HQ Player

[jhwalker]

My Core 2 Duo MBP seemed much happier with PCM oversampling than it was when oversampling from PCM to DSD. No dropouts with oversampling to DSD64, though there was breakup when trying oversampling to DSD128, but even with DSD64 sound wasn't as good. I'll see whether the volume setting makes a difference.

 

My 2012 MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM) does not skip a beat upsampling DSD64 > DSD128 or PCM > DSD128 - CPU runs at less than 15% throughout. no drops, etc. Very nice

 

poly-sinc-short-mp DSD5v2

[jhwalker]

I have nearly the exact same Macbook Pro as jhwalker above (2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16Gb ram, SSD hard drive, running OSX 10.9.3), and I have nothing but dropouts when trying to upsample PCM to DSD128. I tried various volume settings, all the way down to -6db as a "max" volume, and the +6db option is unchecked. Doesn't matter.

 

I am running an iFi iDSD Nano DAC if that makes a difference, and I have DoP selected as the SDM Pack. No other apps are running on the Mac, and the CPU utilization is very low when running HQPlayer, so it doesn't appear that I am running out of CPU headroom. No matter which combination of "poly" filters and modulator I use, I experience dropouts via my DAC. I have no problems when upsampling PCM, but the DSD upsampling sounds so much better in between the dropouts, and I really want it to work.

 

Any thoughts??

 

That's really odd - I have the same iFi iDSD Nano, upsampling both PCM and lower-rate DSD to DSD128, CPU normally about 15-25%, no interruptions:

 

 

As you note, it doesn't seem that CPU utilization is an issue - are you sure there's not a problem with your USB cable / connection? I've noticed my cable is a bit loose in the socket these days so every once in a great while I get a bit of a drop out when the cable wobbles in the socket (one thing I hate about USB). Rock solid other than that.

[jhwalker]

I'm really enjoying my trial of this software, and think I'm hearing a very nice SQ upsampling all my content to DSD128. Still trying the various filter combinations, etc., but was wondering: is there a reason Apple Lossless (ALAC) is not supported? Since I use iTunes for library management, *all* my tracks (save my small DSD collections) are in Apple Lossless format, and it's a bit of a pain to convert to AIFF (or whatever) to get HQPlayer to load them.

 

Any possibility ALAC support will be added in future? Or is there a specific design / philosophical constraint against supporting it?

[jhwalker]

Couple of quick questions:

 

 

1. When one purchases the software, is it licensed for use on more than one machine? In my case, I have both a MacBook Pro and a Mac Mini I'd like to license.
   
2. In the setup described above, could one of the Macs be used as a Network Audio Adapter ("NAA")? Or is that functionality strictly reserved for small Linux devices? Ideally, any machine running the HQPlayer software could be an NAA "target", as well.
   

 

Again, thanks for making this available for Mac - am really enjoying the music I'm getting out of this player. I have all of them, and right now, HQPlayer is my fave

[jhwalker]

I'm really enjoying my trial of this software, and think I'm hearing a very nice SQ upsampling all my content to DSD128. Still trying the various filter combinations, etc., but was wondering: is there a reason Apple Lossless (ALAC) is not supported? Since I use iTunes for library management, *all* my tracks (save my small DSD collections) are in Apple Lossless format, and it's a bit of a pain to convert to AIFF (or whatever) to get HQPlayer to load them.

 

Any possibility ALAC support will be added in future? Or is there a specific design / philosophical constraint against supporting it?

 

Forgive me, but a "bump" on this one: I never saw an answer, and I'd really like to understand if there are plans to add ALAC support in the future? I finally bit the bullet and purchased this great player, but that's the one fly in the ointment for me

[jhwalker]

I don't have a good answer... I've looked into it, but the Apple documentation is a bit vague so I'm not sure if it will work the way I think it will until I try it out. And it would be OS X specific feature not available on other platforms which makes it lower priority.

 

So maybe at some point. As I have a long list of things to be done and limited amount of time, things happen in some order. Meanwhile I can only recommend using one of the cross-platform containers, my favorite being FLAC, but for iTunes compatibility AIFF serves the purpose.

 

(the ALAC code release from Apple wasn't really useful, they released the codec code, but not the code dealing with the container where ALAC is stored)

 

Thank you for the quick answer. Not what I wanted to hear as my library (like a lot of other Apple folks, I'm sure) is in ALAC format to save space - I don't have space to expand my 1.5TB library to 3.0TB+, along with doubling that for backup, etc.

