Foobar2000 Dark Mode

[Tavarus Calamia]

asan update to my previous foobar fiddling, copilot being added to windows apparently rubbed me wrong enough to change my default boot partition and see if WINE with some theming could achieve decent dark modes

foobar columns UI got support for dark mode last year, and I feel the urge to mention you can finally make foobar look pretty decent without having to comb through pages of third-party themes. this leaves mIRC as the last application I still regularly use without a dark mode, which I think we can confidently say is unlikely to ever get one

most of my adolescence involved using some kind of winamp 2.x, which is still totally serviceable, but I do prefer hanging on to software that has current community support. winamp still maintains vbulletin forums even through their acquisitions and seems to have some original staff posting, so for as much teeth gnashing as I've done about them legitimizing NFTs there seem to be people there still interested in keeping their heads down and making decent software. I installed the latest 5.x and it looks untouched at surface level from when I regularly used it, like I untombed a program from an old IDE drive

I find it a bit of a waste of energy to use dark themes on a TFT monitor.

Instead I use the default theme (My Linux Mint with XFCE still looks somewhat like Windows 95) and turn the brightness of my monitor down to 10%.

I am not sure how it is on other systems but on ubuntu the window style is set by the system settings, so if you have a dark mode enabled there it will also put all the UI elements (except the drawing window) in the dark mode style. This works at least for v7 but I think ita also worked for v5/6 before already.

I would really love to see a dark theme for mp3tag. It is one of the last remaining programs I use without one.

I would happily donate again if a dark theme gets implemented. Or I would try to help with the developement of it if possible.

thanks for the reply.

I understand it is a big amount of work.

It is indeed not only esthetics.

Working with a light background is much more tiring for the eyes.

I tweaked it by changing the windows colors in the regedit, but it is not perfect,

a native theme would work much better.

A lot of softwares are now offering the feature. this would make your good app even better!

Hi, This is my first post here, I recently discovered MP3TAG and have to say, Great work, I love it......I tend to tag mostly at night time, my PC monitor is a 4k 55ins OLED, the light from the MP3TAG window is very bright, I find myself switching windows to find album covers and info etc, my theme's for Windows & all other web content are all set to dark, switching from dark to light is actually very uncomfortable so, I too would love to see a dark theme MP3TAG. For now I use the widows "Night Light" function but a dark theme would be so much better.

A dark theme would be preferable. People with young eyes may not care about it, but people with older, easily tired eyes would appreciate it. It is definitely not merely aesthetics. During the day? Maybe not too much of a problem, but at night it most definitely is. Win10 Night Light mode helps, but never as much as a true native, darker (not black or high-contrast) skin.

W10's dark mode API apparently isn't available to non-UWP based programs, hence why most of them don't support it and we're left with the strange state in W10 where some programs support it and others don't.

First would be to patch the Windows theming to support unsigned visual styles and add a dark visual style (odd that Microsoft doesn't include one of their own tbh). This can be done on earlier Windows versions as well though it's up to the user whether they trust the patcher.

A workaround for non-UWP programs I came across was posted about on Stackoverflow and also a working example on Github which demonstrates an undocumented dark mode API introduced in Windows 10 1809. It would be up to the dev's discretion whether to implement this given it's not officially supported.

Implement a custom skin to the program. Programs such as MPC-HC for example appear to implement their own dark mode separate from the user's OS setting. However since it's not universal to the OS I can understand why various programs don't consider it a 'pure' approach (eg: foobar2000's developer, though in that case the alternate theming plugin Columns UI does support full skinning).

I am in the exact same position. I'm getting a little older and my eyes are not as good as they used to be. It's getting hard to read very small text, especially when it is dark text on a white background. I have Windows and all my other apps set to Dark Mode (almost everything supports it now). When I started Mp3tag, it was like being blasted in the eyes with a spotlight. I felt like I need to put on sunglasses to use it. That's sad, because I finally gave up on my old tagger and want to use Mp3tag quite a lot in its place. These days almost every app I see has a Dark Mode option - it seems hard to believe it's that difficult when apps that are far smaller and much less popular have implemented it.

