HQ Player

[Ipoci]

...

Here are our noise measurements illustrating the effects of using Galvanic isolation...

 

I'm more and more convinced that a serious audiophile with good digital playout in mind, should start acquiring oscilloscope, probes and measurement skills before any of audio equipment ... :-)

 

Please guys start a new thread " The Audiophile basic measurement test setup - How to know you setup is really performing as expected "

 

Have a nice day. Massimiliano

[AnotherSpin]

I'm more and more convinced that a serious audiophile with good digital playout in mind, should start acquiring oscilloscope, probes and measurement skills before any of audio equipment ... :-)

 

And good plugs for ears, to avoid listening interference during scientific measurements.

[CA7539]

Hi all,

 

I am just new here and did a lot of reading in the last days as I am building a new audio PC which should deliver high quality sound. Now I just installed the latest version of HQPlayer on a WIN7 test-system. I have cover art embedded in all my FLAC files but I cannot see it in HQP. If I go to fullscreen mode I can see the cover art as background picture but if I go to the left (cover art) screen all the covers are with the same grey background picture. My cover art is mostyl bigger than 1000x1000.

 

Does anyone here have the same problem or does anyone know of limitiation in size or something?

 

The UI of that thing is really bad but if it delivers great sound I can arrange myself with that.

 

Would be great if anyone could help.

[Miska]

I am just new here and did a lot of reading in the last days as I am building a new audio PC which should deliver high quality sound. Now I just installed the latest version of HQPlayer on a WIN7 test-system. I have cover art embedded in all my FLAC files but I cannot see it in HQP. If I go to fullscreen mode I can see the cover art as background picture but if I go to the left (cover art) screen all the covers are with the same grey background picture. My cover art is mostyl bigger than 1000x1000.

 

Does anyone here have the same problem or does anyone know of limitiation in size or something?

 

Cover flow supports only external cover art, stored in same folder as content with file name having "cover" or "folder" in the name. JPG and PNG files are supported.

 

The UI of that thing is really bad but if it delivers great sound I can arrange myself with that.

 

Which way it is bad?

[CA7539]

I now created the files as you mentioned, I tried both, one time with cover.jpg and one time with folder.jpg It doesn't work either way, also deleted the fodler from library and reimported it. Doesn't work for cover flow, still everything grey, also tried with smaller pictures.

 

Bad is maybe somewhat misspelled and offending sorry. Bad is always subjective. I would really enjoy if there was support for a lot more tags that could be shown and more possibilites to search for (eg songname, more better search for any tags)

 

 

[Dandaman]

Cover flow supports only external cover art, stored in same folder as content with file name having "cover" or "folder" in the name. JPG and PNG files are supported.

 

 

 

Which way it is bad?

 

My main problem with the UI is not being able to find the music I add, especially classical. It's equally liable to show up under a performer, a conductor, an orchestra... I suppose it may partially be a metadata issue and rips of CD's may be where it shows up more - I guess I need to bone up on my metadata input. But even stuff I buy digitally online is apt to be hard to find in HQP. Personally, I wish most classical would just show up under composer. The sound of HQP is winning me over, but I find it easier to create a playlist in A+ one time when the music is added and then I can find the thing forever. In HQP the search function is more miss than hit because one has to first figure out which of four boxes to search in. I'd rather have one search box that found any music file with one or two terms entered. Even popular music is problematic. I searched for Susan Boyle's Wild Horses cut and got no hit at all. I had to manually go through the list to find it. It's there, but search was useless.

[Miska]

My main problem with the UI is not being able to find the music I add, especially classical. It's equally liable to show up under a performer, a conductor, an orchestra... I suppose it may partially be a metadata issue and rips of CD's may be where it shows up more - I guess I need to bone up on my metadata input. But even stuff I buy digitally online is apt to be hard to find in HQP. Personally, I wish most classical would just show up under composer.

 

Metadata tends to be a mess, regardless of the source...

 

The sound of HQP is winning me over, but I find it easier to create a playlist in A+ one time when the music is added and then I can find the thing forever.

 

If you store playlists in some forlder, HQPlayer can find and add also the playlists to the library.

 

In HQP the search function is more miss than hit because one has to first figure out which of four boxes to search in.

 

If you use the first one, it is same search as in the cover flow, so it covers all artist, performer and album fields.

 

I'd rather have one search box that found any music file with one or two terms entered. Even popular music is problematic. I searched for Susan Boyle's Wild Horses cut and got no hit at all. I had to manually go through the list to find it. It's there, but search was useless.