 

But . . . I'm really enjoying the player and I will figure something out. Maybe I can preconvert individual albums to AIFF before playing

[jhwalker]

That's what I do. XLD works fine, I preconvert some non-compatible file formats which I have to WAV before playing in HQP, but store them as they are. Not too simple, still better than play them without converting in A+.

 

Just as an experiment, I went ahead and converted a subset of my recent purchases (200 albums, 153GB) to AIFF for use with HQPlayer.

 

Resulting file size was 295GB, a growth of over 90% which means converting my full library (~4,600 albums, 1.5TB - some of that is iTunes / MP3) a complete non-starter, at least for now. I can't afford enough storage to convert my existing library, mirror that for backup, etc.

 

So my strategy will be to convert individual albums when I *really* want to use HQPlayer and hope that someday, ALAC compatibility will work it's way up in the queue for implementation in HQPlayer.

[jhwalker]

If you don't need the content in iTunes, alternative is FLAC which should be pretty much equal size as ALAC. I guess pretty much every other OS X player supports FLACs except iTunes (?).

 

I have to use iTunes at least my primary "intake" because my partner understands and likes it. We both buy music, and I'm comfortable with any player, but he only knows how to use iTunes. I then use home sharing to consolidate and maintain our joint library, so iTunes isn't going away any time soon around here.

 

I wish Apple would simply give up and start supporting FLAC - in addition to ALAC, if they wish. I have no issue with ALAC, but it's only 90% as ubiquitous as FLAC

[jhwalker]

Hey guys .. just wanted to add my voice to the collective. I was having similar issues with not only HQPlayer, but also A+, Amarra, and Fidelia since upgrading to Yosemite. (Pure Music seemed problem free for the most part). I had the same dropout and stuttering problems using the USB connection on both of my DACs. After weeks (seems like weeks at least) of trying to figure this out I decided to roll back to Mavericks today using Time Machine. So far so good! It's been a couple of hours of non-stop non-stuttering beautiful music. My take .. it's Yosemite.

 

Well - it's not *all* Yosemite. I have had no stuttering problems with either my Mac Mini or my MacBook Pro, both running Yosemite since Developer Preview 1, and both now on whatever is now the version # for final release.

[jhwalker]

Could you please confirm that you are running HQP 3.5.1 and OS 10.10.1?

 

I will when I get home (I'm on a business trip to China right now). If I recall correctly, those versions are correct; i.e., I upgraded to 3.5.1 on both systems just before I left - but had had no problem up until then, so don't expect any now - and pretty sure I'm on 10.10.1 unless I have moved on to the next developer build, e.g., 10.10.2 beta.

 

But I'll post for sure when I get back (supposed to be back in the U.S. Saturday evening).

[jhwalker]

But then again I thought that since exaSound managed to provide a driver to third-parties to make either CoreAudio do DSD256 or make use of ASIO on Mac OS X possible, and since I upgraded my iDSD Nano to Quad-rate, I would be able to do native Quad-rate on Mac OS X, provided the audiophile player has implemented the exaSound driver.

 

Looks like I am missing something here.

 

While installing Windows on my Mac makes me cringe, I may do a virtualised install of Linux to test it!

 

Is there any minimal Linux distribution you would recommend? I would try it with VirtualBox.

 

Cheers.

 

The exaSound driver applies *only* to exaSound devices. Until / unless iFi comes up with their ASIO driver for Mac, you're out of luck with the Nano iDSD.

[jhwalker]

The issue with Amarra is that, even though HQP is shut, exited, nada present, it has let core audio or whatever in such a state that Amarra outputs nothing but screeching sounds if one does not reboot. Anyway I feel my future will be with HQP as sole player not in comparisons !

 

Yes, this is an issue with HQP and *any* other player, unfortunately.

 

The others (Audirvana, JRiver, Decibel, Amarra, Fidelia, etc.) all seem to leave the DAC / system in a mode that is immediately addressable by another player, but HQP leaves it in an unusable state after stopping playback and / or exiting the program. Would love to see this corrected - right now, the only way to restore playback capability is to reboot the whole system or turn off / remove / reconnect / turn on the DAC, which is fine if you're using a laptop, but not so much in a server setup

[jhwalker]

This shouldn't be an issue with version 3.5.1 and later, as long as it is closed cleanly. It restores all hardware settings back to the original values. I've tested this with iTunes and Spotify and neither have had problems playing correctly after closing HQPlayer.

 

If it crashes or gets killed, then it of course doesn't have a chance to clean up.

 

Thank you for the follow-up. It appears with the latest version of the Desktop, this issue is resolved. Thanks!

[jhwalker]

I am assuming you are on Windows. If so I will suggest how I do it. I maintain my library on hard disc in mostly flac files.

