Sunday, September 25, 2011

Convert foobar2000 playlists into something useful

Because i had switched from Windows to Ubuntu (on my desktop computer) a week ago, i had the problem, that i had to say "good bye" to my favorite music player called "foobar2000", because he is only available for Windows.
I had some really cool online radio stations stored in foobar2000.
The biggest problem: foobar2000 stores the playlists (and my radio stations) in a non-open binary file format.

So I decided to write the program called "foobarConverter". It is capable to convert a foobar2000 playlist (".fpl") into ".pls", ".m3u" and extended ".m3u" playlists.
As it is written in Java, it should run on a variety of operating systems.

The program is freeware for non-commercial use.

Example of usage:
xxxx@ubuntu:~/$ java -jar ./foobarConverter.jar ../Radio_2011-09-09.fpl pls
Starting foobar2000 playlist converter.
Converting file to 'pls'...
Conversion done! :)

If you are interested in some details, look there: http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ
(Question: "Are specifications of the FPL playlist format available? Why doesn't foobar2000 use some user-editable XML-based playlist file format instead?")

Have fun! :)

4 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot - saved me a lot of trouble. :-)
    I love this smart, handy solutions to unnerving problems.

    Keep going.

    Me, the unknown

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  2. Fpl playlists are user editable in Foobar. Just bring up the playlist you want, edit it in Foobar and save it as fpl, m3u or m38.
    No different than if you did the same to an m3u playist in Notepad.

    However, I will download your little program because I want to convert all my fpl playlists to m3u, and hope yours lets me do it with less effort. Thanks in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you for this nice one. I like to use it like so:
    for list in ./playlists/*.fpl;do java -jar foobarConverter.jar $list m3u; done

    ReplyDelete
  4. How do I use this in Windows ? I would like to convert my playlist in m3u so I can use them in another player

    Thank you

    ReplyDelete