Foobar2000 can now be installed in two modes: standard and portable.

Standard mode is similar to the “install for all users” option in older versions. You need administrative privileges to install foobar2000 in this mode.

Installing in portable mode only extracts the installer content and creates additional files that tell foobar2000 to store any configuration data in its installation folder as well as not to alter the Windows registry. Note that it is not possible to edit file type associations with foobar2000 when using portable mode, as that would require changes in the registry.

Unlike all previous versions, the Media Library now automatically tracks changes made to the content of your Media Library folders. It is no longer necessary or even possible to manually remove dead items or refresh the content of the Media Library.

At the time this article is being written, the foobar2000 0.9.6 Media Library does not work correctly in Wine because of bugs/limitations in Wine itself. Changes in the Media Library folders may not be noticed by foobar2000 until it is restarted.

The Media Library now respects hidden and system flags; files or folders with those flags will be ignored. This can be used to selectively hide cuesheets or files referenced by cuesheets.

To permanently address the “bad allocation” bug present in very old versions of the foobar2000 SDK (released before 2006-07-30), foobar2000 now refuses to load components built with affected SDK versions when running on Windows Vista. Affected components can be fixed by just recompiling them with an updated version of the foobar2000 SDK.

In recent years it has become a popular trend to include cuesheet files with albums in various music trading communities. Such files introduced behaviors confusing to new foobar2000 users: each track of the album was listed twice. To address this issue, cuesheets are now ignored by default when adding entire folders as well as in the Media Library. You can change this in Preferences ⇒ General and Preferences ⇒ Media Library.

You should uninstall any third-party Matroska related components before using foobar2000 0.9.6, having them installed will only cripple the functionality.