HQ Player

[zorntel]

Just wondering if anyone is using a Mytek Brooklyn with HQplayer? Preferred settings for PCM and DSD? I have plenty of power to use any filter to DSD256.

 

Thanks!

 

Robert

[miguelito]

Quick issue report on 3.13.0 for Miska:

 

Selecting "Auto rate family" while having output selected to DSD64 will not play with a 24/96 file.

[Hammer]

Jussi, when playing a playlist that contains multiple file formats, there is often a long delay when switching formats. On a pc with sufficient hardware, would it be possible to add an option to "save" the initialization data structures in memory so that HQPlayer does not need to re-initialize each time there is a change in file format? Thank you, hammer.

[ted_b]

Quick issue report on 3.13.0 for Miska:

 

Selecting "Auto rate family" while having output selected to DSD64 will not play with a 24/96 file.

Which bit rate of DSD64 (2.8 or 3.1)? What filter?

[bogi]

Quick issue report on 3.13.0 for Miska:

 

Selecting "Auto rate family" while having output selected to DSD64 will not play with a 24/96 file.

 

"will not play with a 24/96 file" if your DAC does not support 3.1MHz DSD sample rate.

[ted_b]

Right. Easy solution, use a Poly Sinc filter and uncheck auto family.

[rickca]

Miska, I'm planning a new Skylake build. For PCM -> DSD256 should I get an i7-6700K, or would an i5-6600K be sufficient?

[Miska]

Miska, I'm planning a new Skylake build. For PCM -> DSD256 should I get an i7-6700K, or would an i5-6600K be sufficient?

 

Depends on the exact settings you would like to use. Having plenty of processing power doesn't hurt... There is quite significant clock frequency difference between the two, so i7-6700K is certainly cutting edge power. i7 has also larger cache of 8 MB vs 6 MB of i5. One major difference between the two is HyperThreading, but it is not really useful for HQPlayer use cases, so no reason to pay for that alone.

 

My Win10 machine is i5-6600T plus GeForce GTX 980 for offloading at the moment. i7-6700T wasn't available here yet at the time, otherwise I would have probably picked that one. But I wanted to prioritize on making acoustically quiet machine that would have as much processing power as possible within the constraints of being quiet.

[Miska]

Jussi, when playing a playlist that contains multiple file formats, there is often a long delay when switching formats. On a pc with sufficient hardware, would it be possible to add an option to "save" the initialization data structures in memory so that HQPlayer does not need to re-initialize each time there is a change in file format?

 

Technically yes, but it is not at all easy to implement. So currently only the current initialization is cached over stop/play cycles...

[miguelito]

Right. Easy solution, use a Poly Sinc filter and uncheck auto family.

Yes that works.

[Dandaman]

A+ is clearly causing the trouble here that makes something fail in HQPlayer startup. Now when this happens, don't go to change any settings or if you are put to the settings dialog due to device open failure at startup, just click cancel, exit HQPlayer and reboot the computer. Then after reboot, don't run A+ but just start HQPlayer. Most likely everything is intact.

 

Meanwhile, I recommend not to start HQPlayer after running A+ without rebooting between.

 

Another scenario: I was running HQP normally w/o problems. Closed HQP. Opened System Prefs & changed system sound output to route thru my DAC (which isn't seen directly by the system at any time - system sees my Empirical Audio Off Ramp re-clocker just ahead of my DAC) so that I could listen to music samples from websites (HD Tracks, Pro Studio Masters, etc.) by routing system sound thru Off Ramp/DAC. Listened to samples without issue. Closed browser, reset System sound away from Off Ramp/DAC. An hour later, launched HQP. All settings had reverted to defaults and library forgotten. SO... it seems that almost ANY disengagement of the Off Ramp/DAC leaves the system in a condition where HQP forgets all settings & library. This does not occur with Audirvana+ which doesn't care if I disengage, use other software and come back. It retains settings and music locations.

[Miska]

Another scenario: I was running HQP normally w/o problems. Closed HQP. Opened System Prefs & changed system sound output to route thru my DAC (which isn't seen directly by the system at any time - system sees my Empirical Audio Off Ramp re-clocker just ahead of my DAC) so that I could listen to music samples from websites (HD Tracks, Pro Studio Masters, etc.) by routing system sound thru Off Ramp/DAC. Listened to samples without issue. Closed browser, reset System sound away from Off Ramp/DAC. An hour later, launched HQP.

