Computer Audio Players

thanks, I am looking for something very lightweight, jriver and roon already sound quite colored to my ears. my experience has been that simpler players with less features sound much better.

so far this is the simplest player I have found for OS X, I will try it first https://cogx.org/

 

Audirvana is best for mac but in case you want something which is free and can play all files, you can try VOX. Used it long time back so can't say how intense it is on CPU but feels like a lighweight system from outside

https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

 

I've been using foobar2000 lately. Works fine so far but don't know how many features are missing compared to Windows

 

I have finally got around to trying PlayPCMWin, Smallplayer, Ulilith and JetAudio. There is a change to my system during this analysis. Earlier I used my apogee groove (Dac-AMP) + HD800 (nopads), or apogee groove (Dac 2v out) + Burson fun (sparkos ss3601 opamps) + SRH1540. PC remains same - surface book. This test was done using topping nx4dsd, and urbanite xl, both of which are brighter, noticeably less resolving than the formers, but I've tried my best to decouple this from the music player effects. I've personally experienced each link in the chain imparts a specific sonic footprint, regardless of changes in the other links (except when the links are tied together, like Output impedance correlations). I also did the USB selective suspend removal, and removed system sounds as per this guide from focusrite : https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Optimising-your-PC-for-Audio-on-Windows-10 . Buffer size on my dac was set at 32768 samples, the max permissible value, on all scenarios except Ulilith (reason below).

1. JetAudio - Unfortunately it doesnt seem to support asio/wasapi. And sq was only Okay. I'm not even sure if it supported usb asynchronous audio. Enhancements were turned off. I'd be happy to give it another try if anyone can guide me to set this up in bit perfect Asynchronous audio.

2. SmallPlayer - Sq in terms of texture was alright not much problem with unnatural shimmer or bad boomy or bootleggish bass, but noticeably mistimed. Pans, etc weren't so great. Not sure if it supports usb asynchronous, I doubt it considering how old it is and the sound, I seriously doubt it. I guess it would be a very nice pairing with internal cards on pcie or otherwise. I did try it on my Laptop speakers directly and it performed quite well there, but a bit quiet and extremely lacking in bass. (I guess showing the speakers with their actual properties instead of faking density using compression or other artefacts. It had noticeably more energy and speed than I'm used to with my laptop speakers). I'm gonna keep it for my laptop speaker playback.

3. PlayPCMWin - Very nice. I like it a lot. One of the few players that compete well against musicbee in my setup. Had to fiddle a little with settings. Settled on Exclusive mode with Pro audio priority. 16bit downscaling I left to truncation instead of other options, but it's not a deal since my dac accepts more than 16bit data streams. In terms of sound reproduction, while it is noticeably different from musicbee, neither of them feel coloured or wrong. It's the presentation, and texture around instruments where the differences pop in. PlayPCMWin sounds a lot more efforless compared to Musicbee. Musicbee has a bit of an edge to the sound and as if the instrument had an accompanying low level noise band, in comparision to PlayPCMWin where the instruments sounded fairly natural without any additional band/texture around them. However I feel that there is a problem with that too, PlayPCMWin seems to shave off the edges to the sound of instruments a little. I find transient hits to be slightly more impactful and real despite the slight noise around them on musicbee, while PlayPCMWin seems to mute it just a tiny bit away from what could be perceived real. It is tiny, but it is noticeably and makes me wanting a little more attack. It also makes bass guitars and low level echoes harder to follow than Musicbee even though it is cleaner on that aspect. I can sum it up this way. Musicbee shows good detail and hints of what could be hidden extreme detail, but is a bit distracted sounding. PlayPCMWin shows good detail in better precision but doesn't try to extract the hidden extreme details like musicbee does. PlayPCMWin is the closest I have gotten from windows to my current reference WTFPLAY linux distro, in terms of texture, effortlessness and most importantly lack of color. Hysolid, another player for windows, is more detailed than PlayPCMWin and also is just as effortless while extracting a lot of shades of shimmer, but is more denser sounding than what could be perceived real (think PlayPCM win = HD800, Hyslolid = LCD2). It's a bit of toss between hysolid and PlayPCMWin, but hysolid is buggy, PlayPCMWin is not. WTFPlay is still my reference/champ, it has the texture, and effortlessness of PlayPCMWin but also far more detail, better realistic impact, and believable sound than all of PlayPCMWin, Hysolid and Musicbee.

