Computer Audio Players

Discussion in 'Computer Audiophile: Software, Configs, Tools' started by JoshMorr, Oct 4, 2015.

  1. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    I describing was these in detail in my first post (though a lot more collective info at once).
     
  2. Skyline

    Skyline Double-blindly done with this hobby

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    It's a shame Winyl seems to no longer be in active development and lacks extremely basic functionalities (unless I'm overlooking things).

    Why does the screen on the right not automatically change to show the currently playing track?

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CIEDlnZJOfEm_7MW69zR-60qr0ntWRAm/view?usp=sharing

    If I manually hit next, it'll reflect what's currently playing. Or if I minimize the window and bring it up, it'll change. But, if I just let the music run, the window on the right just...sits there.

    Why can't I select more than one artist? I can click one at a time, but why can't I select all artists to show my entire library on the right hand window?

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bk7rXhTTcI0NvbPvc__fD9kRyFembYma/view?usp=sharing

    Not like it matters, anyway, since that screen would remain static.

    You can say Foobar is buggy, but I have 0 problems getting it to do pretty much anything I want it to *shrug*

    I'm undecided on sound between the two. I haven't had time to do a serious comparison and apparently don't have good enough ears to instantly KNOW one is better.
     
  3. Pharmaboy

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    Everything @Skyline says about Winyl is true. Its total lack of functionality nearly prevented me from operating it. Finally figured out how to get my files to play, but it took a few minutes.

    Winyl does sound good, though. I compared it very carefully to JRiver on a number of cuts. Winyl sounds at least as good, perhaps even a little better--I might hear a bit less built-in upper midrange emphasis in Winyl. It's very close, though.

    I didn't bother comparing it to Foobar. I stopped using it several years because it sounded "blah" compared to JRiver. I found the equalizer stuff moderately helpful, when I had a couple HPs that were problematic in this or that part of the FCs. But now that those HPs are long gone, no need for it.
     
  4. Walderstorn

    Walderstorn Friend

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    To be honest i didnt realize any difference and the interface/options just made me stick with jriver.
     
  5. elmoe

    elmoe Friend

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    I use AIMP + ASIO and in my system, the music player makes zero difference in sound quality with ASIO.
     
  6. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    Xmplay is free, uses the same library, sounds identical to winyl and has a more functional UI.
    https://www.xmplay.com/

    I recommended Winyl because it was simple plug and play. I keep all my music in one organized place so never used a playlist manager. Winyl felt home because it just acted very similar to my ideal target - a headless client with only play and pause options. The screen in winyl is at best a logger which can be used to track down what you have listened till now.

    There are more programs that use the same library and most of them sound identical (Musicbee didn't for some reason I don't know, might be my settings). You can find a list at the un4seen page.

    Foobar, even with ASIO Sounds off. Atleast in the setups me and a few friends have tried. Foobar has certain function calls which still messes up the sound.
     
  7. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    I have been using winyl for the last few days comparing to jRiver v25, and Roon endpoints on Windows and RPi with DigiPlus Pro. On Windows I prefer Winy over anything else, but the Rpi DigiPlus+ Pro Roon endpoint just a bit more vibrant without adding coloration. It may be just the platform difference, DigiPlus+ Pro sounds cleaner than Windows with any streamer and player I tried.
    The transport is Surface Pro 6 with RME ADI-2 DAC over SPDIF, and Rpi over Toslink. All WASAPI.
     
  8. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    Thank you for the heads up. I personally don't have anything other than usb dacs, but yes my friends with a streamer/link between the dac and computer have had better success with jriver than with winyl. And yes, a transport is a better way to get good timing than USB. I'll take your advice/impressions when I try to set up my allo sparky.
     
  9. GoodSchiit

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    I use Audirvana 3+ on a Mac Mini.

    Prior to buying the Audirvana, I used VOX on my MBP. All the FLAC files played quite nicely. Downside is VOX isn't user friendly in terms of managing the database. Another plus is if you get the APP for Vox from iTunes or Google Play; all the music is synched with your mobile. So in effect I am getting FLAC files playing on my iPhone which is handy in the car.
     