 

You can put "susan*" in the artist field and "*horses*" to the album field and you should find it. Already having "susan*" as artist filter would probably narrow down the view enough so that it is really quick to find from the remaining results. Alternatively you could type just "boyle" in the first search box and you probably shouldn't have too many albums as result.

 

Tracks are not covered in the search because they are not indexed at all.

 

Alternatively you could use Spotlight in OS X, or search in Windows Explorer and then just drag-and-drop the correct result if you prefer that way.

[Miska]

I now created the files as you mentioned, I tried both, one time with cover.jpg and one time with folder.jpg It doesn't work either way, also deleted the fodler from library and reimported it. Doesn't work for cover flow, still everything grey, also tried with smaller pictures.

 

To discover covers, you don't need to remove a folder from the library, but you need to re-scan the content for it to be recognized.

 

Bad is maybe somewhat misspelled and offending sorry. Bad is always subjective. I would really enjoy if there was support for a lot more tags that could be shown and more possibilites to search for (eg songname, more better search for any tags)

 

Most of the metadata tends to be incorrect and misleading. For example wherever I look, genre categorization is a complete mess. I have not seen a single place where all Pink Floyd albums would have same genre...

 

HQPlayer is geared towards album playback, playing back whole albums instead of single tracks. Originally there was only album playback and no support for mixed playlists at all. Playlist support was added later. There are still two distinct playback modes. "Transport mode" for playing back albums and "playlist mode" for playing back playlists.

[Guf Gufler]

 

HQPlayer is geared towards album playback, playing back whole albums instead of single tracks. Originally there was only album playback and no support for mixed playlists at all.

 

I feel like I am the only person that likes the file and folder system for searching my music. Searching with album art seems like such an inefficient way to get through a library

[Melvin]

I feel like I am the only person that likes the file and folder system for searching my music. Searching with album art seems like such an inefficient way to get through a library

 

You are not alone.

[Guf Gufler]

I’m posting this here because I’m buying into the upsampling everything to DSD with HQP. I have a 2011 mac mini 2.3 dual core running Mountain Lion. Some times I can playback with no dropouts or stuttering with the "best” filters other times I cant. I have a quad core Windows 7 machine for my home theater I tried to set up in my audio system but it got complicated without having a monitor and not being able to run headless with an ipad. (I’m on windows 7 home and doesn’t allow a host connection with remote desktop.) On my system upsampling to DSD5.6, to run the poly sinc filters without the -2s, I think need a quad core machine? I can throw one together for a few hundred dollars with some parts I have or I can trying getting quad core macmini. The windows would be cheaper but more of a hassle because I’m about 99% mac os in my household. Is there some definite advantages of having a windows machine over a mac for sound quality? I know for my home theater pc I HAD to be able to play back dts-hd so I run windows and I’m totally happy with it. Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Norton]

In my first days of using HQP. Terrific sound, but once in while the PC momentarily " cuts out" (screen blanks then comes back, with message re Ethernet connection offline then online again). At that point I also have to reconnect the USB to DAC before I can resume playback.

 

I'm running a licensed version under Linux Mint on an admittedly fairly modest machine (Zotac c1320 quad core Celeron).

 

Oddly it seems to happen mainly when playing DSD64 files, when I also note that one of the CPUs is running at 100%. Doesn't seem to cut out (or reach this % of processing power) when converting PCM to DSD on the fly. I have Direct SDM & Pipeline SDM selected, and SDMpack DoP.

 

Am I just overloading the PC? In which case it seems odd that it doesn't happen with PCM>DSD conversion.

[Miska]

Oddly it seems to happen mainly when playing DSD64 files, when I also note that one of the CPUs is running at 100%. Doesn't seem to cut out (or reach this % of processing power) when converting PCM to DSD on the fly. I have Direct SDM & Pipeline SDM selected, and SDMpack DoP.

 

Sounds like you have PCM output selected in the main window and you thus get DSD to PCM conversion. Otherwise with Direct SDM enabled and SDM output you should be getting very low CPU load playing back DSD files as there is no processing done.

[Norton]

Sounds like you have PCM output selected in the main window and you thus get DSD to PCM conversion. Otherwise with Direct SDM enabled and SDM output you should be getting very low CPU load playing back DSD files as there is no processing done.

 

No I definitely have SDM output selected in the main window (and Direct SDM checked).

It doesn't happen very often, just odd that it seems to be with native DSD files and not when converting.