I created a play folder (in my case elsewhere). When I sit down to organize my listening session I use Xrecode II to browse through my library. When I make a selection Xrecode II automatically transcodes the file to individual tracks and places it in the play folder for my session. The entire process takes less than 5 seconds on my computer. Then I just use the library function in HQP to load my play file for the session. This is the only solution I have found. That way all items for my listening session are organized and divided into individual tracks. Xrecode also automatically transfers the cover art with the chosen files. The library function within HQP is not all that great or practical to use for someone that has a lot of files. I listen mostly to classical and I have much more than a terabyte of music stored so to try and put all that into HQP is not practical. I am quite satisfied with the approach I outlined above. Works for me. I put up with this little shortcoming of HQP for the love of the sound quality it can produce.

 

Link to Xrecode II: Convert flac to mp3, flac to wav, ape to mp3, cue to mp3, flac to alac, flac to m4a, flv to mp3 and more.

 

Similar approach on Mac. I browse my library using iTunes, then use the "show in Finder" function to bring up the selected tracks in Finder. I then drag and drop into XLD, which is pre-set to convert to AIFF and place in my RAMDisk. HQPlayer is "pointed" to my RAMDisk, so all I have to do is refresh the library to see the new files.

 

That said, I *yearn* for a less complex workflow - could probably code an iTunes add-in (or AppleScript standalone) to automate this - just need to figure out how to do it (I'm an IT infrastructure guy, not a programmer!)

[jhwalker]

If you have content in AIFF format in iTunes, then simple drag-and-drop straight from iTunes works... For ALAC it is not so simple...

 

Yes, if I had space for AIFF . . . but barely fit my existing library (all ALAC) into available disk space. Trade off until I'm able to afford several terabytes more space

[jhwalker]

i.e. hard disk or monitor put to sleep after 2 minutes

 

On my system, HQPlayer stops playing completely when the screen goes into power save mode:

 

System Preferences : Energy Saver : Display Sleep

 

or when the screen saver kicks in:

 

System Preferences : Desktop & Screen Saver : Screen Saver

 

I have to turn off both of these for HQPlayer to continue playing, either locally or to a NAA.

[jhwalker]

A new subtopic:

The new MacBook is fanless and I read a post by Miska that this is a good thing. - But for the sake of DSD conversion: which cpu is necessary? 1.1 or 1.2 or 1.3 GHz

And, for me, money is of consideration.

 

I have a 2.5GHz i7 (16GB RAM, SSD HD), and the highest I can do PCM > DSD without stuttering is DSD256 with the -2s filters. I can get DSD512 if *nothing* else is running on the machine (i.e., no Safari, no other players running in the background). Without dropping back to the -2s filters, DSD128 is my max.

 

DSD direct (i.e., no resampling, etc.) is rock-solid at DSD512.

[jhwalker]

Presumably you have ripped your collection to ALAC. It takes a couple of hours of transcode your whole collection to FLAC. There's no reason not to. And you cannot purchase commercial ALAC hi-res files, everything is sold as FLAC. Plus iTunes is a terrible ripper, there are much better ones available to convert CDs to FLAC.

 

I understand your point, but by sticking stubbornly to ALAC you're missing the boat, so to speak. And there are actually quite a few high-end musci players out there that don't support ALAC.

 

There are a *lot* of reasons not to convert to FLAC, not the least of which is that iTunes doesn't support it. Our entire music library is in iTunes, and my partner only knows how to use iTunes / iPod, etc. Switching to another solution just for one player is not viable, for me at least.

 

And, no, "everything" is not sold as FLAC - every store I buy from offers *either* FLAC or ALAC (and some WAV or AIFF).

 

I agree FLAC is the most widely-supported format, but *every* other player I use (and I have a *lot* of them) support ALAC - HQPlayer is the lone holdout.

 

PS - I don't mean to sound so negative about HQPlayer - I bought it and enjoy it regularly. But it *is* a pain to have to convert everything to AIFF just to listen to it. I've taken to maintaining a completely separate / much smaller subset of my music just to use HQPlayer - my main 80k track collection (almost 2TB) is just too large to convert to AIFF without a substantial investment in disk space

[jhwalker]

I kurb1980,

 

My Mini is a quad-core (2.3 GHz, Intel Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM). I will try your suggestion on the filters to see if that makes a difference.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

Gary

 

I have a MacBook Pro, 2.5 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, same DAC, up sampling to DSD128, etc. - no issues here. CPU runs about 20%, across 8 cores.

 

My settings:

 

Looks pretty similar to yours.

