foo_alphabar

A Columns UI panel for foobar2000 that draws an alphabet strip (#, A–Z) next to the playlist. Click a letter to jump to the first %album artist% starting with it; the highlight follows scrolling.

Requirements

foobar2000 v2, Columns UI, and a playlist sorted by %album artist%.

Install

Download foo_alphabar.fb2k-component from the releases and open it. Then add Alphabar beside the playlist, about 25 px wide: turn on View → Layout → Live editing, right-click the playlist and choose Add before → Panels → Alphabar. Drag the splitter to narrow it, then turn live editing off.

Preferences → Display → Alphabar chooses whether letters with no album artist are shown dimmed or hidden. It can also size each letter by its number of tracks, so the strip mirrors the playlist like a scrollbar: empty letters are then hidden, and every letter keeps a readable minimum height.

Notes

• Accented initials fold onto their base letter (É → E). Leading articles are not stripped, to match a sort on raw %album artist%.
• Leading hyphens, dashes and apostrophes are skipped, as Windows sorting ignores them: -M- files under M, 'Til Tuesday under T.
• The last letters may not reach the top of the view, as it stops scrolling at the end of the list; there the highlight shows the last of them.
• Colours follow Columns UI, including dark mode, but are not configurable.

Build

Visual Studio 2022 (toolset v143) and a Windows 10/11 SDK. The foobar2000 and Columns UI SDKs are vendored under sdk/.

Run from cmd with foobar2000 closed, as a post-build step copies the DLL into the foobar2000 profile. The path is for the Community edition; in the Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022, plain msbuild works too.

set MSBUILD="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\amd64\MSBuild.exe"
%MSBUILD% foo_alphabar.sln -t:Rebuild -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64 -m
%MSBUILD% foo_alphabar.sln -t:Rebuild -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=Win32 -m

Then package both into build\foo_alphabar.fb2k-component, a zip with the Win32 DLL at the root and the x64 one under x64/:

powershell -NoProfile -Command "Add-Type -A System.IO.Compression.FileSystem; $p='build\foo_alphabar.fb2k-component'; if (Test-Path $p) { del $p }; $z=[IO.Compression.ZipFile]::Open($p,'Create'); [IO.Compression.ZipFileExtensions]::CreateEntryFromFile($z,'build\Win32\Release\foo_alphabar.dll','foo_alphabar.dll') | Out-Null; [IO.Compression.ZipFileExtensions]::CreateEntryFromFile($z,'build\x64\Release\foo_alphabar.dll','x64/foo_alphabar.dll') | Out-Null; $z.Dispose()"

Compress-Archive would not do: in Windows PowerShell 5.1 it writes x64\ with a backslash, which foobar2000 does not read as a folder.

Credits

Written with the help of Claude, Anthropic's AI coding assistant.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. The vendored SDKs keep their own licences.