 

I would need a HQPlayer log file of this happening to figure out what goes wrong. This is not happening on my machines so it is a bit hard to figure out otherwise.

 

How do you close HQPlayer? Of course on Mac, clicking the red X button on top left window corner doesn't close the application, only selecting "Quit HQPlayerDesktop3" from the application menu, or cmd-Q from keyboard...

 

All settings had reverted to defaults and library forgotten.

 

It usually just seems so because the application failed to start up successfully. So if you want to retain settings just quit HQPlayer without changing any settings and on next successful restart everything is probably just like before.

 

In any case, you can use the settings Export/Import from File-menu to backup and restore the settings/library, so if something gets lost for some reason you can get things back.

[Hammer]

Technically yes, but it is not at all easy to implement. So currently only the current initialization is cached over stop/play cycles...

 

Thank you...and so the only way to speed up the initialization now is a faster processor? CUDA does not help with this aspect, right? Is there any other hardware that can help?

[Miska]

Thank you...and so the only way to speed up the initialization now is a faster processor? CUDA does not help with this aspect, right? Is there any other hardware that can help?

 

At the moment that's the case. It could be possible to accelerate the initialization with CUDA, but it will also need more work, although it is quite a bit easier than caching bunch of different initializations and then picking the right one from those.

 

So I can look into CUDA acceleration of the initialization procedure in future releases to see how much it would help.

[Dandaman]

I would need a HQPlayer log file of this happening to figure out what goes wrong. This is not happening on my machines so it is a bit hard to figure out otherwise.

 

How do you close HQPlayer? Of course on Mac, clicking the red X button on top left window corner doesn't close the application, only selecting "Quit HQPlayerDesktop3" from the application menu, or cmd-Q from keyboard...

 

 

 

It usually just seems so because the application failed to start up successfully. So if you want to retain settings just quit HQPlayer without changing any settings and on next successful restart everything is probably just like before.

 

In any case, you can use the settings Export/Import from File-menu to backup and restore the settings/library, so if something gets lost for some reason you can get things back.

 

- I always quit HQP by using command+Q.

- I followed your advice and saved the settings. I then went thru the procedure previously mentioned to listen to music samples on the web thru my audio system - knowing that this caused HQP to lose all settings. Sure enough, when HQP was re-launched, all was at default settings with no library shown. I quit HQP. I then rebooted the Mac Pro. When finished, I launched HQP. It did not recover any settings or show any library. I then tried to import the settings you had me create. I got an "Import Failed" message.

- Question: if I have log file enabled on HQP, does it only log crashes/hangs or just any activity? In any event, even though the log file preference is checked, no log entry was made. In fact I thought it had NEVER made any log entries but it turns out that it did from late July 2015 till Oct 2015. No entries since.

 

I conclude that it is not a failure to re-initialize HQP but something else which effectively says "go back to base state". This issue seemingly does not lend itself to an easy diagnosis.

[Hammer]

At the moment that's the case. It could be possible to accelerate the initialization with CUDA, but it will also need more work, although it is quite a bit easier than caching bunch of different initializations and then picking the right one from those.

 

So I can look into CUDA acceleration of the initialization procedure in future releases to see how much it would help.

 

That would be great! Thank you.

[zorntel]

Depends on the exact settings you would like to use. Having plenty of processing power doesn't hurt... There is quite significant clock frequency difference between the two, so i7-6700K is certainly cutting edge power. i7 has also larger cache of 8 MB vs 6 MB of i5. One major difference between the two is HyperThreading, but it is not really useful for HQPlayer use cases, so no reason to pay for that alone.

 

My Win10 machine is i5-6600T plus GeForce GTX 980 for offloading at the moment. i7-6700T wasn't available here yet at the time, otherwise I would have probably picked that one. But I wanted to prioritize on making acoustically quiet machine that would have as much processing power as possible within the constraints of being quiet.

 

Jussi,

 

I know its difficult to make universal pronouncements on machine speed, but it seems like there are lots of questions asking about a machine that is fast enough for "X" with HQ player. I know there are lots of variables (OS, processor clock-speed, cores, RAM, cache, CUDA, etc.) so it is difficult to make universal pronouncements, but it might be useful to have some general guidelines.

