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! :)