 

Is it ok in a quad core machine to have one CPU at 100%?

[Miska]

No I definitely have SDM output selected in the main window (and Direct SDM checked).

It doesn't happen very often, just odd that it seems to be with native DSD files and not when converting.

 

Is it ok in a quad core machine to have one CPU at 100%?

 

OK, strange. There's shouldn't be any big load in that case... It is OK to have such load, but I'm not sure why it would happen. You could check "top" if it is really HQPlayer generating the load or some other process. You could also try setting "Buffer time" setting in HQPlayer to 100 ms to see if it cures the issue.

[shadowlight]

@lmitche,

 

Thx for the Win10 optimization steps.

[CA7539]

To discover covers, you don't need to remove a folder from the library, but you need to re-scan the content for it to be recognized.

 

Ok but it still doesn't work here. It doesn't matter if I have cover.jpg or folder.jpg they are just not shown. Only as background picture as already mentioned...

 

Most of the metadata tends to be incorrect and misleading. For example wherever I look, genre categorization is a complete mess. I have not seen a single place where all Pink Floyd albums would have same genre...

 

HQPlayer is geared towards album playback, playing back whole albums instead of single tracks. Originally there was only album playback and no support for mixed playlists at all. Playlist support was added later. There are still two distinct playback modes. "Transport mode" for playing back albums and "playlist mode" for playing back playlists.

 

Ok but there are still people like me outside there who painfully edit their metadata for all albums, loading down from discogs, checking, editing, adding information from the booklet, ... This all is lost for me then...

 

I think there is a lot of high quality programming in HQP, is it that pain to implement support for more tags?

[fordski]

If you're open to using iTunes and you have a Mac you could try the iTunes script Geoff Armstrong posted in the following forum:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/showthread.php?t=24281

 

It gives the best of both worlds, iTunes library management and hqplayer sound quality. Unfortunately no DSD though.

[CA7539]

Sadly don't have both of it, neither Itunes nor a Mac... I am sure there will be a solution but it's some way to go as it seems...

[bogi]

Sadly don't have both of it, neither Itunes nor a Mac... I am sure there will be a solution but it's some way to go as it seems...

 

I am also maintaining metadata with my music collection and I am also running Windows. If Foobar2000 music library manager is OK for you, I have a solution how to send albums or tracks or any playlist created in Foobar to be played in HQPlayer. I am using mainly Foobar's autoplaylist feature, which automatically displays the actual music library selection (album, tree, filter result ...) in a playlist. Foobar is not only music player, it is also music tagger, format converter, powerful playlist manager and more. You can for example copy/paste tracks between different playlists and change their playback order, if that's your wish.

 

I showed on a video few weeks ago some basic techniques I am using: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/manage-hqplayer-playlist-foobar2000-24282/ My solution allows playback of any music file format, which is supported by Foobar2000, even if it is not supported by HQPlayer. It is reached using temporary conversion of files into RAM disk. Playback from RAM disk improves sound quality in comparison with playing from classic SATA or USB HDD.

 

Meanwhile I improved the solution from my video to be more convenient. If there would be interest, I can share it. My current solution contains 2 possibilities

- Send to HQ Player playlist with deletion of previous RAM disk content (the deletion is intelligent, existing tracks which appear also in the new playlist are not deleted)

- Add to HQPlayer playlist (without deletion of previous content)

 

Operation consists of these simple steps:

1. Select tracks in any Foobar playlist

2. Klick on an icon or press a hot key to perform "Send" or "Add" as is described above.

 

Then sent tracks appear in HQPlayer playlist in the same order, how they appeared in Foobar's playlist.

 

Current drawback of my solution is one HQPlayer bug when it receives playlist from an external application, but Miska told me that correction is already implemented and it will be part of the next version.

[Miska]

Ok but it still doesn't work here. It doesn't matter if I have cover.jpg or folder.jpg they are just not shown. Only as background picture as already mentioned...

 

OK, if you did rescan the music folders using "Add tree" after adding the separate cover art file, and saved the result by clicking OK in the Library dialog, then I don't know why it wouldn't appear...

 

 

I think there is a lot of high quality programming in HQP, is it that pain to implement support for more tags?

 

No, it is not pain. There's not much more in FLAC than is already supported. OTOH, ID3v2 (other file formats than FLAC) has lot of things but then it's more about which of those should be supported and how to represent it in the GUI... I've been prioritizing DSP features over GUI features, so sound quality over user interface. Given limited amount of time I just need to decide what are the most important things to be done next.

