I really don't have a lot of requirements in a music player, or I thought I didn't, but it seems like I'm picky. I've been through.. I don't know how many, never satisfied.

I was a fan of Winamp for years, but eventually got tired of videos opening up in it and it totally wrecking my window placement. I spent a while hanging on, not wanting to change, changing defaults one by one for video file formats, but it either didn't stick or a new format would come and mess me up again. I didn't want a video player. I'm completely satisfied with Zoom Player, Media Player, and WinDVD - between the three I can play more or less anything I want.

So I switched to Windows Media. If my music player was going to play movies I might as well use one where the screen doesn't change size all the time. And I stuck with it for a while, maybe a few months, but the size of it was just too much, both in terms of screen space and processing drain.

I tried Yahoo's whatever music player - I thought it'd be cool to be able to show people in Yahoo Messenger what I'm playing, but it was so incredibly slow I don't think it lasted an hour on my comptuer. Since then, I've been using iTunes. Which I just don't like - I couldn't easily find (if it exists) a way to easily update my library or a way to search for a certain song. The only feature I really liked was the way songs blended between them.

With both iTunes and Windows Media, I had the grumble that their toolbars just took up too much room in the task bar.

Basically what I was looking for in a music player was - well, a music player. I wanted something that would play my music, that I could minimize to the system tray, and just let it go. Preferably something compatible with the Last.fm plugin so I wouldn't have to mess with an unsupported plugin.

When you first open up foobar 2000, it's nothing exciting. But the customization is incredible.

It minimizes to tray. The playlist system uses tabs, which really impressed me. I'm a big fan of tabs. It was a breeze to change the keystrokes to what I wanted them to be. It works with Last.fm. Changing the layout a colors was a little complex, but really once you scan the help page, it doesn't take very long for some very nice features. I can search for songs, scanning my media library for new tracks is simple and quick despite having a rather large music folder.

At the moment my only complaint is I've somehow overridden where the color of the playing track changes. Hopefully I'll be able to sort that out without too much work.

Because the last thing listening to music should be is work. And with foobar2000, so far, it's not.

Finally.