Personally I think these features are useless for foobar. And a bit buggy:

• Image of the same size as thumbnail looks ugly in Flip3D (I have no idea why MS decided to show thumbnail instead of live preview there).
• Window must to be shown at least once to make Aero Peek working. It’s a common issue for any app.
• Too frequent painting of a live preview image drains a lot of CPU, so it is made not so “live” as it should.
• When window is maximized, there are some glitches with its frame size in Peek mode.

Blame MS for all that stuff

P.S. I’m still on RC, so someone should test it on RTM. I wanna to know if something changed.

On builds before 7068 WASAPI was working as expected. But all newer builds (up to RC1 7100) cause it to throw “unrecoverable playback error: could not open device 88890020″.
I don’t know what exactly does it mean, but I know how to fix it. The default 1000 ms buffer size does not fit for some reason, so you should decrease it – 500 (and less) ms buffer is ok. Note that this number could vary for different hardware.

Well, maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it does work for now!

Also there are two new icons for “play” and “preferences”. Hope they’re not very awful…

Go to product page to read more.

Quick download: foo_w7shell 0.2.7.0.

Go to product page to read more.

Quick download: foo_w7shell 0.2.6.2.

Windows 7 shell integration addon (foo_w7shell) is a plugin to utilize brand new interface features like custom preview thumbnails, flyout toolbars and others.

You’d just unpack the plugin to your components directory. It works “out of the box” and adds nice and user-friendly interface features to your favorite player.

If you want, you can disable progress indicator, hide “stop” button from toolbar or perform some other tweaks via settings page. But you wouldn’t find any system settings – it’s as simple as your iPod.

Features:

• Album art in thumbnail
• Play/pause/stop/next track/previous track buttons in thumbnail
• Progress indicator
• Customizable jump lists
• Overlay icon to display play/pause state

Download foo_w7shell 0.2.9.1.

Version history

0.2.9.1:

• Preferences page upgraded to be compatible with new SDK. Settings are now applied only on ‘Apply’ button click, no more ‘legacy page’ messages.

0.2.9.0:

• Using new Foobar 1.0 SDK. Not compatible with older versions!
• Album artwork configuration support
• Hiding thumbnail progress indicator (and setting taskbar progress to indeterminate state) when playing stream of unknown length

0.2.8.1:

• Taskbar progress indicator
• Some changes on Settings page

0.2.8.0:

• Options to enable Filp3D and/or Aero Peek back (a bit buggy thing, but people wanted it)
• Some minor changes

0.2.7.1:

• New setting: draw border around album art
  This may be useful when foobar is using transparent (layered) window and border is not drawn by system. There’s no bug with incorrect border size in alt-tab switcher in this mode, so turning transparency on is recommended for now.
• Workaround for invalid pause button behavior in 7068
  
  In this build button messages are sent twice for some reason. This is definitely a system bug, Windows Media Player is also working wrong.

0.2.7.0:

• New feature: shows your playlists in jump list!
• Added kinda of icons for play/preferences jump list entries
• Some bugfixes

0.2.6.2:

• Fixed crash on foobar update/reinstallation
• Fixed thumbnail vertical flipping on builds after 7057
• Improved stability when using with Columns UI
• Other minor fixes

0.2.6.1:

• Fixed compatibility issues when running on Vista/XP (previously crashed)
• Added option to workaround built-in thumbnail toolbar in Columns UI 0.3.6.7

0.2.5.1:

• New nice button icons
• Thumbnails are loaded asynchronously
• Play progress indicator
• Settings page
• Some refactoring

0.2.3.1:

• Initial public release