Foobar2000:Title Formatting Introduction

foobar2000 uses title formatting scripts in several places. This article will give you a basic introduction to title formatting patterns.

Just text

For example, you can customize the format of the playlist or the statusbar. The simplest thing you can do, is display some static text:

 This text will be displayed as-is.

Admittedly, this is pretty boring and you probably will not want to use this on its on. There is one more thing worth noting before we move on to more interesting things. Title formatting code uses some special characters which cannot be used in plain text, but you can use them inside single quotes:

 'These characters normally have special meaning: ( ) , [ ] $ %'

Single quotes, percent signs and ampersand can be included in the output, by doubling them outside single quotes.

Note that linebreaks will not appear in the output, unless they occur within single quotes:

 This is the
 first line.
 'This will stretch
 to the second line.'

Note that multiline scripts cannot be used everywhere; in the default components, they can be used for the text on the icon in the system notification area ("systray") and in the copy command script. The playlist and other singleline displays will truncate strings with line breaks, and would display the above example like this:

 This is the first line. This will stretch (...)

Comments are achieved by placing '//' at the start of a new line of code. That entire line will be commented out, eg.

 //This is commented and will not appear// this is also commented due to the '//' at the start of the line
 This is not commented and will appear// this and the '//' preceding it will also appear, because there is no '//' at the start of the line

Song information

Title formatting scripts would be quite useless, if you could not display information about songs. To access the value of the "title" tag, you would write "title" in percent signs:

 %title%

Actually, the above is a little smarter than just using looking at the "title" tag. If the title tag is missing, it will use the filename instead. There are several of this field remappings that are intended to make your life a little easier; among them are %artist%, %tracknumber%, %list_index% and of course %title%.

A name written inside percent signs will generally try to look up the tag of the same name, unless it is one of the aforementioned remapped fields. Even in this case you can use the unaltered value of the tag:

 $meta(title)

Technical information

Technical information can be accessed in similar way as tags, either using %__name% or $info(name) where the name is one of those that can be seen in the "Other info" part of the properties window in foobar2000. There are some field remappings for technical information as well, for example %bitrate% gives you the average bitrate of a song or the current dynamic bitrate, if the song is playing, provided that the format supports reporting the dynamic bitrate.

Additional Reading

• Title Formatting Reference page