  10. Mikeybc

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    I'm using JRiver24 with my DAC manufactures DSD AISO driver, I tried WASAPI and it maxes out at DSD 128, AISO allows me to play DSD 256 files...I only have maybe 2 or 3 samplers but still. Both sound the same in my setup.

    The JRiver app on iPhone and iPad is very good also
     
  11. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    After delving with many music player softwares, I've finally settled on wtfplay. There is still scope of tweaking inside there with buffers and priority, but for the most part, I'm convinced that this is as best as I could get from my pc audio, without having an Ethernet solution or dedicated pc with carefully selected components. I would like to know opinions of people who own things like uptone ether regen or something. Not here, but in PM, so as to not make it off topic. Or you could redirect me to the right thread if one exists already.

    Within windows, hysolid is very good though quite saturated sounding all the time. People who prefer warm/lush sound would love it. The app is quite buggy and you'll have to put up with it though.
     
  12. ader

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    This isn't about a specific computer audio player, but I didn't feel like it was worth a new thread: apparently a pretty-fast windows 10 PC with no particular software or hardware modifications for audio is low-latency enough to use the Auralic Vega's "Exact" clock setting?

    When I first got the Vega, I was using win7 with an i7 2600k w/16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 and a high-endish Asus motherboard. I could only use the Exact clock setting, which is just an all-around improvement to my ears, if I played music through JRiver with the setting that buffers your music in your RAM first. Doing anything else would result in frequent audio cut-out, which meant I just didn't use the Exact clock setting 99% of the time. Reviews in 2013 basically all said that special care had to be taken with the more advanced clock settings as well. I don't think anyone at the time just plugged it into their gaming PC and enabled Exact clock without an issue.

    However, I enabled the setting just now, listened to several tracks on youtube, played some off both an NVMe SSD and an HDD just via Media Player Classic without any attention paid to settings, played a half-hour of Doom Eternal, and listened to more music on youtube as a sanity check... Not a single desync!

    For reference, I'm now running Windows 10 with a Ryzen 7 3700x, 32GB 3600Mhz DDR4, and a shitty Asrock x470 board. My chain is: PC's rear USB --> 15ft active extension cable -- short printer cable --> ifi iUSB Power --> PPA Studio USB cable --> Auralic Vega --> ECBA --> Verite, with everything (including both the active USB cable's PSU and the ifi iUSB) plugged into a BPT Ultra power isolator whose exact model # I forget atm.

    If this were my first time experimenting with the Vega's clock settings, I wouldn't even know that the Exact setting was finicky, whereas it was so much so on the older system that I had written it off before getting bored just now. I feel like this shouldn't be the case, especially with how wacky win10 often shows itself to be, and how I have like 20ft of USB cable going on, despite the power conditioning.

    For the heck of it I even started doing Cinebench R15 runs while listening to a track on youtube, and still no skips.

    Is this the power of AMD's Infinity Fabric? I don't have any comparatively modern Intel hardware to test with, unfortunately.

    Edit: I have now experienced 3 cut-outs while listening to tracks on youtube, but that's after like 2 hours of listening to dozens of tracks. I've since also played an entire stage of Doom Eternal without a single desync occurring. I swear on my older system I wouldn't have been able to game like that at all.
     
    Last edited: Apr 12, 2020
  13. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    Made a comparison of music players on windows, linux, android.

    Note: Most of these software are free so you can try and check for yourself. This is only relating to USB dac connected to PC directly and using a general asio/uac2 driver. If you have a network streamer or signal regenerator/reclocker or any other protocol, the inferences may not carry over. Your mileage may vary on protocol support.

    For all of the tests/analysis, I have tried my best to make sure there is no additional zero padding, upsampling/oversampling etc is in play within the server system. I almost always used ASIO with proper buffer configurations wherever supported (almost all of them do except strawberry, mediamonkey etc). More on the technical breakdowns at the end of the analysis.