4. Ulilith - Seems to have issues with large buffer sizes, was stuttering heavily on 32768 samples on the buffer so I dropped down to 2048 samples. Works great in Wasapi. It is very different from PlayPCMWin and Musicbee. Both the star and pitfall of the show is the treble. Its sizzly, shimmery, but also aggressive. It is not distorted or fuzzy. It is very real, but very forward and in your face. Like you are standing next to a cymbal crash, with no muting off of any part of the sound. Oucch. My current setup being a bit treble fuzzy doesn't help it much either. I expect it to be a lot more enjoyable when I get back to my Srh1540 or HD800. It veers on the opposite end of PlayPCMWin if you keep Musicbee in the middle. Both Ulilith and PlayPCMWin sound cleaner than Ulilith, but both show deviations in either directions. While PlayPCMWin is mellow and laid back, Ulilith is forward and aggressive but without any of the general distorted feel which i get when eq'ing up the treble. I love the energy and shimmer of Ulilith, but I would have to be very careful of system pairing. One more point to note, I first tried buffer to Auto from 32768 which was unbearably aggressive during cymbal crashes. Setting it to 2048 made it more bearable, I think fixing it to a more optimal value would help me get it to good enjoyable levels while still maintaining that aggression.

I would be experimenting further on both PlayPCMWin and Ulilith with my other gear and other settings, as of now, I like PlayPCMWin a lot for windows and Ulilith as a flavor player. Musicbee still remains my go-to choice due to it being the middle of the line, despite its minor issues, but all 3 are compromises in one way or other, when compared to something like WTFplay.

I plan to move out to streamers where these player swaps would likely start to make lesser difference, I just made these posts to help people looking to extract the best of their existing system.

Tldr:
Wtfplay Linux - still the best, by a large margin
Musicbee - a good compromise land in windows, nowhere near as detailed or clean as wtfplay, but still good enough for me.
Play pcm win - closest to wtfplay in terms of texture and lack of colour/noise but also noticeably lower detail, slightly less than even musicbee. Ever so slightly muted in the attack.
Ulilith - Clean and aggressive. Opposite of playpcm win. I love the flavour but pairing can be iffy if the rest of your chain is aggressive as well.

 

@dietwater interesting, thanks for sharing. I like PlayPCMWin too. in general, I find WASAPI output modes on most players to be uninspiring and homogenizing but not this one. maybe it has to do with the RAM loading.

as you've already discovered, the best thing to do for computer audio is not use Windows 8)

some other players you may like to try for fun if you haven't already: Tunebrowser, APlayer, SoundByte using quicktime engine

 

Thanks I'll check them. I'm planning to code my own headless player in Linux for my Allo sparky, with certain features I'm interested to implement. The infrastructure seems to be well developed already. https://gist.github.com/ghedo/963382/815c98d1ba0eda1b486eb9d80d9a91a81d995283

Would love to know if you got any guides for me in terms of further tweaks on it (rt kernels etc).

 

Well I guess I was a little quick to conclude PlayPCMwin lacks impact, it was actually the secondary system, mainly the dac I used that was lacking, just that it was masked by the noise in musicbee and PlayPCMwin showed it as is. Went back to my primary systems and PlayPCMwin has all the grunt and kick, and the effortless details with all headphones, including the urbanite. Not quite as good as wtfplay but it's very good. I forgot that I never tried nx4 on wtfplay - it is actually a little muted sounding on a good source.

Ulilith is just as expected. Forward treble hits. Just not as obnoxiously harsh as on the topping + urbanite xl but still quite forward, and cleanliness is retained. Can get fatiguing quite quickly. The threshold time counter just ticks a bit slower here.

 

Update: also I can hear noise band whenever I have content around 8khz when using PlayPCMwin, I think this also affects the low end a little, especially if the hit comes in around the 8khz band together with the bass (guessing this must be USB frame noise 1/125us). This did not happen with Wtfplay with the same system and wtfplay was all round noticeably better, so this is unlikely to be a complete fault of the dac, and has happened with all DACs I own (though I do see that a better dac should have thought and fixed this). Wonder what is happening here! Is PlayPCMwin likely playing around with the usb output power profile too? In fact this particular issue wasn't distinctly audible even with other players despite them having a bevy of other noise. Is it something relating to how the spread of noise affects the analog section, like if it's a single noise band, it being more reactive/unstable than if it were a wide noise band? My supra usb cable also had a similar but far worse effect and caused a bootleggish sound signature. I'm assuming it's something related to a specific noise profile, might be similar or different to the above. I have tried everything right now using either stock groove cable or uptone uspcb. I'll try to pair up supra with PlayPCMwin and see if the effect compounds or nulls or modulates into something esle.

