Foobar2000
audio player, freeware

foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, and formerly Windows Phone, developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Standard "skin" elements can be individually augmented or replaced with different dials, buttons, and visualizers. foobar2000 offers third-party user interface modifications through a software development kit (SDK).
foobar2000 supports many audio file formats, has many features for organizing metadata, files, and folders, and has a converter interface for use with command line encoders. To maximize audio fidelity in cases where resampling or downscaling in bit depth is required, it provides noise shaping and dithering. There are a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. The core is closed source, whereas the SDK is licensed under the Three-Clause BSD license.
History and development
foobar2000 was first released on 20 December 2002 and developed by Peter Pawłowski, who had previously worked at Nullsoft and developed plugins for Winamp. He created foobar2000 with the audiophile community in mind.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Foobar2000” is audio player, freeware. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Foobar2000, audio and player, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Foobar2000” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.