My guide to making foobar pretty (usable).

[shuy]

how are the albums organised? in my playlist they aren't organised according to its tags for some reason. how do i rectify this?

 

[acedriver]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuy how are the albums organised? in my playlist they aren't organised according to its tags for some reason. how do i rectify this?

use this sorting

Pref > General > Sort incoming files by:

$if($strcmp($ext(%_path%),'cue'),%_path%)|%artist% $num(%date%,4)%disc%%album%$num(%tracknumber%,2)|% _path%

 

[shuy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by acedriver use this sorting Pref > General > Sort incoming files by: $if($strcmp($ext(%_path%),'cue'),%_path%)|%artist% $num(%date%,4)%disc%%album%$num(%tracknumber%,2)|% _path%

the problem still persists, i dont understand where foobar is getting the album info from if not from the tags!

furthermore, my music is neatly put in folders arranged as such:

c:\... \artist\album\(mp3s)

 

[Max Minimum]

Whoa! Terrific thread!! Thank you so much! I'd gotten my 8.3 installation pretty much the way I wanted it and didn't see moving to 9 to be worth the effort it'd take to get things set back up. Thanks to this, I'm making the move now!

 

[morose-]

And there was much rejoicing. Thank you old fellow. I was downloading the wrong archive, actualy.

 

[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Max Minimum Whoa! Terrific thread!! Thank you so much! I'd gotten my 8.3 installation pretty much the way I wanted it and didn't see moving to 9 to be worth the effort it'd take to get things set back up. Thanks to this, I'm making the move now!

I'd do it, save even more trouble down the line. There'll be fancy new plugins only made for newer versions.

I upgraded from 0.9 to 0.9.2 and it transferred all my settings. I guess moving from 0.8.3 would be more taxing, it is fairly different.

 

[morose-]

Now, I have all of my music recorded at 1411 kbps on a 500 GB hard drive. Presently, foobar doesn't seem to recognize artist disctinctions. Is this a problem with the root file, or a problem with foobar?

 

[HiFiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chri5peed I'm probably missing something, but everytime I add an album is there a way to add it on its own rather than scanning everything? It only takes a few minutes ATM, fast computer/70GB collection, but its ever increasing. It'll soon take 5 minuites, then 10....

*Edited for clarity*

It took me a while to figure this out.

If you move files to a sub folder of where you have the foobar library looking, all you need to do is add those files to a playlist in foobar and they'll be added to the library.

One caveat is the playlist tree will need to be refreshed to see the new music, so make sure to do that before deciding your new music isn't in your library. I'm not sure but I imagine the browser plugin would need to be refeshed too.

And another way to add music to the library...

This is my "workflow" of going about putting new downloads into my collection, as opposed to what I've written above. I have all downloads come into "c:\downloads". If I want to keep an album, i.e. I want to move the music to my music collection I do the following:

1. add the album to a playlist
2. select the files
3. right click
4. file operations, move/rename files

After moving the files to a place that the foobar library is configured for, the files will be in the library. Note that doing this won't move album art, playlist files, or sfv files.

 

[HiFiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuy the problem still persists, i dont understand where foobar is getting the album info from if not from the tags! furthermore, my music is neatly put in folders arranged as such: c:\... \artist\album\(mp3s)

If that is the case, clicking edit, sort, sort by file path, should do the trick.

 

[HiFiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by morose- Now, I have all of my music recorded at 1411 kbps on a 500 GB hard drive. Presently, foobar doesn't seem to recognize artist disctinctions. Is this a problem with the root file, or a problem with foobar?

Maybe foobar doesn't like the tags in your files? I find foobar can be picky about tags. What codec and tag format are you using?

 

[shuy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HiFiRE If that is the case, clicking edit, sort, sort by file path, should do the trick.

the sorting's fine. but i can't get the album-mode column to look like how it should.

1st column is album, 2nd column is album mode, 3rd column is title & length.

for say the green part, why doesn't it first put the artist name, then the album name? it just lists how it's encoded.

for the red part, everything's fine. BUT how did foobar know all this when it's not in the mp3 tags, as shown by the empty album column on the left????

i've manually filled in the album tag to ALL my mp3s, which almost killed me. and the problem still exists!! grrrrrrrr!!!

 

[HiFiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuy the sorting's fine. but i can't get the album-mode column to look like how it should. 1st column is album, 2nd column is album mode, 3rd column is title & length. for say the green part, why doesn't it first put the artist name, then the album name? it just lists how it's encoded. for the red part, everything's fine. BUT how did foobar know all this when it's not in the mp3 tags, as shown by the empty album column on the left???? i've manually filled in the album tag to ALL my mp3s, which almost killed me. and the problem still exists!! grrrrrrrr!!!

The columns ui configuration "Navigator" uses track numbers to decide how to display a song. It looks like you don't have a tracknumber column and you have an album column which isn't possible without modifying navigator, i think. This is maybe why you're having problems.

Navigator does some guessing based on the file's path to figure out track number and album and such. Foobar is pretty picky about tags.

 

[HiFiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuy sorry for the n00b question, i'm new to this foobar beautifying business. how do i add playlists to the left column? i have .fpl files, but i don't know to get them listed there! thanks...

The only way I can find to put playlists into the playlist tree is to drag and drop it from windows explorer into the playlist tree.

 

[shuy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HiFiRE The columns ui configuration "Navigator" uses track numbers to decide how to display a song. It looks like you don't have a tracknumber column and you have an album column which isn't possible without modifying navigator, i think. This is maybe why you're having problems. Navigator does some guessing based on the file's path to figure out track number and album and such. Foobar is pretty picky about tags.

thanks for reply!

yes, i did add the album column to see which songs weren't tagged, so i could manually tag all of em. i've since taken that column out. situation's the same, but if navigator uses track number to determine its display, then there's my problem.

is there any way to teach navigator to do it another way? as u can see, i don't have full albums as i delete the songs i don't like. if not, is there any way just to display artist name alone? in default artist column, the artist name gets repeated every line, while i prefer just 1 line at the top for the list of songs by that artist.

 

[h-man]

Hi,

just caught up with this awesome thread, and I just wanted to thank the OP for making foobar2k understandable and useable by us non-experts! I am now able to enjoy flac files through my laptop as well!