pwnt.be

I’ve made the switch. No, don’t be daft, I haven’t switched to a Mac. I have in fact pulled the plug on Winamp in favor of the lean mean foobar2000, which has finally reached a stadium where I consider it usable and a worthy replacement for Winamp.
Should you use it? Perhaps. It’s not the definitive media player. What it is though, is fairly minimalist and functional—a lot like μTorrent, incidentally. If you, like me and many others, keep your media player minimized and use global hotkeys for everything, you should totally consider taking this baby for a spin. If you don’t, all I can say is: consider it; think about it: you don’t want the user interface, compact as it may be, to be in your way permanently, so what’s the point of a spiffy skinning engine that’s just going to hog resources?
I will say that foobar2000 isn’t that awesome out of the box. That is to say, it works and everything, but its component-based architecture is there for a reason. I ended up installing a couple of components. The first is Columns UI, since the default list-based playlist just contains table-based information and hence, I wanted it to be presented that way. Next up, while I don’t want a permanently visible UI, I do like to be notified of song changes. That’s why I turned to Toaster. Unfortunately, there’s no foobar 0.9 version of it yet. Not to worry: foo_prettypop is about as cool and works nice and dandy. And finally, since I wanted to be able to continue to use my X-Chat “Now Playing” script, I needed a component that would simply write information of the currently playing song to a text file, which AMIP handles beautifully. With all those installed and configured, I’m well through my 6th hour of foobar2000 playback, and rest assured many more are to follow.