    It is too early to conclude the causation of these changes but a look into USB audio protocol (asynch) gives better clue. It works more like UDP than TCP in that it doesn't guarantee a failure when packets go missing or get corrupted during transmission. There is a possibility they could just get concealed, either by any logic/fsm in the usb receiver, or the fact that a delta Sigma dac can behave as a natural packet loss concealer. I have done experiments and I have found that the more constrained and the more buffer underruns the harsher/grainer the sound gets to and extent and past that I get serious crackle noises. So yep I have experienced till there, on a system that would be shown bitperfect by any software analysis inside the computer. The key to this is to be able to probe at the i2s pins of the usb to i2s.

    Gear used - surface book 2015, apogee groove, supra usb cable, burson fun, sparkos ss3601 opamps, shure srh1540 (hd800 without earpads <I prefer it that way for subjectively better upper midrange/low prescence> and hd700 as well), OnePlus 3. Few other headphones, dac and amp were also used to ensure coverage on other parameters, and they fit well with the same descriptions.

    1. Windows groove player - really low fidelity. You got a pig fat low pass applied on top of the digital stream (no clue why) and very bad in overall implementation. When you scroll and play back instead of playing from start, you lose details (the only player that I've come across that does this).

    2. Windows media player - not as terrible as groove but forgettable.

    3. Foobar2000 - has lots of plugins and features etc. General "I'm an audio enthusiast" circle tries to push this forward but unfortunately sound isn't the best. Its quite poor to be honest, and even music players in android sound better. Outdated asio and wasapi plugins, measurable distortion and just overall sloppy implementation. Quite softened and smooth but in a very artificial and dry manner. A far cry from the best kind of fidelity you can get from windows. Nice tool for streaming from internet though, thanks to variable buffer on the input side of the player.

    4. Winyl - the first music player software that had decent fidelity on my tries. You can hear the different textures of bass instruments and the detail/depth/resolution is insane. As my friend calls it, it is DAW level audio quality. A bit artificially sharp sounding due to some buffer management issues. Not the smoothest with bad with low res music, you want that, don't look at this. You can hear a sheen of dither noise (i assume, don't quote me) on top of voices in 16bit music as well. Not quite perfect and not ultimate resolution. I had a short trial with certain background task cleaners/audio enhancers and it did show improvements in sustain detail and left right coherency. Don't know how it uses ram but I wish it could flush the full song to ram and play back from there with high system priority. Peers to winyl are xmplay, musicbee and hqplayer both of which sound almost identical at identical settings.

    5. Hqplayer - it's as good as winyl in equivalent settings. But it's a lot more feature rich. Lets you try custom upsampling PCM or DSD conversion options and can help get a better stream to your dac than the internal digital filters which can sometimes be low fidelity in the DACs. Also lets you try high precision fir filter convolution for a usable high precision eq.

    6. Musicbee - the best competition to winyl. It's from the same audio library so sounds similar for the most part. But winyl has a more robust port configuration setting afaik and has less artefacts on that front. However winyl let's down in its buffer, while musicbee takes lead there. It doesn't have the winyl characteristic harshness once the buffer is set to load full song to RAM. Has almost all features of foobar, but built in and usable from the get go and actually sounds good. For some reason the player volume is at 50% by default which I recommend you to set to 100% and use the dac control panel to control the volume. Software volume control is most often poor on any player software, unless it's super sophisticated with 64bit precision and stuff like those (roon has those options).

    7. Jriver- not as good as winyl not as bad as foobar. It sounds a bit compressed and loud in comparison to winyl. Quite clean otherwise. If you loved the geek out you may like this but it doesn't sound "correct" with usb dacs. People have had better luck with jriver sending data to network streamers.

