Software update: foobar2000 2.0

After a long development period with no fewer than 35 beta versions, version 2.0 of foobar2000 has been released. This popular, lightweight music player can handle MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, WAV and WMA, among other things, and has support for Replay Gain. Furthermore, the player can convert different formats, the program has extensive options to adjust the tags and the interface can be completely customized to your own needs. In addition, it is possible to use the functionality plugins to expand further. Downloads are also available for Android, iOS and macOS, but they have a different version number and release schedule. The changelog for version 2.0 looks like this:

Support for modern processor architectures. Now available as:

• x86 32-bit (legacy) – requires Windows 7 or newer.
• x86 64-bit – requires Windows 7 64-bit or newer.
  64-bit foobar2000 requires 64-bit builds of components; it cannot load legacy 32-bit components. However, at this time, most components have 64-bit builds available already.
• ARM – requires Windows 11 ARM device.
  foobar2000 for ARM has been compiled in Emulation Compatible (ARM64EC) mode and can load components built for x86 64-bit. There’s no need for component developers to specifically build ARM components.

User interface updates:

• Dark mode support on Windows 10 and 11. Add-on components need to be updated to utilize it.
• Added album art in Default User Interface playlist view.
• Clickable rating stars in Default User Interface playlist view (with new Playback Statistics component only).
• New Default UI element: ReFacets, reimplementing most of Facets functionality. Old Facets component doesn’t work with new 64-bit foobar2000.
• Improved Default UI splitter, now allows any number of panes.
• Added ‘remember per playlist layout’ to Default User Interface playlist view.
• Added ‘stream selector’ element to Default User Interface toolbar.
• Some Default UI Elements (ReFacets, Equalizer, visualizations) now also accessible as Columns UI panels.
• Made more edit boxes recognize ctrl+backspace.
• Fixed remembered main window position/size not respecting system DPI settings.

Configuration management changes:

• New internal playlist format, changes instantly saved to disk, no more recent changes lost on crash.
• New configuration data format, changes instantly saved to disk, no more recent changes lost on crash.
• For non-portable installs, profile folder is now %appdata%\foobar2000-v2. There is no need to back up old profile before upgrading, your foobar2000 v1.x profile will be left untouched.
• First run performs import of old configuration data (playlists, library).
• New full config reset semantics – now clears profile folder (optionally leaving user-components intact) instead of asking all components to reset themselves.

DSP technology updates:

• Made possible to apply DSP config changes without reinitializing affected DSPs.
• Allowed DSPs to manipulate their shown name depending on preset data.
• Added crossfeed DSP from foobar2000 mobile.
• Added sample rate exclusions to SSRC resampler.

Audio codec technology updates:

• More audio formats supported out of the box: TAK, APE, AC3, DTS.
• Latest revision of APE format is supported (Monkey’s Audio 10.09).
• Updated WavPack to version 5.6.0.
• Updated FFmpeg to version 6.0.
• libvorbis is now used for decoding Vorbis format instead of FFmpeg, as some rare files continue to cause compatibility issues.
• Cleaned up Ogg reader, made possible to search in remote (HTTP etc) Ogg files.
• Made FLAC tag updater remove ID3v2 garbage prefixing FLAC stream.
• Made MP3 reader report MP3 frame count not matching Xing/LAME header info when verifying integrity.
• Fixed bad MD5 verification of AIFF sourced WavPacks.
• Added extra sanity checks to tag update operations in built-in codecs: made sure that attempts to remove covers from files that didn’t have them in first place don’t alter files at all.

Properties dialog updates:

• Properties dialog now follows theme colors of the active UI.
• Improved behavior if ‘reload info’ detects a change in number of chapters etc.
• Updated Automatically Fill Values ​​logic, better results if searched pattern appears more than once.
• Logs tag update errors to console.

These add-on components are now obsolete as their functionality is available out of the box:

• foo_benchmark
• foo_bitcompare
• foo_verifier
• foo_input_monkey
• foo_ac3
• foo_sanitizer
• foo_input_dts

These components previously included with the installer are no longer optional (features always enabled):

• foo_rgscan
• foo_cdda
• foo_albumlist

Other:

• Media Library efficiency improvements for very large music libraries.
• New audio output device management features – unwanted devices can be disabled, bit depth and DSP can be configured per-device.
• Can display file creation time (%file_created%) and attributes (%file_attributes%).
• Internet Radio dialog (File menu), remembers previously played Internet radio streams.
• Modernized Explorer integration, no longer needs separate 32bit/64bit shell extension DLLs.
• Utilized Windows Imaging Component for picture decoding, removed libwebp dependency. Album covers in HEIF, AVIF, etc can now be viewed if system codecs are present.
• Added %year% mapping, takes year part of %date%, discarding content past first four digits.
• Changed default Album List patterns to use %year%.
• New console logging system, writes per-instance log files to the specified folder.
• Fixed incorrect handling of M4A itunes compilation=0.
• Fixed glitching when seeking with smooth playback and CPU-heavy DSPs active.
• Converter: Pass float32 audio to LAME encoder.
• Changed replacement for slash character in file naming.
• Fixed audio glitching on screen resolution change in certain configurations.
• Improved exclusive output behavior with uncommon channel layouts, 4.1/5.0 would not play on a device expecting 5.1-side.
• Worked around ages old problem with external changes to file tags causing loss of foo_playcount data (needs new foo_playcount).
• Preferences / Shell: changed default target playlist name.
• Better console logging of internet radio stream reconnect events.
• Worked around foo_input_dvda bugs, no longer crashes on null album art data returned.
• Updated exclusive output device-specific workarounds.
• Compiled with Visual Studio 2022.