums were flooded with peo­ple who had seen these screen­shots and wanted a decked-out music player to match their translu­cent, purple-LED-spangled case mods; sec­ond, because of TIPM/SCPL’s con­vo­luted new for­mat­ting lan­guage, foobar’s already noto­ri­ous learn­ing curve was pitched to unprece­dented new heights. Avatar-less users were every­where, start­ing new threads with their first post, ask­ing ques­tions about TIPM/SCPL. These ques­tions belonged in the com­po­nents’ threads, of course, but one got the sense that peo­ple were begin­ning to believe that foo­bar was TIPM/SCPL.

Inevitably, TIPM and SCPL were merged into one com­po­nent, Pan­els UI, which replaces entirely the Columns UI inter­face: “Pan­els UI looks and acts like one large Track Info Mod panel (advanced text posi­tion­ing, mul­ti­ple font con­fig­u­ra­tions, dis­play­ing images, etc.) that can inside of it host new pan­els.” Alarm­ingly, a very recent poll shows that, out of 89 foo­bar users, 42.7% are using Pan­els UI. And the threads con­tinue to this day:

• pan­els UI sort prob­lem (quick question)
• few ques­tion [sic] about Pan­els UI
• how do i make a but­ton that will open the menu? (With foo_ui_panels)
• Pan­el­sUI Cod­ing Ques­tions (Ques­tions I Can­not Find Answers To.….….…)
• and my favorite: please help. pan­els UI :( (renamed to rocket sci­en­tist UI?)

Admit­tedly, Pan­els UI is capa­ble of improv­ing foobar’s func­tion­al­ity. If you took the time to develop a real exper­tise in the for­mat­ting lan­guage, the look and feel of foo­bar would be lim­ited only by your imag­i­na­tion. And my sus­pi­cion that the graphics-intensive nature of Pan­els UI places an unjus­ti­fi­able bur­den on your sys­tem resources has been largely untested (by me). Per­for­mance was the rea­son I got into foo­bar in the first place, and though I tried Pan­els UI for a few weeks with mixed results, the more mea­sured, sober approach to foo­bar devel­op­ment demon­strated by older “essen­tial” com­po­nents ulti­mately drew me back to Columns UI, which I am still hap­pily using today.

I do think it would be a wise solu­tion to cre­ate a Pan­els UI sec­tion in the foo­bar forums. These threads are not going away, and never before has a sin­gle com­po­nent spawned so many one-off threads. Unfor­tu­nately, the noto­ri­ously stub­born forum admin­is­tra­tors would never agree to this, as it would vio­late the even-handedness with which foo­bar involve­ment has always been treated — “Why shouldn’t my com­po­nent have its own forum?”

There is a new blog meant to report foo­bar news from the forums, but its focus, too, is pri­mar­ily on Pan­els UI. But at least its posts are infor­ma­tive and con­sid­ered, not thought­less ques­tions from frus­trated n00bs, and it does allow and encour­age contributions.