What’s new in Columns UI 3.4.0

20 May 2026 • 2 min read

Hello 👋 This is the inaugural post in the news section of this site, where more detailed information about notable new versions of my foobar2000 components will be posted.

This first post is about Columns UI, an alternative UI for the foobar2000 audio player on Windows. Columns UI is written in C++, uses the Win32 API and is open source on GitHub.

Here’s a summary of the most notable changes in Columns UI 3.4.0, released in March 2026.

Smooth scrolling in most built-in panels

Smooth scrolling here refers to animating the transition between two scroll positions. Support for smooth scrolling has been added to the playlist view, playlist switcher, Filter panel, Item details and Item properties panels.

Here’s the new smooth scrolling in action in the playlist view:

The frame rate of the animation is synchronised with the desktop refresh rate when possible

Smooth scrolling is disabled by default. It can be enabled using the Use smooth (animated) scrolling option found at Preferences › Display › Columns UI › Setup.

(Note that in the playlist view, smooth scrolling performance may be reduced at high resolutions for complex configurations.)

Sticky playlist view group headings

In the playlist view, group headings can now be made sticky so that they stay in view when scrolling:

Sticky group headings work for multi-level groups too

Sticky group headings can be enabled using the Keep group headings in view when scrolling option found at Preferences › Display › Columns UI › Playlist view › Grouping.

Improved built-in spectrum analyser performance

The built-in spectrum analyser now renders in a background thread and synchronises with the Windows desktop refresh rate as closely as possible. Here’s the visualisation rendering at just under 60fps on my machine:

The visualisation is sized larger than it might normally be here

The ability to lock the main window size

A new main menu command has been added to lock the main window size, preventing it from being resized using its border. (Maximising and restoring the window is still allowed.)

The new menu command can be found at View › Lock window size.

Other changes

There were several other smaller changes in Columns UI 3.4.0 – see the release notes from version 3.4.0-alpha.1 onwards for full details.

How to update

If you currently have Columns UI installed, you can update to the latest version using the Help › Check for updated components command in foobar2000. (Note that Columns UI 3.4.1 is the last version to support Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. Versions from 3.5.0 onwards, including pre-releases, require Windows 10 or newer.)

If you have foobar2000 installed and want to add Columns UI to it, download Columns UI from the Columns UI page, open foobar2000, navigate to Preferences › Components, click the Install… button and select the downloaded file. Alternatively, if file associations are set up, you can simply double-click the downloaded component package.

(And if you don’t have foobar2000 at all, you can download it from the foobar2000 downloads page.)