Computer Audio Players

oh niice~ might have to give audirvana plus a try. Roon is kinda pissing me off. (Disclaimer: kinda frustrated so need to vent. recently shelled out $100 bucks for the app and they changed up the sound engine for the worse and now i feel like i wasted my money.

The new 1.2 version ruined the sound and is kinda terrible. Their system for managing songs (especially when theres explicit versions) is super frustrating. i had to delete and re-add to library several times for various hip hop albums. I was ok with dealing with that when the sound was good, now that it sucks i just dont want to deal with it and use the default tidal app which sounds much better.

 

Audirvana is pretty great only things it can't do that I care about (and jriver can) are stream to dlna and output to 2 dacs simultaneously.

 

I just finished a Roon trial and that was one of the best aspects of the software, zone control. The ability to use the IOS control app as an endpoint was pretty cool too.

In every other aspect Audirvana is better than the other options on OSX.

 

Yeah just tried audirvana 2.5 yesterday. Wayyyy better sounding than roon. Zone control is pretty nice with roon but it's a feature I don't need. Will be going with audirvana now

 

Recently started using Audirvana on my recently acquired Macbook Pro and it has been pretty great so far. I am really enjoying the integration of tidal into the app and the free 3 month trial of tidal that comes along with it. Overall very happy with the purchase this far.

On windows I generally just use Foobar, but I have been preferring Audirvana on my Mac since I started using it.

 

I enjoy using the Audirvana remote app to control the music and I don't even have to deal with the computer at all. I set my macbook up to not sleep on closing the top and it works nicely for music control and viewing (including PDF booklets) and control volume on my Lyr or Ember.

 

I used to use Foobar2000 when i used windows. I think once Battle.net moves to Linux like Steam, i will get rid of windows entirely at home.

When i'm at home on the desktop i might just use something like Audicity if im not lazy to use QNAP music station in the browser. I don't really use my desktop much except for designing, gaming once in a blue moon, ripping and encoding/transcoding CD's, DVDs, and BluRays. The desktop is too noisy to use with open headphones.

For everything else including mobile and at work (can't install anything on laptop). I just connect to the NAS from anywhere including the car because they have Music station on Android or stream it through USB Audio Player Pro into my ODac.

 

I'm a Foobarian although had been using VUPlayer for a while before that.

Some of you might not be aware that Foobar is now available for Android handsets - I tried this a few days ago and was relieved to find that the program can navigate physical folders and play all the tracks sequentially. All the other players I tried just want to display by Artist/Album/song etc. which makes me want to tear my hair out.

 

How does foo sound via Android using full res files vs something like Onkyo HF player? Does it use the 48khz Android framework or its own which would allow native sample rate playback;.

 

I have to say 'dunno' twice now - my handset is an old Huawei from 2012ish, and I'm not sure what value a comparison with a DAP would have. It sounds good enough with bluetooth earphones, which is all I'm going to use it for.

If you're asking about how they sound as transports only, alas I cannot connect my phone to a DAC so that's out.

Regarding the frequency thing, there's no firm information I can find. I got as far as the resampling feature in the DSP options on the player, this defaults to 44.1khz. Rates above 48khz (88.2 & 96) won't work; so maybe the software responds to the limitations of the handset, at least.

 

I highly recommend Bughead Emperor. The UI is a nightmare and the manual is in Japanese but its hands down the best sounding player I've ever heard (and I've basically tried them all).

 

I thought BHE was okay, but it ultimate sounded too artificial for me, like there is a lot of dsp going on. I have no idea what is actually going on but that was my impression after a brief try-out. Do you use it consistently as your player?

 

Those were my initial thoughts as well. Its because I was trying to tweak it too much. Those added tweaks might be DSPs, or they might be filters, every audio program uses some form of this. At first I got best results just leaving it plain.

This is a bit off topic but related. I realized the arficial feeling was mostly my computer being absolutely noise filled with EMI/RFI (from all the chips and moving parts). Computers are the worst thing you can use for hi-fi audio. They are super noisy which can manifest as harshness, artificiality and a kind of digititus feeling to the music. USB decrapifyers help but only so much. In the end some cheap ERS paper strategically applied to my laptop removed a considerable layer of digital grunge/harshness/artificiality and now Bughead sounds amazingly realistic. I was able to redo some of the tweaks to Bughead which added hugely to the sound.

In the end it seemed Bughead was highly resolving and just revealing the dirty/noisy nature of my computer.

 

Well you can't beat the cost. I remember your posts on HF when I was trying it, as I tried some of the settings you had mentioned as a starting point. I don't know if there is a manual in Japanese with details, but the names of the settings didn't help clue me in to their purposes, as you know. It's just set it and try it. I had migrated to roon, so was more interested in HQP for that reason. At the moment I'm back to just using roon itself for simplicity while I work on some other parts of my system.

 

Thanks @ColtMrFire for bringing Bughead to my attention. It's sq is better than other player's I have tried, at least on windows.
Presentation is similar to that of Daphile, not raw like Foobar and not polite like JRiver.
It is a riddle to install it though.

 

Sure. Tweaking BH to find just the right sound for you is the tricky part though.

After doing alot of tweaking I ended up just leaving it on basic settings, as I found too much tweaking made the sound a bit too artificial though YMMV.

Be sure to try running AllCoreAnyCures program that comes with it before starting BH. It vastly improved the sound for. Start AllCore then hit "run every 15 mins". Close it then reopen and now hit "Run program". Then open BH or Infinity Blade. They are the same program but IB sounds less harsh to me than BH but try them both and see what you like.

 

And the JPlay forums have a pretty extensive thread on BH you'll probably find informative.

 

I wasn't able to get bughead to work, it said windows 7 x64 wasn't supported.

 

News to me. It should work on any version. I had Windows 7 x64 (before upgrading to 10) and.it worked.

 

I have W10 and it took some wizardry to get it working.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/pc-based/274200-bug-head-emperor-4.html#post4770936