 

It would also be great to have those guidelines tied to some type of accessible standard on speed, like Geekbench, for instance.

 

I suppose an alternative might be to develop a user database where people could catalog their machine/set-up and then say what it can comfortably do (e.g., polysinc, PCM 24/192 to DSD256, for instance).

 

I know recently when I grabbed a machine just for doing HQ Player I just guessed...and I'm not sure I made the best choice for the money. For instance I choose a machine with really good multi-core speed because I saw a big improvement when I went form a quad to an 8-core mac with about the same clock-speed...but then when I went to a 16-core machine it didn't really do any better...maybe better to have gone with a quad-core machine with fast clock-speed. These are the types of questions I think a lot of people might be struggling with.

 

Is this something we might be able to do and put somewhere that is easy to reference for users?

 

Robert

[Miska]

When finished, I launched HQP. It did not recover any settings or show any library. I then tried to import the settings you had me create. I got an "Import Failed" message.

 

Strange, seems like something is preventing HQPlayer from writing to the ~/.hqplayer folder where the settings and log is kept...

 

- Question: if I have log file enabled on HQP, does it only log crashes/hangs or just any activity? In any event, even though the log file preference is checked, no log entry was made. In fact I thought it had NEVER made any log entries but it turns out that it did from late July 2015 till Oct 2015. No entries since.

 

Everything is logged. This sounds like that for what ever reason, writing to ~/.hqplayer folder is blocked since Oct 2015 (assuming you have enabled log every time you have reconfigured HQPlayer since).

 

I conclude that it is not a failure to re-initialize HQP but something else which effectively says "go back to base state". This issue seemingly does not lend itself to an easy diagnosis.

 

That happens if the settings file is corrupted, cannot be read, or some other serious startup failure happens.

 

You could try to go back to completely clean state:

1) Quit HQPlayer

2) Delete the ".hqplayer" folder

3) Clear all HQPlayer state preferences with command "defaults delete com.signalyst.HQPlayer\ Desktop"

4) Start HQPlayer

5) Start from fresh empty configuration, or attempt to import your settings backup

[Miska]

I suppose an alternative might be to develop a user database where people could catalog their machine/set-up and then say what it can comfortably do (e.g., polysinc, PCM 24/192 to DSD256, for instance).

 

I know recently when I grabbed a machine just for doing HQ Player I just guessed...and I'm not sure I made the best choice for the money. For instance I choose a machine with really good multi-core speed because I saw a big improvement when I went form a quad to an 8-core mac with about the same clock-speed...but then when I went to a 16-core machine it didn't really do any better...maybe better to have gone with a quad-core machine with fast clock-speed. These are the types of questions I think a lot of people might be struggling with.

 

This is a really complex question, because there are so many variables, and I add new optimizations over time and things like CUDA change the overall structure significantly. In the end, to say X can do Y, I would need to buy X and test how it performs Y in practice. I have some rough hunch though, but there are still many variables, and really hard to say how it compares to Z.

 

If you don't have CUDA, in many cases at the moment, optimal number of cores is roughly N*2+2 where "N" is number of audio channels and then pick as fast clock speed, memory bus bandwidth and large cache as possible. If you have CUDA, you can do with N+2 cores and maybe get higher clock speed. Since there are not many 6-core CPUs, for stereo case you may need to go with either 4 or 8 cores; so if you use Roon, go for 8 cores, if not you may get quite a bit more clock speed at quad core (i7-6700K runs at 4 GHz base). With something like i7-5960X or Xeon E5v3 you get twice as wide RAM bus though, doubling the RAM access bandwidth plus large caches.

 

Where the bottleneck is largely depends on the particular HQPlayer settings.

 

This is probably pretty good price/performance ratio in addition to i7-6700K:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1650 v3 (15M Cache, 3.50 GHz) Specifications

 

Or fast dual-socket options (but it's not cheap anymore by any means):

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2637 v3 (15M Cache, 3.50 GHz) Specifications

 

For Mac users, Pro is also available as 6-core.

 

16-core machine is probably good option for example with exaSound e28. But I'll probably add more parallelism to the code over time, already did it for CUDA so I can try to scale it also to multi-core CPUs with lot of cores. Especially since there are rumors that AMD is coming up with some 32-core CPU.

 

All this assumes you don't use matrix processing, digital room correction or such, where higher number of cores help more.