Is there a known way to get this fixed? PlayPCMwin seems to come eerily close to fixing windows audio for me, this particular issue aside. I'm thinking of a simple regenerator or a 8khz notch filter in the ground plane of the data line. I think going external power would also help.

 

I ditched my windows 10 laptop for an early 2008 mac pro tower as a digital transport, the last great model mac pro before cost cutting and generally retarded design decisions such as the trashcan Mac.

I'm not into headless streamers because I use obscure internet music sources and also youtube for listening to rare recordings, so I need a regular computer with a display. this thing is a serious beast build quality wise, the components on the motherboard and power supply are obviously of a higher grade, the machine is totally silent other than HDD noise and the entire thing is made of metal.



running 10.11.6 El Capitan which seems to be the oldest version of OSX that still has support for most modern applications. it runs decently well on this 12 year old hardware, 10.6.3 Snow Leopard runs way better and believe it or not sounds better too but doesn't really have web browser support anymore.

I tried a few different players including Audirvana and settled on SoundByte which is a sound clip management software for DJs but has playlist support so it can be used for music just fine. Audirvana did not impress me, the sound is very 'hi-fi' with boosted lows and artificial impact, whereas SoundByte is honest and tonally balanced.



just using the Mac as a USB source to feed a USB/SPDIF converter, the gain in SQ was huge, the Windows machine sounds disgusting in comparison. I think there is a good reason 2008/2009 Mac mini's were really popular with audiophiles before the current streamer/endpoint fad. although the gains are also hardware related I suggest if you have any sort of high-end digital setup to ditch Windows ASAP.

 

What I really dislike about MusicBee is their track rating tool, which messes up my existing Foobar rating. I had to redo thousands of song ratings.

 

Audirvana on my Windows 10 and loving it for Tidal!

 

I actually set my music files to read only after making all basic tagging. I haven't really touched ratings settings yet though.

 

Basically, need to disallow MusicBee to make changes on ratings. Even then, it still messes up regularly some of the track by deleting the rating. It also only reads Foobar rating once when it is a new track file. After that, it doesn't. So, whatever changes I make, I will need to make the same changes in MusicBee.

Foobar may not be great sounding, but functionally it is still the best when it comes to arranging and managing my library.

 

Musicbee reads all of my track ratings from foobar flawlessly. Not quite sure what's happening in your setup....

 

It does read it when I put the songs the first time in the MusicBee folder. But after that, changes in Foobar don't get reflected in MusicBee.

MusicBee and Foobar use two different formats for ratings. Foobar uses 1-5 star ratings, while MusicBee uses 10-100 scoring.

 

Musicbee uses 1-5 stars? It sounds like we are talking about very different things, haha.

I also don't store my files inside the musicbee or foobar folders. They are always in their own folder and I haven't moved them around, though I can't imagine why that would impact things.

 

Yeah, me too. Sorry for the bad description. I also keep my music files separate. But I let MusicBee monitor those folders.

MusicBee uses 10-100 scoring. So, totally different format than Foobar. For example, when I use MusicBee to rate a track with 3 "star", in Foobar, it reads 5 star. So, all my tracks' rating were changed to 5 star in Foobar that I had to re-do and re-listen to them.

 

Ahhhh, I see. The issue is when you go BACK to foobar. I haven't done that.

Really no reason to...MusicBee seems to do everything at least as well as Foobar in my usage scenario.

And I'm VERY picky about tagging my music, so you've just put the nail in the coffin. Going back and seeing my ratings messed up would send me over the edge.

I'm still curious, though. When I go into my tags, rating says 1-5.

 

How come mine looks different than yours? How do you go to that page?

Mine is below. That 5 star means 100 score rating in MusicBee.

 

Click on "Tag Inspector" at the top to get to the screen I shared.