Computer Audio Players

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

  1. Jerry

    Jerry Friend

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    Aaah...I see.

    Yes, it is a bit misleading to see 1-5 rating there, cause MusicBee uses 10-100 to get to that rating. 2 means 40.

    Maybe it is Foobar that is against the norm; I'm not sure. But JRiver is able to duplicate and mimic perfectly.
     
  2. dubharmonic

    dubharmonic Friend

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  3. bixby

    bixby Friend

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    Need some help! According the interwebs, Tidal can be played through JRiver via a driver that JRiver wrote and there are reports that you can also use DLNA to "stream" Tidal through JRiver.

    Why the big deal about JRiver you ask? Well, my room is EQ'd via a VST Reaper plugin in JRiver and sounds great with my files. I want to give the same benefit to Tidal. There is lots of new discovery music I would like to hear in all it's potential glory.

    Can anyone confirm if the JRiver driver is worth a crap and if it works? And can anyone point me to a step by step for setting up DLNA to work with JRIver?

    I know JRiver has a Wiki on DLNA but is seems geared toward streaming over wifi or Ethernet. My Tidal app is on the same Windows machine as JRiver, so I am not sure how to make it work.
     
  4. GoodEnoughGear

    GoodEnoughGear Evil Dr. Shultz‎

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    There is a windows audio driver that makes JRiver look like a sound card on Windows. I've used it for YouTube and stuff so I can use VST with it. It has been stable when I've used it, but I've not done any critical listening.
     
  5. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    Forgive me if this has been repeated, I haven't kept up with this thread. I got noticeably better sound from foobar after tweaking some settings (taken from a guide for fidelizer)...

    -Open setup Preferences and in Source mode and Processing set ReplayGain to “none”

    -Setup output device with WASAPI (event), change output data format to highest supported bit-depth, and slide down Buffer length to 200ms (or as low as you can go without playback errors)

    -Configure Advanced settings with the following options:
    Full file buffering up to (kB): Highest possible (I entered 1048576 for 1GB buffer)
    WASAPI Hardware buffer in MS – push/event mode: 24
    High worker process priority: checked
    Thread priority: 7
    Use MMCSS: checked
    MMCSS mode: Audio

    Hope this helps!
     
  6. bixby

    bixby Friend

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    UPDATE: I am trying one solution on Tidal and my daily desktop for EQ.

    I am using Equalizer APO for my Windows machine and the PEACE Equalizer Gui on top of it. Really nice so far. Both are available free from SourceForge and there are some vids on the GUI on youtube.

    I haven't tried the JRiver driver yet in the main system, but I will.
     
  7. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    I must have installed it without knowing it because Roon shows JRiver as one of the audio out local interfaces.
     
  8. bixby

    bixby Friend

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    UPDATE: Yup, Tidal is playing through JRiver. and it is playing through the DSP stack, hence via the EQ I have set for my main speakers.

    I am not sure how transparent it is vs playing a file via JRiver, but will test that in due time. For now happy to have music discovery on the big rig.
     
  9. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    Did a few more experiments. I first tried xxhighend but couldn't get it to work properly in my system.

    Since music playback generally improved with full ram buffer based players I wanted to give RAMDisk configs a try. I downloaded AMD RAMDisk and created a 2GB RAM drive. Installed musicbee, PlayPCMWin and albumplayer one by one on the RAMdisk and configured all to use full RAM buffer. Then I tried playing the local music stored in the drive (since I have already ensured memory playback I didn't initially feel like putting the songs to the memory disc). All the players sounded cleaner for the most part (compared to having them installed in hard drive) but also had the 8khz hiss/resonance like PlayPCMWin did in earlier normal disc. It seems fine initially since the remaining frequency spectrum is cleaner and more detailed but gets increasingly annoying as time goes on. Then I tried another experiment. I moved the songs to RAMdisk and then played them. It surprisingly made a meaningful improvement with a reduction in 8khz hiss and lesser overall haze despite the players already configured to do RAM playback. I have no reason why this happens. But even now the 8khz hiss was quite hard especially when high pitched voices are present in the music. And I preferred musicbee + ram playback installed on local drive instead of ramdisk because of this reason. Apart from the 8khz hiss, in PlayPCMWin the overall higher pitches felt slightly softer, lacking that last edge of bite and bass also felt a tad aliased for lack of a better word (despite the better resolution). This softness was worser in PlayPCMWin installed in non-ram disk so it's an improvement here.

