I’ll admit it: I’m not as interested in tinkering with things as I used to be. I’d rather they just work so I can get MY work done. That way, I have more time to play.

Well, since my foray back into the world of Windows, I’ve been sadly lacking a mod player. DeliPlayer v2 is probably the best for the task, but it’s ugly as all sin, and despite being developed for years, isn’t the world’s most CPU friendly.

WinAmp’s MOD support is awful on a good day, and really, it doesn’t do what I want it to: not suck.

Enter foobar2000:

If you think the above is sparse, you should have seen the work it took me to make the beast print THAT much information about the files it’s playing..

foobar2000 makes harcore UNIX users look, and feel like they’ve taken first class – on the back of a camel, downhill, with a breeze. If you want to add support for something that it doesn’t natively work with, after researching the hundreds of plugins for foobar, seeing which are still developed – and still work – with the latest version, You’re usually copying a DLL into a subdirectory of the installation, then tinkering with one of the myraid of preference panes to try to see where what you did went, and what it does. “What? Me? Documentation?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great player, and from what I can see by ignoring the recent v0.9 SDK (surprise, nothing from v0.8 works – they’ve reinvented it, again), it does an incredible job at taking files, and formatting the data for your screen to your exact specification – then rendering an audio stream in one of about 3 ways to your same audio output device.

Now, I’ve grown to like it for what I want it for (Thank you, kode54, for foo_dumb, an incredible multiformat MOD rendering plugin), but honestly – I wish Apple would update and allow people to develop plugins for QuickTime.

Why? iTunes just works. If I want to listen to a song, I click a button, and it works. I don’t need to spend 10 minutes in a binary file editor to extract variables to find out exactly what the plugin system exports. No kidding.

Here’s how I got my final statusbar:

All this to find out about the @#$%)! file I wanted to play. Damn it, Steve, release some docs on interfacing with QuickTime, already. Some people still hate iTunes. Make it a little easier for others to support, and they’ll accept it with open arms.

The alternative, well, is foobar.