Foobar2000 Mobile for Windows 10

Foobar2000 Mobile for Windows 10 is a new mobile version of the popular music player for Windows designed specifically for Windows 10's Universal Windows Platform.

The developer of Foobar 2000 held a fundraiser back in 2014 to port the music player to Android, iOS and Windows Mobile.

The fundraiser was successful and the Windows version targeted Windows 8.1 initially. Today, Foobar2000 Mobile for Windows 10 has been released, an updated version of the music player application that is offered as a free preview currently.

The following review takes a look at the preview version released for Windows 10, and tries to answer whether it is a suitable alternative for the desktop version of the player.

Foobar2000 Mobile

Foobar2000 is a fast, powerful music player that users can customize to their liking, for instance by modifying the player's interface or installing components that extend its functionality.

The preview version supports major audio formats such as mp3, m4a and flac, and several powerful under the hood features that universal apps usually don't support.

The interface is as basic as it gets currently, but support for themes is baked in already which suggests that users will be able to change the player interface at least somewhat in the future.

For now, only a black or white skin are available for selection but there is already a user skins listing.

As far as controls are concerned, the player displays all options it provides on start. You can select to browse music in different ways, for instance by album, arist or title, use the built-in shuffle feature, or browse by composer, genre or style instead.

Advanced Search provides even more options to browse the music collection. The music player interface itself is bare bones: you get options to pause playback, use a slider to jump to a different position, if go back or forward a song if you are listening to an album.

The music continues to play when you leave the playback screen or minimize the app.

Most of the features until now are found in several other music players for Windows 10 as well. If you dig in the preferences, you will stumble upon a mighty built-in DSP Manager.

You can turn on or off features on the page individually, for instance the Crossfader or advanced limiter.

The preferences provide you with other useful options. Use them to add folders to the library (Foobar 2000 Mobile scans the system music library by default exclusively), or configure ReplayGain Use, the output mode (XAudio2 by default), or an option to clear the image cache.

Foobar2000 Mobile supports UPnP Media Servers which you can configure in the preferences as well.

Closing Words

Foobar2000 Mobile is a good, maybe even great, music player if you compare it to other Universal Windows Platform apps.

It lacks features when compared to the Foobar2000 program for Windows on the other hand, and if you make use of it already, there is nothing the app offers that you cannot get from the desktop program as well.

This leaves mobile use as the main incentive to install and use Foobar2000 Mobile.