It's been some time since I did any coding, but though I can see there might still be minor issues in doing it in a fancy way to support Windows etc. But it doesn't have to be done the super-elegant and completely integrated way. You don't have to make it use the Official Windows Method, or design support for themes in general. But what is preventing a less fancy but very effective solution? Something philosophically like this?

It may well be much harder than I think, but to my simple brain it seems like that would be possible. And Frankly I view this as an accessibility issue because it is hard to use for people with vision impairment. I think lots of people would appreciate it if you gave it a shot again. As I said, almost every app on my desktop has a Dark Mode now, and some of them are pretty cheesy, way lee advanced than Mp3tag. Maybe ask around some programming sites?

As much as I like the inclusion of a dark mode in v3.09, could you please provide an option to toggle the dark mode in an upcoming version (I don't see a way to do so)? I'd like to use the light mode.

I use dark mode as my system setting, but I find Mp3tag's original light theme to be more visually clear. The main advantage of the original theme for me is that the tag panel's text fields have a white background and the tag panel itself is grey, giving better better separation between the black text used for a field's name, and the black text used for a field's contents.

The new dark theme on the other hand uses white text on a black background for both the field name and its contents, which isn't as clear, especially with field names which are long (it ends up looking like a wall of text between the field names and contents).

Another criticism would be that it's not as easy to tell that files are selected once you click into the tag panel. Maybe something could also be done about this? Currently, files are highlighted in blue before changing focus to the tag panel, but after doing so, the highlight turns to a dark grey (almost the same as the file list's background).

This is especially annoying when it is all files that are selected and the file list is longer than the available view. Technically, one could look for the presence of any grid lines (none = files are selected), but if the selected files could dim to be a darker share of blue (when tag panel has focus), or maybe to not as dark of a dark grey as is current, it would be helpful. I don't recall it being as ambiguous in the light theme.

For the time being I will keep the two old foo_dsd_asio modes (now renamed to mode 4 and 5) in case some one has trouble with the DSDTranscoder component but they will be eventually removed as they are now redundant.

To enable this, run the installer from the DSDTranscoder folder of the extracted SACD plugin location or download the component from _transcoder/ , extract the content from the zip and run the DSDTranscode executable file, accept all default options until installation is complete.

My iFi iDSD micro supports native DSD through ASIO up to DSD512 but only for 44.1K based sample rates like SACD rips or upsampled CDs, for 48K based sample rates like those generated by upsampling 16/48, 24/96 or 24/192KHz to DSD it only supports up to DSD256 through DoP. With this component it takes very little time and effort to configure all 44.1K family to output native DSD and leave all 48K family in bypass (leaving the default dash, -).

Version 1.1.1 introduces two new user configurable fields (Window Length and Window Type) plus the possibility of performing sample rate conversion in the upsampling process, more on these a few paragraghs down.

Since the plugin is not included any longer in the plugin zip file, it needs to be downloaded separately from here ( version 0.9.4 is strongly recommended), decompressed to a folder and installed separately as a any other program.

So should you want to leave DSD unprocessed make sure you have all these PCM rates with no up/downsampling configured like in the shown screen capture. This may be a little of a nuisance if you have plenty 176.4 or 352.8K PCM music you want to convert to DSD but presently there is no alternative solution other than resampling these files with SOX to a 48KHz base, e.g. 176.4K->192K and 352.8->384K.

One example of what can be done with this mode is upsampling 176.4 or 352.8 KHz PM to DSD while being able to output true DSD without intermediate conversions. This cannot be done in any of the previous modes as this sample rates are shared by PCM and DSD64/128 in DoP mode output by the plugin.

This is how the above would look like aiming to upsample all PCM to the maximum DSD rate supported by my iFi iDSD micro (native DSD512 for 44.1 based PCM and DSD256 DoP for 48K based PCM) while leaving DSD unmolested:

Hello. I have foobar and DSD Transcoder installed. I have a modern delta-sigma DAC (Opera Consonance reference 1.3). I doubt the quality of Foobar (a free software) and its configuration options (converter, sample & hold, window ..), in the work of converting from PCM to DSD. What is your opinion? Is it better to convert PCM to DSD using Foobar and input the DSD file to the DAC? Or is it better to send a bit-perfect PCM file and have the DAC do all the internal conversion work designed by the manufacturer?

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