    So after everything was done I thought I'll make one final experiment. I uninstalled my apogee dac driver and reinstalled it on the RAMDisk. And now everything made started falling in to place. The 8khz hiss on all the three players reduced drastically and the bass improved a lot. PlayPCMWin is my favourite of the three in this config (settings mostly default, only priority being changed to pro audio thread). There is still an 8khz hiss but it's much milder and occurs only in very few songs. PlayPCMWin also retains a much milder version of that slightly soft tone where the upper registers lack that very last ounce of bite but PlayPCMWin is overall cleaner and less hazier than the other players I've tried. Overall, aside from this occasional 8khz tizz and mild softness it's spatial and resolution properties are excellent now and dare I say, I can hear more detail than even wtfplay!!
     
    Last edited: Dec 21, 2020
  10. econaut

    econaut Almost "Made"

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    I wonder if it's general consensus among friends here that all software audio players sound the same when playing bitperfect?
     
  11. dietwater

    dietwater Acquaintance

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    There are members for both school of thoughts. It depends a lot on the chain, system, and software. If you had read the last 3-4 pages you'll likely find sonic reasons to experiment other players.
     
  12. dubharmonic

    dubharmonic Friend

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    For the last 5 days I've been trying Roon after nearly 20 years with Apple Music. Thanks to help from @YMO the Pi2AES is working as a Roon endpoint, and all of my music is being hosted on a Synology NAS. Setup was drop-dead simple.

    Am I imagining this, or does Roon sound softer than other players? It doesn't seem to matter which DAC or input format I use.
     
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  13. crenca

    crenca Friend

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    My opinion, but all else being equal your probably imagining it. Many caveat's of course mostly having mostly to do with setting both softwares up so that they are using the same essential signal path - one is not applying DSP while the other is going through OS sound library's for example. Otherwise, your talking about the "sound" of digital software as if they were tubes, transformers, etc.
     
    Last edited: Mar 4, 2021
  14. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    I never thought Roon make things sounds soft. It sounds the same to me on my end if I'm running a same setup via UPnP feeding the DAC bitperfect. Did you go into the DAC settings and make sure there's no oversampling features on?
     
  15. dubharmonic

    dubharmonic Friend

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    No DSP being added by Roon.
    [​IMG] [​IMG]
    After looking closer, I'm nearly positive that it was Apple Music adding DSP to normalize volume.
    [​IMG]
     
  16. Gazny

    Gazny MOT: ETA Audio

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    Could be you are noticing a difference between airplay psychoacoustics and pi2aes v usb
     
  17. dubharmonic

    dubharmonic Friend

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    This was comparing Roon with Apple Music over USB to Unison, though results on the Pi2AES were similar when streaming AirPlay and RAAT.
     
  18. bixby

    bixby Friend

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    Yes in simple terms. I trialled Roon twice on several setups and it always sounded a bit soft or with less leading edge and with perhaps a bit of "warmth added" in comparison to Jriver which was used on the same two systems. Sound is these most important factor for me in choosing a player and since Roon was not better, just different to my ears the decision NOT to buy was a very easy one. Price.
     
  19. Michael Kelly

    Michael Kelly MOT: Pi 2 Design

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    Does roon allow you to bypass the dsp functionality?
     
  20. dubharmonic

    dubharmonic Friend

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    The Roon DSP is all turned off in the screenshot above. I’ll give it a few more days of listening.

    Thanks for sharing and making me feel less crazy @bixby !

    Another issue I’m having with Roon is artist / album recognition. It’s correctly identifying maybe 70% of the content in the library, even when tags and album art are included in the files.
     

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