Facets

Manual

Installation

Download the foo_facets.dll file to the components subfolder of your foobar2000 directory. Start foobar2000 and make sure you have added one or more music folders at Preferences, Media Library. Open the menu View, Layout to activate the layout editing mode, and follow the instructions to add a "Facets" UI element to the user interface. Right-click into each facet to choose a view, for example genre, artist, and album. You can also combine columns like date and album by enabling the "multiple columns" option, or add certain statistics.

Facets layout

A new Facets UI element contains three facets. You can change this number by activating the layout editing mode, right-clicking into one of the facets, and chosing between the options to remove the highlighted facet, or to insert or add a new one. (screenshot) The difference between "Add" and "Insert" is that the new facet will be inserted either in front or after the highlighted one.

Instead of next to each other, you can also arrange facets below each other. (screenshot) To achieve this, activate the layout editing mode, right-click on one of the splitters between two facets, and choose "Arrange vertically". Another quite useful feature is that you can double-click on one of the splitters to reset all facets to the same size.

Column patterns

Facet columns are based on title formatting, a language used in several parts of foobar2000. See Help, Titleformatting Help for a syntax reference. You can edit the pattern of existing columns or add new ones at Preferences, Media Library, Facets. (screenshot)

Metadata fields are usually accessed by including the name in percent signs, like %album% or %composer%. Note that several titleformat expressions do not only check a single field, but multiple ones. %album artist% for example falls back to the artist field if no album artist tag is present.

All predefined facet columns are enclosed in brackets, a syntax which is used to hide tracks which lack a certain tag. [%album%] for example only displays tracks with an album tag, while %album% would cause tracks without an album tag to be listed in the facet under a "?" item. You can also use $if2(%album%,Unknown) to display tracks without an album in an item labeled "Unknown" instead of "?".

A specific feature which is also used in the album list component is the %<fieldname>% syntax to split fields with multiple values into separate items. So instead of seeing an item like "Pop, Rock" in a genre facet, you see individual items for "Pop" and "Rock" - each containing the track tagged "Pop; Rock".

Playlist interaction

By default, a facet sends its current selection to a playlist called "Facet Selection". To change the name of this playlist, just rename it like you would rename any other playlist, the component detects that automatically. If you do not like this behaviour, set the "selection change" option in the preferences to "none".

Double-click and middle-click actions can also be customized. Note that the double-click action is locked the selection change option is set to "send to the facet playlist" or "send to the current playlist". The reason is that double-clicking always causes a selection change, and thus the selection change action to be executed.

Items sent to a playlist are sorted by the pattern specified at Preferences, General, Sort incoming files by.

Search box

By default, a Facets UI Element displays a search box on top. If you want to move the search box to the bottom or completely disable it, activate the layout editing mode, right-click on it, and choose between "Bottom-docked" and "Hide".

The search box supports simple full-text search which checks all metadata fields, technical properties, and the file path, as well as the query syntax which is also used in playlist search and album list elements. Examples would be "artist IS The Beatles" and "rating GREATER 3". This allows you to filter your facets based on specific rules. For a syntax reference on queries, click on the dropdown botton and choose "Show query format reference".

History items can be removed by clicking on the dropdown button.

Special display features

Some special behaviours which might be perceived as bugs unless explicitly being mentioned as features:

The "All" item of facets using the [%fieldname%] pattern (i.e. with brackets) only contains tracks which have the specified field.
Text in brackets appears dimmed. I consider this as quite useful for "Artist (feat. another artist)" or "Title (some remix)".
Rating columns have a varying intensity depending on the percentage of rated tracks. This indicates a rating's reliability.
The summary item of date columns displays the difference between the first and last year, not the number of different dates.