    8. Albumplayer - It was promising as it was coded from scratch and gave me options to prioritise it. I set it up at the best possible settings - asio, full song to ram, high system priority. It sounds a bit softened but not bad like foobar - this thing has depth. I don't know if this is what people call as analog. It sounds very different from winyl but very hard to compare which is better. The general opinion from my side is albumplayer is a little too midrangey and slightly muffled for the most part but with a bass punch somewhere (could just be distortion). On one song it just sounds softened and dull but on another it carries a lot of bass weight. Midrange detail is typically more visible on albumplayer but winyl produces the same with a tiny bit more edge. Most of the time albumplayer is softer but sometimes it can sound exceedingly bright or hard hitting. One thing i like though is that it can bring back that tactile feel in bass in certain songs which i mostly lost with winyl. It sounds weightier and more natural which i like but i just can't get over the resolution winyl offers typically. I wouldn't be doing further testing since I have heard players that outperform both winyl and album player by a significant margin. If the formers are a bit contrasty, edgy and in my face, album player is a bit soft and nice to listen with a different presentation of detail. Idk if it's distortion or just another way to present it or even better accuracy.

    9. Aimp: I wanted it to sound identical. But unfortunately it didnt. Couldn't find anything bad but the winyl/musicbee kind of players have a sense of texture and aimp has a different texture and imo aimp texture is smoothed off and wrong. Lacks depth. Can't be sure if it is volume or the volume control or anything of that sort. Not a particularly bad player but I'm not particularly impressed.

    10. Media monkey - didn't have an asio output so used wasapi. Didn't like it. Sounded like a low pass filter or bass boost was applied. The liveliness was missing. Can't say i noticed a difference between wasapi and asio in other players but will return to testing media monkey in asio if it improves.

    11. Audirvana. Not bad. I like it. But winyl still better texture retrieval/detail. Winyl shows the texture and depth noticeably better. Audirvana is a little softer. Bass is even less tactile than winyl on audirvana. (Yep I did try changing settings on audirvana). It was created by an UCLA graduate I think, can't be bad (and it's not), but then again winyl is super lightweight with no bloat, runs on a rock solid audio library, and has multiple other checks to ensure better detail. I'd rate audirvana above jriver (and of course we are well beyond foobar at this point). Didn't sound like it had any compression or anything of that sort. Just not fast enough/transparent enough.

    12. Roon: to be honest the settings I described above is sub optimal for roon. They recommend you to use your pc as a roon source and another endpoint device like raspberry Pi or ethernet streamer. I can see why. With the same pc acting as both source and endpoint fidelity suffers significantly. It sounds as if I input clipped my amplifier. Doesn't have as muddy artefacts as foobar but I don't like it since it doesn't sound transparent and has a clearly audible aberration. However if your system uses ethernet receiver or roon supported endpoints, I assume it'll be very good owing to the custom roon protocol and compliance control.

    13. **Hysolid**: My first ever OMG moment. The difference from foobar to winyl was a little bit more than the difference between DACs I tried. The difference from winyl to hysolid was more than the difference between multiple tiers of headphones. If you had said that a year ago, I'd have laughed at you, but now that I have heard, I cannot unhear this. If I have to describe it's sound concisely, I'd say saturated and detailed. It is not the most transparent and has an obvious character that is fairly borderline warmish but without the Treble suffering anything. In fact, Treble texture was the biggest improvement from winyl - finally all the hf noise is gone but without being gooey unresolving mud like foobar. Started to hear a million shades of cymbals and digital hi hat synths (listening to mausam and escape right now). And everything else follows, vocal textures (whispers and so forth), bass instruments. Inter channel integrity still not perfect (I guess maybe coz due to it being 32 bit) but otherwise Sounds stellar. The difference in decay texture and detail with hysolid. The sound of water drops, the sound of claps, vocal textures. Feels like the first time I upgraded from hd598 to vsonic gr07. However it got a serious catch/dealbreaker. It's buggy. the architecture is in such a way that you need to have a separate control system. Android app didn't work (it broke after android 6 and never got an update I guess) so I had to use it on iOS. Running through asio to my computer.