[CA7539]

@bogi : This will certainly be an optionn thanks for the hint. I am actually in the process of finding the optimal workflow for me. I am aware of foobar but actually don't use it. At the moment my processing is : ripping with either EAC or dbPoweramp to FLAC, then a lot of tagging work in MediaMonkey with Discogs tagger, adding/correcting metadata in MM, getting high resolution album art either via scanning or if available already in the ripping process. So until now I was mainly listening with headphones, but this will change now as I live alone again. So I built a completely silent PC which I will also use for video playback. As JRiver was an option but it is not possible to get movie information and covers in other languages than english this is a complete fail for me. So I switched back to Kodi for video.

As I read a lot positive about HQP I want to give it a try and now look for a solution where all my metadata work was not worthless.

My main setup will be PC -> Chord 2Qute -> NAD C165BEE -> Adam Sub-20 -> Adam P-33A

So Foobar might be the missing link, I will try that out for sure, thanks.

[CA7539]

OK, if you did rescan the music folders using "Add tree" after adding the separate cover art file, and saved the result by clicking OK in the Library dialog, then I don't know why it wouldn't appear...

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18760[/ATTACH]

 

 

 

No, it is not pain. There's not much more in FLAC than is already supported. OTOH, ID3v2 (other file formats than FLAC) has lot of things but then it's more about which of those should be supported and how to represent it in the GUI... I've been prioritizing DSP features over GUI features, so sound quality over user interface. Given limited amount of time I just need to decide what are the most important things to be done next.

 

That was the missing hint! I did not use "Add tree" I did use "Add", with "Add tree" I can see the cover art. Thanks on that!

 

Well, I use a lot more tags in my FLAC files than that, this is my common structure :

TITLE, ARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST (I store both versions), ALBUM, DISCNUMBER, DISC (also both versions), TRACKNUMBER, YEAR, ORIGINAL YEAR, ORGANIZATION, GENRE, DATE, ORIGINAL DATE, some customized tags CUSTOM1-4, COMPOSER, LYRICIST, CONDUCTOR (is misused for producer, but I know in my workflow), ENSEMBLE, INVOLVED PEOPLE, COMMENT, TOTALTRACKS, TOTALDISCS, LYRICS

 

And I store this for every single track in my collection, so it's a pain for me if this is kinda "lost".

 

Oh I am completely with you that sound quality is prioritized in such a project. A great GUI is of no use if the main use of the program is let down for it. But maybe you reach a point where SQ is so outstanding that you have time for improving the GUI a bit. But I also know there will be always something to tweak regarding sound optimization. So...

[bogi]

@bogi : This will certainly be an optionn thanks for the hint. I am actually in the process of finding the optimal workflow for me. I am aware of foobar but actually don't use it. At the moment my processing is : ripping with either EAC or dbPoweramp to FLAC, then a lot of tagging work in MediaMonkey with Discogs tagger, adding/correcting metadata in MM, getting high resolution album art either via scanning or if available already in the ripping process. So until now I was mainly listening with headphones, but this will change now as I live alone again. So I built a completely silent PC which I will also use for video playback. As JRiver was an option but it is not possible to get movie information and covers in other languages than english this is a complete fail for me. So I switched back to Kodi for video.

As I read a lot positive about HQP I want to give it a try and now look for a solution where all my metadata work was not worthless.

My main setup will be PC -> Chord 2Qute -> NAD C165BEE -> Adam Sub-20 -> Adam P-33A

So Foobar might be the missing link, I will try that out for sure, thanks.

 

I'm not using Kodi, but maybe that's easier way for you, if you wish to solve also video playback.

 

Geoff Armstrong solved Tidal playback via HQPlayer through Kodi. http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/tidal-and-wimp-through-your-software-player-choice-23987/ Maybe similar solution could be used also for direct audio playback from Kodi, without Tidal. But I don't know that solution.

[Miska]

Geoff, bogi,

 

I have now following items implemented in "hqp-control":

hqp-control <host> <--playlist-remove <index>|--playlist-move-up <index>|--playlist-move-down <index>|--playlist-clear|--select-track <index>|--play|--pause|--stop|--previous|--next|--backward|--forward|--seek <position>|--volume-down|--volume-up|--mute|--volume <value>|--state|--status|uri>

 

Does this look enough, or is there something more that should be there? Difference between "state" and "status" is that first one returns the current state/position while latter one keeps printing out the information until playback stops (at the end of playlist/album).