A foobar2000 skin that turns the world's most configurable audio player into something that looks like a modern streaming app.
Four-step install. No components to hunt down. No fonts to install.
Verdant is a modern foobar2000 theme — a complete visual skin that restyles your local music library and playlists into a clean, dark, Spotify-inspired interface.
Everything on screen is custom-drawn in a JSplitter panel running under Columns UI — sidebar, home, playlist and All Songs views, search, queue and lyrics pane, player bar, fullscreen mode, even the window title bar. No stock foobar2000 widgets are involved, which is why it looks nothing like default foobar2000.
It does not connect to Spotify's service and plays nothing you don't already own — it's a look, not a client.
 Playlist |
 All Songs |
 Search |
 Artist |
 Fullscreen |
 Lyrics |
 Visualizer |
 Editing |
- Home — a horizontal shelf of your playlists with 2×2 cover mosaics, above a grid of every artist in your library.
- Playlist view — gradient header tinted from the cover art, sortable by title / artist / album, inline rename, delete, and drag-and-drop import with duplicate detection.
- All Songs — your entire library in one virtualised list, optionally grouped by artist, album, or both. Handles thousands of tracks without stuttering.
- Search — instant, across artists and tracks, as you type.
- Queue / Lyrics pane — what's actually playing next (real playback queue and "next from"),
or synced
.lrc/ plain.txtlyrics that roll with the track. Click any queue row to jump to it. - Fullscreen mode — big now-playing art, rolling lyrics, or an FFT audio visualizer fed from real PCM. Four visualizer styles.
- Normalize volume — one button that levels your whole library so you stop reaching for the volume knob between albums. How it works ↓
- Shuffle that tells the truth — shuffle plays from a hidden shuffled copy of the playlist, so the "next up" list is the actual upcoming order, not a guess.
- Custom title bar — frameless window with real File / Library / Help menus and window controls.
- Install foobar2000 as portable from the official website.
- Download
Verdant-vX.Y.Z.zipfrom the latest release. - Extract the
profilefolder from the zip into foobar2000's root folder (the one containingfoobar2000.exe). - Start foobar2000 and enjoy.
That's it. Columns UI, JSplitter and UI Wizard are bundled — nothing to install separately. And no fonts to install: Verdant uses Segoe UI and Segoe MDL2 Assets, both of which ship with Windows 10 and 11.
For a standard (non-portable) install, extract the contents of
profileinto%APPDATA%\foobar2000-v2instead, then start foobar2000.
Don't extract over it — profile carries a layout and core settings that would replace your own.
Close foobar2000, double-click install.bat, start foobar2000.
The installer checks before it writes. It adds only the components you're missing, and if you already
use Columns UI it replaces only the panel layout — your colours, fonts, playlist columns and
filters survive, because it uses Columns UI's own layout import rather than overwriting its config.
It backs up whatever it touches and writes an uninstall.ps1 beside the backup in
<profile>\verdant-backup\<date>\.
Prefer to import the layout yourself?
extras\verdant-layout.fcl is the layout on its own. Copy profile\verdant\ into your profile, then
Preferences → Display → Columns UI → Import, ticking Main Layout and Toolbar Layout.
Run uninstall.ps1 from <profile>\verdant-backup\<date>\, then delete <profile>\verdant\.
Home and All Songs look empty? Verdant reads foobar's Media Library, not your playlists. A fresh foobar has an empty library, so add a music folder under Preferences → Media Library. That's expected, not a broken install.
Lyrics are read from a .lrc (synced) or .txt (plain) file sitting next to the audio file, with the
same name.
Right-click the panel → Properties:
| Property | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Display: UI scale (0 = auto) |
0 |
Scales every font and the title bar. 0 follows your display scaling; set 1.0 for a compact look, higher for a large or 4K screen. |
Scrolling: wheel step (px) |
180 |
How far one wheel notch scrolls the lists. |
Both are read when the panel loads — reload the panel (right-click → Reload) after changing them.
Sidebar and queue-pane widths are still code: M.navW / M.queueW in
theme/verdant/core/tokens.js.
All Songs → Normalize volume makes every track in your library play back at the same loudness.
Under the hood this is ReplayGain, which is two separate things — and the button owns both:
- A loudness measurement per track, stored as a
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAINtag in the file. - Playback applying that measurement (foobar's ReplayGain source mode).