    14. Regarding android. Where do I even begin. What a forcibly gronked system is all I can say. A forced resampler makes every headphone sound like a hd598 <<sigh>>. Just overall low fi and I rather prefer it sending the stream as bluetooth signal and listen than to use stock android stuff. The only instance where I could get decent sound out of android is when using uapp or hiby music (and an external dac coz the internal dacs also mostly suck). I envy lg users coz lg has a reworked kernel and music player that apparently doesn't screw these things too much, apart from actually having a usable sound chip.

    15. After all these, I tried my attempt at linux distros. First tried ubuntu without setting up alsa, just pulse audio. As expected disappointment. Then I tried ap-linux, a fork of arch Linux with audio optimizations and kernels built in. The installation process was a pain and unfortunately it didn't support my network card. I couldn't do further updates and sound quality wasn't anything to write home about in that config. I thought I had hit a dead end and had to resort to battling windows.. until.....

    16. WTFPLAY: this sounds amaaaaazing. All sorts of good adjectives - transparency, detail, effortlessness. There is no character I can attribute to this other than those of the recordings themselves, and maybe minor effect changes by changing buffer settings or some BIOS settings (and apparently changing RAM changes sound, since different RAM will have different memory refresh properties and response times). It is a live cd, so no need to install. Just burn to pendrive, boot from the drive. It'll load to RAM and run from the RAM. When you play a song it'll be decoded and loaded to RAM and played from there, instead of buffers from storage drives. It is super focused in audio tasks and has very minimal daemons. Doesn't have any instruction cycle stealing process - no network, no mouse/mouse polling, not even a battery probe. This is what makes it great since it can respond back to the data request from the dac in a timely fashion, and also there is no sudden noise spike in USB bus owing to noise from CPU interrupts/power state shifts. It sounds great and has been my reference for the last 4 months. Haven't had the chance to compare to ethernet streamers, but within system software, this is leagues above everything available on windows, with hysolid being the only thing that can even be compared, and even that is not as transparent. Highly recommend this player.

    Continuing some technical analysis from top.

    ASIO communicates both the bit depth and sample rate along with volume control info in the control frames, as per my understanding. It for sure communicates sample rate that way and I can see it even in my DAC control panel. If you send something with 32khz sample rate via asio to my dac it will refuse to pick it up and throw an error. In other operating system like mac os, we have other data structure for sending the data,including left justified 8-24 inputs.

    I did further investigation on this topic earlier. Hqplayer lets you choose the bit depth it sends to the dac. Winyl sounds closer to hqplayer configured to have same bit depth as the music file. Which means winyl is not doing any unnecessary padding. I have actually found padding to reduce detail in my system, making it artificially soft. I can for sure confirm that padding actually reduces detail, in my system and not improve. Custom upsampling using HQplayer is a completely different story altogether, I have tried a few and have been able to see how they "change" the sound but on a pure performance level it was on par with winyl, and worse when additional functionality was being used. Also my system was not up to snuff to try the high precision improvements. There's not much way zero padding can bring in such an amount of difference as heard through the players. Also if all of them do the same thing they should all sound the same which they clearly don't.

    Most of these improvements can be correlated to how the softwares handle the music playback at the instruction level. Which means libraries used, the stability of plugins used, memory consumption, buffering etc. I have made some investigations on what makes winyl superior to peers in bass audio library and also its one pitfall compared to its peers. It does perform optimizations with regards to usb root control as well. I was trying to see if I can make it play full song from RAM like I can do on musicbee, but after I tried hysolid, i've stopped that approach. I am 100% certain the way a library, the instruction set and features are implemented make an insane level of difference. Changing buffer and load to ram changes things. So many small changes changes things. The way their instructions are structured and the way they behave with other io has a correlatable effect on sound. In a normal music player, you need handles for i/o, trying to see where the user wants to scrub to which means your instructions will have structure in a way it keeps asking for memory pointers. The better ones do a more streamlined getting it closer to just store in a register and keep shifting it, and using it. And as I mentioned above, in my device stack the differences are bigger than different tiers of headphones.

