HQ Player

[Miska]

Do we need to install ASIO for OSX in order to get ASIO support?? or we need special drivers??

 

Same way as on Windows, you need special drivers provided by the DAC manufacturer. At the moment exaSound is the only one providing such.

 

There still seems to be some problem with the ASIO driver loading/initialization, so most likely it doesn't work yet on HQPlayer. I need to get my hands on exaSound DAC to test & fix it...

[Miska]

The current driver and firmware from the manufacturer are installed.

 

I can upsample beyond 192k in Foobar2000.

 

HQP set to 384000/11289600, but when I load a file, I can't go above 192000/3072000.

 

What am I missing?

 

There are two bugs in the current Thesycon driver shipped by iFi and many others:

1) Rates higher than 192k are not properly supported through WASAPI

2) 48k-base rates (3.1/6.1/12.3 MHz) DSD rates are not supported through ASIO

 

Your solution is to use ASIO driver with iDSD Nano, which is in any case recommended. And required for DSD256 support anyway. Just launch HQPlayer using the "HQPlayer Desktop 3 ASIO" shortcut.

[Miska]

I've only one issue (....apart from complex setting.....): I converted some .m4a files to .aiff with XLD since HQPlayer did not added those format to its library. Now I can get them loaded into the library but they are randomly listed under different artists (of whom I don't even own one single cd.....), for example Antonio Forcione & Sabina Sciubba under Stevie Wonder (?!?!), Nils Landgren under Cat Stevens (!?!?!?).... Is anyone experiencing the same weird issue?

 

Sounds like the metadata got somehow mixed up during the conversion...

 

If you have a Windows machine available for checking out the metadata, you could try Mp3Tag to see what is going on with the metadata (I generally recommend this tool for metadata editing, since it also supports DSF files these days). If the metadata is correct, then there's something strange happening inside HQPlayer that I'm not yet aware of.

[Miska]

One question I forgot to you ask you (in yesterday's PM consolidating my remaining questions) is with regards to HQP's ignoring of the Complilations folder when importing all the Artists>Albums from an iTunes Media>Music folder.

There is nothing special whatsoever about the organization or metadata of the Albums or Tracks contained in the Compilations folder--except for the flag in each track marking them as "part of a compilation." In other words: in iTunes Music folder, Compilations is the Artist folder, and the directories inside it are Albums just as for other "artists" and inside those Albums folders are the individual tracks (see screenshot below).

 

It shouldn't be ignored, but tracks will end up under each respective artist name and thus end up scattered around. Solution is to import the compilations folder separately using "Structure only" feature.

 

You can find the misplaced compilation directories by sorting the library manager view by folder name, you can then multi-select and remove those from the library and add again using the "Structure only". Those should then appear under artist name "Compilations".

 

P.S. Kernel used by Debian Jessie does include Broadcom "tg3" Ethernet drivers for modern Macs even though it is earlier than 3.5 kernel previously reported as required. But do be sure to tell anyone here trying to use a Mac as NAA to forget about Debian Wheezy--that's a non-starter!

 

Jessie has kernel 3.14 which is latest "LTS" (long term stable/support) kernel maintained for two years (Aug 2016). Note that the version numbers are not decimal, but each number separated by dot is considered as a separate number. HQPlayer also uses same versioning system: [major].[minor].[patchlevel]

 

Currently latest version is 3.16, see:

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/

[Miska]

Even accepting the idea that only one album can be added to the Transport window (by double-clicking), and that clicking another takes the first away, why can't we, after activating Playlist Transport, at least be able to add more than just one track at a time?

 

You can do it in the fullscreen/touch mode... There you have two completely different views for managing either album mode or playlist mode.

 

For the desktop mode I need to figure out how to do it without breaking standard control UI paradigms on any of the three platforms. The fullscreen/touch mode doesn't have such limitations because it has it's own UI paradigms anyway.

 

When in Playlist Transport mode, one can not double-click an album, so building a playlist of a few new albums for the evening would require that individual tracks (dozens) be double-clicked on. Even if we can't have drag-and-drop, can we at least get command-click or shift-click ability to add albums/tracks to playlist from upper library window?

 

I will look into this. Meanwhile you can drag-and-drop from iTunes or Finder if you'd like to do things different way... (note, you can drop a folder from Finder to add all content found under the folder)

 

And I am sorry, but the Album and Artist "filter" search fields at top are almost useless since one has to type the name exactly and completely. Typing just Andrew will not bring up Andrew Bird, and in Album filter typing Satchmo will not bring up "Satchmo Plays King Oliver (SACD)".

 

No, it is actually really flexible. you can type "andrew*" and it'll show all artists that begin with Andrew. Or alternatively you can use regular expressions and type "#^andrew.*" for the same result. Or you could type "#^\d.*" to find all artists who's name begins with a number.

