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Enhance Your Audio Collection With Foobar2000

I took on the task a few days ago to update and upgrade my audio collection with the meta-data I’ve been striping out all these years. For the longest time my audio collection was a simple hierarchy of artist’s names and albums. I used foobar2000, but only because of it’s small memory usage.

I started with album covers. Using a program called Album Art Aggregator I downloaded almost every album cover I needed. The program is fairly simple to use but does require the .NET libraries to run.

I then upgraded to the latest version of foobar2000 which was 0.9.5.4.

I had the chore of tagging my entire collection. But foobar has a few features to help out. Highlight an entire album, right click, then choose Tagging -> Get Tags from freedb. Hopefully you’ll be presented with multiple tag sets to choose from. If one isn’t found, right click, choose properties and in the Tools menu try out Auto-Fill tags. Foobar will generate tags for you based of the filename.

If you want to look good Columns UI is the way to go. It’s a little clunky to figure out at first but this might help, everything to tweak the design seems to be modifiable from File->Preferences then Display->Columns UI choose the second tab Layout. Play around with your right-click menus in there.

Another big boost is the Lyrics Panel. This handy plugin automatically downloads lyrics for your songs if it doesn’t find any.

My Foobar2000 SetupMy Foobar2000 Setup.

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Hope for Ubuntu on the Acer – Part 2

So I’m writing this on an Ubuntu LiveCD while it’s installing to a partition I set aside yesterday. I must admit except for the wireless issue it appears that everything else works right. The sound controls are functional, USB works fine, and power options are in place. It’s actually very clean. The screen dims after about 20 seconds of no use but lights up again as soon as I touch anything. The touchpad works fine although Ubuntu didn’t magically know I like to set up the right button as a middle button and the right side of the touchpad as a right button. The installer is chugging away now at around 70% putting it’s files on an ext3 formatted drive. I opted for no swap partition as I know it’s easy to set that up later. Although wireless is out wired networking worked perfectly find.

I’ll keep everyone updated…

Update: I managed to get the wifi working finally. I followed the instructions on this forum except I downloaded the drivers I found here. It took a bit of mucking around but finally it worked. We’ll see how this develops the next few weeks. Also note the wireless LED does not work.