    Now coming to the topic of foobar sounding objectively worse. This player showed a measurable worse performance across multiple independent tests. (https://imgur.com/gallery/50P4hRJ) All above topics, we have few players like hysolid sounding objectively better on all fronts, and other players with custom libraries like winyl,hqplayer,musicbee, etc are give an take between them but all sound better than foobar under any parameter. An accurate player will have more depth and separation for almost any song, and that foobar sorely lacks. There is some processing/added distortion happening without a hint of doubt and that is the reason for lack of detail, not accuracy. The player sounds different across different versions as well as per a report from my friend. The issue has also been reliably measured with different input tones. The aberration is closer to how a limiter/compressor would perform, and guess what, windows volume control has built in limiter and compressors. These were measured in ASIO, in WASAPI and still showed the same aberration both audibly and measurably. What does this tell? It just tells that foobar is broken,and has some processing happening even though it claims not to with the plugins. This is one huge flaw which makes it sound worse than even normal players like aimp, and apart from this, memory handling and other issues are also abundant, which as I said winyl and other BASS library based players do better and completely smack foobar out. I have tried my best to "fix" foobar. Have tried 2-3 different asio/wasapi plugins and all had different issues. Case's asio plugin literally distorted annoyingly at 100%. I'm not moving away from my conclusion at all. I've tried revisiting foobar multiple times (whenever I change something in my chain) in an attempt to see and have always been disappointed. Winyl sounds closer to professional DAWs.

    Tl:dr: WTFPLAY >> Hysolid >>>> Winyl = Musicbee = Hqplayer = xmplay > Audirvana >> jriver = roon > Aimp > uapp on android > foobar2000 > any bundled music player with windows or non asio supported players.
     
    Last edited: May 3, 2020
  14. Pharmaboy

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    Thanks for an exhaustive listing & comparison of software players, @dietwater. You won't stay "Rando" very long if you keep this up!

    I have 2 Win7Pro machines, both running JRiver. I have Vinyl installed on the big desktop & have compared it to JRiver (slightly better in subtle ways)--but it's almost devoid of functionality (off-putting).

    Your post has me interested in Hysolid because it runs w/in Windows (WTFplay interests me but also scares me off--I'm not a PC guru & I think you need to be to get that going). But I don't have a cellphone that can run apps. So my question is: can I used Hysolid alone/by itself on a PC w/no cellphone?

    Answer is rather unclear on Hysolid website ... thrashing through their "manual" right now.

    (thanks)
     
  15. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    Thank you for the kind words. Unfortunately you need a android 6 or below or iOS device to run hysolid. No other way around (unless you can have something like BlueStacks)

    Please don't be afraid of wtfplay. If it were difficult to use I wouldn't have used it. It is very simple and easy, and minimalistic. You just need a pendrive that's all. Once you have tried wtfplay you can explore other linux distros with the functionality you desire and move from there. Wtfplay is the easiest to set up and use distro I've come across.

    This is the wtfplay manual : http://wtfplay-project.org/manual.html

    wtfplay -d hw:1 /media/sda1/music/'song A.wav'

    Is a sample template of the command. File name more than one word should have single colons.
     
  16. Degru

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    Simpler way to use wtfplay; first of all switch to a second terminal with ctrl-alt-f2 and start up "alsamixer" there. Hit F6 and select your DAC from the list. Note the number to the left of it. You can go back to alsamixer later to adjust the volume of your device if applicable. Plug in your drive that has music on it if you haven't already. Press ctrl-alt-f1 to go back to the other terminal and run "wtfcui -d hw:#" with whatever # was next to your DAC. It should show a help screen with all the control keys; you can get back to it with F1 if you need to reference it. Now you should be able to just navigate with your arrow keys and add files to the playlist on the right and play them. Much more convenient than playing individual files directly from the command line.

    WTFPlay is a super simple distro, you don't even install it. It just loads into RAM from the flash drive, which you can even take out after you're at the prompt. Think of it as more of a standalone piece of bootable software, since the installed functionality is extremely minimal and only suited for lossless playback.
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2020
  17. Pharmaboy

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    I appreciate your attempt to simplify WTFplay. Unfortunately, it's not simple enough. I'm still scared off. That's all on me...a reluctance to get out of the cable car & go exploring.