 

Just prefix regular expression with '#' character.

 

Since importing playlists from iTunes is almost possible (I believe you are making the fix for Mac versions since Apple recently corrupted their Playlist Export files), I could happily live just with HQP's Transport window by opening exported iTunes playlists--though support of drag-and-drop from iTunes into transport window would be a HUGE improvement (A+ has supported that from the beginning--I think it is pretty basic Apple stuff).

 

Yes, I have iTunes-created playlists loading already in my current development version. Drag-and-drop from iTunes and Finder has been working fine as long as Mac version has been there?

 

However, PLEASE add Album Name and Track Number columns to the Transport window (the info is right there in the metadata), AND the ability to sort the view of the Transport window by clicking on the column header.

 

It is always explicitly in the track order, in case of playlists is is exactly in order the items are on the playlist and cannot be reordered (note, you have more flexibility again in touch/fs mode).

 

Extra columns are not there due to lack of space. The desktop GUI has been designed to fit into 800x600 resolution and that limits amount columns, because horizontally scrolled views are annoying and the horizontal scrollbar take space in the window... There are no other reasons not to include those columns.

 

Main usage model is still album mode (like changing CD's in a CD player or vinyls in LP player) and there the album information is not relevant because it can be seen from the above view. And anyway from the status information view when a song is playing.

[Miska]

Now I remember doing that (dragging tracks from iTunes window) last week, but I think this morning I must not have had Transport Playlist activated when I tried it. Doing that is probably the easiest way for me to build spontaneous playlists or to bring existing ones into the transport window by highlighting all tracks in an iTunes playlist and dragging them over. I am sure to use HQP mostly this way.

 

You don't need to do anything in HQPlayer before dropping content, it will automatically switch over to playlist mode. Every time content is dropped, it is appended to the already existing playlist. Any unsupported files are just ignored. So for example if you drop bunch of m4a files nothing happens.

 

Okay. But does anybody still have displays/devices that are only 800x600? Perhaps at least the option of displaying Album name would be welcome by many.

 

Not many I think, at the beginning it was useful for those touch TFT's that you can have on PC front panel, but now there's the fullscreen mode that is more suitable for the purpose. I guess 1024x768 is safe as lowest supported resolution these days. I'll see what I can fit on that size...

[Miska]

As I asked you before, I will be waiting for you to add multi-selection to library in desktop mode so I can playback continuosly those 2 o3 CDs classical albums.

 

I will look into that. But absolutely best way is to move those multi-CD albums into one directory and rename the files so that track numbering continues correctly. This way you can utilize the album playback mode.

[Miska]

If a new column cannot be added easily, even a tooltip (like for the top icons) with the path of each song would help. Perhaps some songs may have a very long path though...

 

It is fairly easy to add, I just need to make the window wider so that it can actually fit there...

[Miska]

That really will be nice to have because, even if I adopt Miska's somewhat old fashioned analog paradigm of listening to one album at a time... I have 4,000 physical LPs, and when I pick out what to listen to, I pick a handful. I don't go back to my shelves after each record!

 

But you still need to even turn the side...

You can now filter the list to what you are going to listen and then change the album when you need.

 

I know Miska would like us to use the full screen/touchscreen interface more, but in some ways I am a bit old fashion myself! (and I don't often want to give up my entire display to a player; lots of empty space on my 27" monitor--a bit wasteful)

 

Some day you could try running HQPlayer on Surface Pro 3 in touch mode playing from NAS to a NAA - all wirelessly.

[Miska]

Miska, Surface Pro 3 looks great but is also a bit expensive, what would be the minimal configuration level to run HQPlayer smoothly??

 

It depends a lot on what you'd like to do in terms of DSP and number of channels, so it is hard to give generic guidelines.

 

I also expect there to be more similar products with lower prices, especially when the new Broadwell series of CPUs take off.

[Miska]

Does HQPlayer for OSX plays from memory??? or all upsampling and format conversion is handled at real time.

 

Depends how one defines it...

[Miska]

Any chance for support of cue sheets and SACD ISO images in the future? I tried out the trial for a while and I do like upsampling to DSD but I all my SACD are iso. I converted to DFF via Sonoma but I don't want to convert all my iso's. Also all my rips of CD's are flac image with cue log and HQ has no cue log support at this time.

 

No plans to support SACD ISO's and I find it very unlikely to ever happen. I'd recommend extracting contents to DSF files that can also host metadata. ted_b here has guide on how to do that. I believe the work can be done as batch process.

 

CUE sheets are requested every now and then, but I don't see a point in having entire album as one flat indexed file (yes, unfortunately CD is like that and at the moment it is the only medium where that's supported). So it is quite low on the priority list. Probably there are tools that can split out the files to normal file-per-track.