 

I will say that I was experiencing high CPU utilization, skips / pops, etc., with HQDesktop up until recently, when I rebuilt my MBP with a new install of El Capitan. Not sure what was going on before (too much bloat acquired over the years?), but with the fresh install and El Cap, all my apps work much more smoothly.

[jhwalker]

That's because JRiver as well as foobar2000, limits all PCM to 24/48.

 

Don't understand this comment - there is no such limitation in JRiver *or* foobar2000?

[jhwalker]

Dear Jussi,

 

I cannot copy HQPlayer 3.11 to Ramdisk ( 512 Mb) anymore since I have installed version 3.11 instead of 3.09 and have installed recently El Capitan 10.11.1 om Mac mini Server 2012 model I7 with 16Gb ram.

 

I am running OS El Capitan from SDXC card and have a script installing about 7.9 Gb of music files to first Ramdisk and also HQPlayer to a separate Ramdisk.

 

If I try to open the HQPlayer from Ramdisk it tells that that file is corrupt and/or damaged!

 

I suppose that have to copy other HQP-system files also to the Ramdisk ?

 

Please advice..

In awaiting your reply.

 

Vert best regards, Andreas

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]22052[/ATTACH]

 

I believe this is a bug with El Capitan. I have not been able to copy program files to RAM disks since the upgrade.

[jhwalker]

Jussi, DSD>PCM drops constantly using Roon build 99. And any combination under SDM drops out also during playback I have tried every possible combination. The only setting that plays without any major dropout issue is when I use PCM only.

 

2015 iMac>Pulse Infinity>roon>HQP 3.13beta2

 

I'm not having this problem, but have to ask: why are you converting DSD > PCM for playback on the Pulse Infinity? It supports DSD via DoP.

 

You're certainly welcome to do so, just wondering why.

[jhwalker]

Previously I found that the 96k recording sounded me lifeless and less involving compared to the MQA file. Today I could compare both with the original DXD file.

 

I did this comparison:

DXD 24/352.8: poly-sinc ASDM7 6144000 SDM(DSD)

PCM 24/96: poly-sinc ASDM7 6144000 SDM(DSD)

MQA 24/44.1: poly-sinc-mqa ASDM7 5644800 SDM(DSD)

 

What really surprised me was the difference between the original DXD master and the downsampled 96k file. I didn't expect so big difference. As HQPlayer and Foobar2000/SoX user I knew what can do upsampling. But the amount of information lost in the downsampling process from 352.8k to 96k still surprised me. Did they use really good downsampling filters? Hopefully yes.

 

The DXD recording contained much more air between instruments and sounded vivid. The subtle detail in the 96k recording was less audible. The 96k recording didn't contain so much and air and sounded me darker, smothered, lifeless in comparison with the DXD recording. The presentation of highest part of audible frequencies seemed me to be much better on the DXD master.

 

Then I compared the MQA file with the DXD file. The MQA one missed the subtle detail and clarity of the DXD master. With the DXD master I had natural feeling that the air is "right". At least I couldn't compare it with better recording, the "air" was here and sounded me naturally. The MQA recording somehow attempts to be airy, but doesn't have the same resolution as the DXD master. Therefore it's "air" sounded me somehow artificial and little disrupted in comparison with the DXD master. I perceived less low level detail, less clarity, less natural presentation of the MQA file.

 

Listening impressions are always subjective and related to the listener and his gear. Please take my post this way.

 

Thank you for sharing your impressions. Will be very interesting when MQA-capable DACs are available so we can do a proper comparison between DXD and MQA file "decoded", instead of just the truncated 16-bit version

[jhwalker]

I've thought about it, but it doesn't actually fit there. On some OS and some display/font size settings it would fit, but for example for me on Linux with 4K display it doesn't fit and I'm reluctant to make the information boxes larger because it immediately cuts out one line of space from library or playlist views. I rather just fit it on the same format line.

 

If you use latest Roon builds with HQPlayer, the active rate is actually reported there...

 

 

Edit: I changed it to look like this a bit of fitting exercise, is this better than before?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]24014[/ATTACH]

 

Love this - was a concern of mine, as well. Great work on polishing an already-good thing

[jhwalker]

Could find nothing on the web about Audirvana Plus upsampling PCM to DSD. So I downloaded the trial version, but neither could I find anything in the settings (preferences). Where can I find more info on this?

 

(Just interested – very happy with HQPlayer for Windows.)

 

Looking too far abroad

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/audirvana-plus-2-multi-channel-sound-5-surround-channels-and-1-lfe-low-frequency-effects-channel-pulse-code-modulation-direct-stream-digital-conversion-28428/