    I've made a good living (freelance medical writing) for >20 yrs using 1-2 computers in a home office. I know more than the usual citizen about Windows machines, but never had the guts to go off the O.S. reservation & mess w/command line stuff, Linux, etc.

    Think I'll just stick w/JRiver, the "devil I know."
     
  18. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    The usability preference is a very personal thing and I wouldn't invade into your choice. Afterall, audio is a very personal thing.

    Also don't take my opinions as universal. These aberration and correlated effects seem to be system dependent. The same buffer underrun problem from winyl that caused harshness in my and few of my friends dacs like apogee groove, nx4, etc., it caused an artifical rounding/softening sensation in my friends system that had dangerous convert 2. And a few other players like jriver and roon which sounded rounded off to me sounded sharper to him. The aberration, based on its type seems to manifest in different ways in different systems. And depending upon your computer optimization and other factors, it may not even be there (except maybe foobar in current versions since there seems to be something broken with its plugin implementations).

    But I would like to clear off a few misconceptions, especially relating to wtfplay.

    I think the word command line puts off many people as hard to use. The reality is that it is just as easy to use as mouse interaction and often way quicker and far more automatable and rule customizable. Once you go command line, you'd want to do it for almost any task except the ones where you really need tracking. Also the auto fill commands/shortcuts are just as robust so what would take multiple clicks and navigation in a custom mouse interaction would be just a few tab button presses in command line. Command line is not as nerdy thing as it is made out to be.

    Also one more thing about wtfplay is that it doesn't have any write permissions (as far as I know, kindly correct me if I'm wrong). It can only access and read files and not write them. The OS usage corrupting your data or screwing up with any of the boot records shall be in the last of worries when using wtfplay.

    Of course there are other valid reasons to not use wtfplay, since it doesn't support any custom upsampling like hqplayer at the moment, no video player possibility and also having to boot into a separate os just for music playback. Other niggles in the current edition include not being able to control volume during playback. That said, i find the gains in performance to be worth the usability compromises, and a lot of usability changes that others might feel as a compromise, actually feels simpler/more intuitive to me. YMMV.

    I would love to try few other players eventually and update the comparions. Ulilith, smallplayer, gentooplayer, xxxhighend, are some I can think of at the back of my mind. There are also things like audiophile optimizer, and people go to extent of buying a copy of windows server for supposedly better sound quality. Windows server is less bloated and more precise os, not to say they took like 3 years to port wasapi into it so pretty sure lot of attention has been paid there. And of course players in Mac. I didn't have a particularly good luck the first time, maybe I could reset and try properly again. Problem there is pretty much everything is expensive.

    There are players I've tried and refused to include like strawberry for windows, due to not supporting proper asio/streaming methods, or some other players for being really obscure and not feeling worth the effort. I tried jplay but couldn't get it to work. I tried minorityclean and it has a noticeable sq difference but minimal as compared to moving direct to hysolid/wtfplay.

    I'd love to hear opinions from anyone who has tried the above softwares or more.
     
    Last edited: May 5, 2020
  19. JellyRhino

    JellyRhino Facebook Friend

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    Your point of view seems irrefutable. I mean that you seem to prefer some things, and then accept the possibility of so many other opinions. Karl Popper would hate your guts. I mean that your opinion is safe from criticism in this context. To me, Musicbee and Winyl sound a bit U shaped compared to foobar. That's it. No technicalities involved really, just FR. Maybe foobar is midcentric. I might be deaf. Do you have an agenda? Do you enjoy macrodetail? Also, those walls of text might be influencing my opinion of yours.
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2020
  20. hifi01170

    hifi01170 Acquaintance

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    Would anybody know which free player can support the use of a x64 vst plug-in? Foobar doesn’t support and google-fu didn’t yield any sensible result...
     

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