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I've switched from MusicBee to foobar2000 recently but one thing annoys me. In foobar there's 4 different playlists which each contain bunch of songs:

Foobar2000's playlists

As you can see, I'm using both the Playlist View and Playlist Tabs. What I want is to find a way to remove all the playlists and combine them into a single one. That way the playlist tabs would only show 1 tab. I imagine this requires some changes in the core of the application since one of the tabs is "Library Selection" and in order to remove that, you need to somehow show the selected tracks elsewhere. Winamp has its own list for this, MusicBee and MediaMonkey (my preference) show them inline in the library section. Maybe there's a component for this?

Sometimes I play some songs from the library and then double click on a file on the Windows Explorer. When the song finishes it then returns to the previous playlist and plays those songs. The other issue is that sometimes I want to go to the playlist I was playing songs from but I have to go through all of them to find it. These are of course small things but they annoy me when I have to do them 20 times in 1 day.

Managing a playlist this way is a lot easier, then I won't have to move back and forth between playlists. At least they should remove the "Library selection (playing)" and "Query" playlists. It should be "Library Selection" and "Default" where the latter is for all the playing songs.

More info:

Here's my current design: Foobar2000's design

And this is my design for MusicBee: MusicBee

In MusicBee when I click on an album in my library, I can see the tracks in that album. That way I can easily play one of them. When I double click on the name, the album will be added to the "Now Playing" section and the selected track will be played. If I double click a song on Windows Explorer, the playlist will be cleared and the song will be added to the same section. And when this song finishes, the playback will stop as expected.

Now in Foobar2000, if I select the library, the "Playlist View" will change to show my selected tracks. If I double click on it, it will play. Now if I double click a song on the Windows Explorer, the song will be added to another tab (I think it's Default) and it will play from there. Then, when the song finishes, it will continue from the library selection. (?)

If you compare the two, you can see that the MusicBee only has 1 playlist (named "Now Playing") and if I manage it, (for instance reorder songs) I know where they are at. In contrast, I swear sometimes the playing song is in neither of the tabs. I think the MusicBee behavior is a lot more user friendly and I'm looking to change Foobar2000 to the get the same result. Frankly if it wasn't for some quality differences, I'd stick with MusicBee since it's more beautiful and does what I want it to.

On a side note, I have a HiFi music system and after reading a lot of reviews I think Foobar2000 has a slight better quality. That's why I use it. Also it's a very resource-friendly program.

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  • Looking at your images and especially your profile it's clear that you don't need all that bunch of info in my initial answer, but only a practical suggestion on how to change your layout.
    – user162573
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 14:50
  • It would be much easier to solve your problems if you would make a short list of each separate "grievance" you have. I see separate issues: 1) to easily access now-playing playlist double-click the task bar; 2) instead of having only one tab (which beats the purpose of having tabs) replace pls tabs with pls view; 3) but multiple playlists are important in foobar; 4) have you tried the settings under File-Preferences-Media Library-Facets-Library: selection, double click, middle-click action?
    – user162573
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 15:06
  • I think you want to keep the Facets-selection-send to playlist option active and that is what is making the now playing pls inaccessible. Double-clicking the taskbar is then useless.That is your question.
    – user162573
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 15:16
  • My way would be the Facets option 'selection:none', and for the other two to use 'Add to current playlist' and 'Send to new playlist'. In this way the playing track is never lost. Drag and drop works perfect too. What simplifies greatly the use of Facets is using 5 or six columns, setting them to folder view and the display setting to columns. In this way foobar looks nothing like Mediamonkey. But it is not supposed to in fact.
    – user162573
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 15:42

1 Answer 1

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I have installed your theme. You do not use Playlist view, only Playlist Tabs and Tabs.

The simplest way would be just to use only Playlist view instead of Playlist Tabs. But from your comment I see that this is not your main concern.

To manage multiple playlists while displaying only one in Playlist view, you can use Playlist manager in parallel, which is just a list of playlists names.

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  • Hi. Updated the question. And here's the link: dropbox.com/s/7wkzbyn5is8m2sc/Mine.fth?dl=0
    – Alireza Noori
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 14:08
  • Actually I used the playlist view before even knowing there's a playlist tab component. The behavior is the same. You just can see 1 playlist at a time and to switch you have to set a shortcut or use the playlist manager.
    – Alireza Noori
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 15:01
  • @AlirezaNoori - then the problem for you might be the way Facets interacts with the playlists. I guess you in fact prefer multiple playlists/tabs to just Playlist View. To adjust what happens between Facets and the playlists, check the facets settings: File-Preferences-Media Library-Facets-Library: selection, double click, middle-click action. You should change your question because there it looks like what you mainly want is one playlist.
    – user162573
    Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 15:09

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