The pill turns green only when both are true, so it can never claim to be on while doing nothing.
The line underneath tells you where you stand — e.g. 1,204 of 3,000 tracks scanned.
| State | Clicking it |
|---|---|
| Some tracks unscanned | Asks first, then scans them and switches normalizing on |
| All scanned, normalizing off | Switches it on — instant, no rescan |
| Normalizing on (green) | Switches it off. Tags are left alone, so switching back on is instant |
The scan writes tags into your audio files, which is why it asks first. The scan itself is foobar's own — its progress window, its update file tags confirmation — so you can cancel there and nothing is written. Only unscanned tracks are ever handed to it. A large library takes a while the first time, but it's a one-off.
Nothing here is destructive: no audio is re-encoded, no tag is removed. To undo it completely, use foobar's own ReplayGain → Remove ReplayGain information from files.
- foobar2000 v2, 64-bit (developed and tested on 2.25)
- Windows 10 or 11
- Bundled and installed for you: Columns UI, JSplitter (
foo_uie_jsplitter), UI Wizard (foo_ui_wizard, optional — without it you keep the normal Windows title bar)
Is this a theme or a skin? Both words get used for the same thing in the foobar2000 world. Verdant is a full visual replacement — layout, colours, fonts, every control — not a colour tweak.
Will it change how my music sounds? No. Verdant is purely visual. The one exception is Normalize volume, which you have to switch on yourself and which uses foobar2000's own ReplayGain.
Does it work with foobar2000 v1.x? No — v2, 64-bit only.
Can I still use the Default UI / my old Columns UI layout? Yes. Columns UI keeps layout presets,
so you can switch back at Preferences → Display → Columns UI → Layout. If you installed with
install.bat, your previous layout is also backed up and restorable.
Is my music library safe? Verdant never touches your audio files. The one feature that writes anything is Normalize volume, which asks first and writes only ReplayGain tags.
It looks huge / tiny on my screen. Set Display: UI scale in the panel properties — see
Tuning.
theme/verdant/ the theme — copied verbatim into <profile>\verdant\
main.js entry point: declares the panel, sets the module load order
core/ props, tokens, utils, title formats, memory caps, job scheduler
data/ art, library, playback, lyrics, replaygain, dedupe, playlist edit
ui/ skeletons + shimmer, window chrome and shared widgets
views/ nav, playlist, home, artist, songs, search, queue, bar, fullscreen
app.js panel state, layout, paint dispatch, input, foobar callbacks
components/ the three foobar components, bundled for the installer
dist-config/ layout + core config harvested from a clean-room foobar
tools/
deploy.ps1 dev sync into the foobar profile ( -Watch to auto-sync )
install.ps1/.bat the shipped installer
harvest.ps1 pull configuration out of the clean-room rig
make-release.ps1 build Verdant-vX.Y.Z.zip
Every module is evaluated into one shared global scope, so any module can call into any other.
main.js fixes the load order because a few things are computed at load time (fonts from UISCALE,
the reveal-gate ceiling from ART_CAP).
The whole theme runs on one thread shared with the UI, which is why the code caches aggressively, slices long builds across timer ticks, and scopes repaints to the one panel that changed.
setx VERDANT_PROFILE D:\foobar2000\profile # once, so deploy knows where to put it
.\tools\deploy.ps1 -Watch # mirrors theme\verdant into the profile on every savedeploy.ps1 auto-detects a standard install; for a portable one, set VERDANT_PROFILE as above or
pass -FoobarProfile.
Then reload the panel (right-click → Reload). console.log goes to foobar's console (View → Console).
Deploy copies the same folder to the same place the installer does, so there's no separate build and
no second code path.
Built by superziper.
Standing on: Columns UI by Reupen Shah, JSplitter by LUR, and UI Wizard by The Wizardium.
Verdant is MIT licensed — its own code is everything under theme/, tools/,
dist-config/ and docs/.
The three foobar2000 components bundled for the one-step install are not Verdant's work and keep their own licences (Columns UI is LGPL-3.0, UI Wizard is MIT). See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Spotify. "Spotify" is a trademark of Spotify AB; this is a fan-made visual theme for a local music player.