[Dandaman]

Strange, seems like something is preventing HQPlayer from writing to the ~/.hqplayer folder where the settings and log is kept...

 

 

 

Everything is logged. This sounds like that for what ever reason, writing to ~/.hqplayer folder is blocked since Oct 2015 (assuming you have enabled log every time you have reconfigured HQPlayer since).

 

 

 

That happens if the settings file is corrupted, cannot be read, or some other serious startup failure happens.

 

You could try to go back to completely clean state:

1) Quit HQPlayer

2) Delete the ".hqplayer" folder

3) Clear all HQPlayer state preferences with command "defaults delete com.signalyst.HQPlayer\ Desktop"

4) Start HQPlayer

5) Start from fresh empty configuration, or attempt to import your settings backup

 

OK - I've done steps 1-4 but I can't locate my license key. The URL to download my key has expired too. Can you assist w/ key?

[Miska]

OK - I've done steps 1-4 but I can't locate my license key. The URL to download my key has expired too. Can you assist w/ key?

 

Just drop me email support at signalyst dot com.

[Dandaman]

OK - I've done steps 1-4 but I can't locate my license key. The URL to download my key has expired too. Can you assist w/ key?

 

Nevermind, Miska, I found the key. AND after completing steps 1-5 you listed, it appears the problem may be solved. I've tried the two scenarios which always caused trouble before, and this time there was no forgetting my settings and my library came back as expected. I'll pay attention to see if the trouble returns, but as of the moment I'm good. Thanks!

[freesteve]

I do so enjoy this wonderful software ....

[Embz72]

I've just moved over to Linux from MAC. Just curious to see if anyone knows the answer as to why the performance of HQP varies depending on the distro.

 

I have a i3-4360 processor, and using Ubuntu 14, I couldn't even use the poly-sinc2 filters for DSD.

 

I tried Ubuntu Mate and the poly-sinc2 filters for DSD would work, but for about 1 min and then the CPU% goes to 100% and the sounds starts to stutter.

 

I tried Debian and all the filters work for DSD including poly-sinc.

[zorntel]

This is a really complex question, because there are so many variables, and I add new optimizations over time and things like CUDA change the overall structure significantly. In the end, to say X can do Y, I would need to buy X and test how it performs Y in practice. I have some rough hunch though, but there are still many variables, and really hard to say how it compares to Z.

 

If you don't have CUDA, in many cases at the moment, optimal number of cores is roughly N*2+2 where "N" is number of audio channels and then pick as fast clock speed, memory bus bandwidth and large cache as possible. If you have CUDA, you can do with N+2 cores and maybe get higher clock speed. Since there are not many 6-core CPUs, for stereo case you may need to go with either 4 or 8 cores; so if you use Roon, go for 8 cores, if not you may get quite a bit more clock speed at quad core (i7-6700K runs at 4 GHz base). With something like i7-5960X or Xeon E5v3 you get twice as wide RAM bus though, doubling the RAM access bandwidth plus large caches.

 

Where the bottleneck is largely depends on the particular HQPlayer settings.

 

This is probably pretty good price/performance ratio in addition to i7-6700K:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1650 v3 (15M Cache, 3.50 GHz) Specifications

 

Or fast dual-socket options (but it's not cheap anymore by any means):

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2637 v3 (15M Cache, 3.50 GHz) Specifications

 

For Mac users, Pro is also available as 6-core.

 

16-core machine is probably good option for example with exaSound e28. But I'll probably add more parallelism to the code over time, already did it for CUDA so I can try to scale it also to multi-core CPUs with lot of cores. Especially since there are rumors that AMD is coming up with some 32-core CPU.

 

All this assumes you don't use matrix processing, digital room correction or such, where higher number of cores help more.

 

This is very helpful Jussi. My Intel Xeon Processor E5-2670 (20M Cache, 2.6Ghz) 16 core with 64gB RAM and a MSI Geoforce GTX 970 was about $1500 US (refurbed dell with new MSI card). Running Windows 10 it is doing poly-sinc easily for DSD256 (including upsampling DSD128 files). It handles DSD512 with poly-sinc-2s (including DSD256 files). The CUDA card does make it all possible, however. Additional support for more cores might get it all the way to poly-sinc with DSD512...as the second 8 cores are pretty under utilized. Might also make the CUDA card less important. At this point it doesn't seem more processing power is really needed.

 

Robert