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• Software Requirements and Setup
• Properly Tagged Music Files

Requirements and Setup

Software Requirements and Setup

The software requirements for this tutorial are as follows:

• Windows 2000, XP or Vista. Foobar2000 0.9 won’t run on Windows 95, 98 or ME.
• Foobar2000 v0.9: Get it from foobar2000.org.
• Latest Columns UI: Get it from musicmusic’s page.

I suggest you use a second installation of Foobar2000 into a different folder because we are going to mess up Columns UI’s config completely. Make sure to disable Enable per-user settings and Install for all users in the installer. Otherwise your current config file will be overwritten. After the installation unpack foo_ui_columns.dll from the downloaded archive into the components subfolder of the new Foobar2000 location.

When you load Foobar2000 for the first time make sure to select Columns UI as the interface module.

For writing and analysing scripts I suggest using a text editor with syntax highlighting and only copy & paste the finished script to Foobar2000 in the end. Some users on the hydrogenaudio.org forums have even created specific Tagz syntax highlighting modules for a variety of editors including the popular UltraEdit, TextPad and Notepad++. If your favourite editor is not in the list, try its built-in C or C++ highlighting, which should work reasonably well.

Properly Tagged Music Files

As our design relies entirely on the tags of your audio files, a properly tagged music collection is essential. If you’re not familiar with the concept of tags, catching up on that issue is probably more important than beginning scripting right away. A starting point might be the Hydrogenaudio knowledgebase.

For the most part, our design follows commonly used tagging standards. The following list gives you an overview over all the tags used in the scripts.

• %artist%, %title% and %album%
  Essential. Used all over the place and containing the name of the track artist, the song’s title and the name of the album respectively.
• %tracknumber%
  Essential for tracks being part of a full album (album tracks). Contains the tracknumber of that song.
• %disc%
  Non-critical. Contains the disc number for albums with more than one disc.
• %album tracks%
  Essential for album tracks. Contains the total number of tracks on the album.
  Another popular tag name for ‘number of tracks on album’ (not used by the scripts in this tutorial) is %totaltracks%, which is even supported by Foobar2000’s mass tagger.
• %album artist%
  Medium important. Various-artists albums should have it containing ‘Various Artists’ or any other string you prefer to identify that album.
• %date%
  Non-critical. Is supposed to contain the track date, i.e. the date applicable to that individual song, not necessarily to the whole album. But nothing will break if you use this tag to refer to the album’s date.
• %album date%
  Non-critical. Used to store the album’s date when it’s different from the tracks’ dates. Think of a recent best-of album covering several decades of songs and you get the picture.

The special way of displaying full albums depends on the three tags %album%, %tracknumber% and %album tracks%. All album tracks must have all of those or the design will break. At the same time single tracks must not have all three of those tags. Furthermore %album artist% is strongly recommended for proper display of VA albums.

Of course you absolutely need not re-tag your music collection just to follow those guidelines. Changing the scripts to apply to your preferred tag structure should generally be straight forward and not a problem.