 

There are bunch of new DSP features to be implemented first, so the schedule is booked up to 1H/2015.

[Miska]

CUE sheets are used also in the file-per-track case to store album metadata. This way CUE sheets can be used also for audio file formats, which don't support embedded metadata. I have created CUE sheets for almost all albums in my collection. In Foobar2000 I typically drag&drop a CUE sheet to playlist, then all album tracks are inserted. In JRiver I can do the same. My Rockbox-ed iPod, as well as other portable players, use CUE sheets to access album metadata. CUE sheets can be also used to transfer metadata between different audio file formats. So CUE sheets have more uses than only to index a big file-per-(SA)CD image.

 

But why use those instead of ID3v2 tags or Vorbis Comments (FLAC) that can also support embedded album art and such?

 

Sounds like a playlist use, but m3u(8) playlists can also store such simple metadata...

 

Last time I looked, I didn't find a standard for CUE sheets.

 

All devices I've seen support ID3v2 tags and Vorbis Comments for FLAC.

[Miska]

Miska, cover art is not displayed right if other windows content is too long.

 

I will fix this for the next release...

[Miska]

The instructions mention a PCM/SCM Ouput Mode Selection (Chapter 2.14). I cannot find any such switch or setting.

 

In Settings (Preferences on Mac) dialog, select "DoP" as "SDM Pack" method. Now you should have two options in the rightmost drop-list in main window "PCM" and "SDM (DSD)". DSD output option is not shown if there's no method to output DSD. Two drop lists on the right select "what" as output and the two drop lists on the left select "how" to get the output. These selections are logically linked together, so for example filter selection can have impact on available output sampling rates. So you can only select a combination that is technically possible.

 

Settings/Preferences dialog allows you to select default values for these settings.

[Miska]

Modulator: DSD5

 

You could try switching this over to DSD5v2...

[Miska]

Is a 2ghz quad core good enough for the processing back-end for DRC? I plan to experiment with HQPlayer in coming weeks hence the question. I just decided to upgrade my AMD E350N dual core mini-itx that I'm using for the NFS server to a Celeron J1900 baytrail mobo for this reason. I am wondering if I should have waited another few months for the J2900 to be available locally or if this will suffice?

 

It largely depends on kind of filters you would run and the type of content. For PCM source content it is usually not particularly heavy, especially RedBook which is usually majority of content. For DSD content it is heavy and will require quite a bit of computing power...

 

But it is really hard to say whether some CPU is powerful enough. It also depends on RAM speed (and amount of CPU cache)...

 

Once you have tried your use cases on some computer, you can try to establish some estimate on what is enough.

[Miska]

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

 

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)

[Miska]

I'm not a programmer, but I don't see why you need to know the ALAC file format or M4A container format to read audio data from an ALAC file.

 

Because that's the only way to make it cross-platform... Whenever something is specific to a certain OS it immediately get's 1/3 of the priority because I support three platforms simultaneously and prefer to keep feature sets aligned as much as possible.

 

Core Audio can do the conversion for you.

 

Yes, I've looked into that. What is vague is what format I would get if I don't ask anything specifically. I mean I want to get bit-perfect decompression of the content to what ever is the native format and then go on myself from there. I specifically want to avoid any other conversion than decompression.

 

CoreAudio sort of works wrong way around, because it expects me to tell what I want. But I want CoreAudio to tell what was the source format before compression and give me that one.

[Miska]

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.

 

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 (?).

[Miska]

1) The first column of the transport window (well, after the fixed 1,2,3,4 of the list) is headed by "#", which I take to be meant for the track/position number embedded in the file's metadata. Despite my checking to and confirming that my tracks' metadata does have track/position number embedded/reported, your "#" column always shows just blank. Am I doing something wrong or misinterpreting the purpose of that new column?

 

Yes, it's a track number. It has been working fine for me, but practically all my content is either FLAC or DSF. Some more information about the content type and source of the content (ripping tool, etc) could help locating possible bugs...

 

2) While I know it might involve a lot of new programming, is there any way soon to have the ability to click on the column headers of Performer/Artist and Album and have the list resort by those? That would go a long way toward making the transport window function a bit more like a typical media player.

 

It works in the middle library view. But sorting playlist feels a bit awkward, because I have trouble understanding who would want to play something in alphabetical order. And there are some interesting side effects.

 

1) Let's assume you start playing some playlist

2) You add some more content to the playlist while playing

3) You decide to sort the playlist by artist

4) Now artists being earlier in alphabetical order than the currently playing one wouldn't be played because they are ordered before the current playlist playback position

 

I never liked typical media players and that's why I created things in a different way.

 

I know that in the past you have explained your paradigm for your Library versus Transport windows and also encouraged people to use Full Screen Mode (which does not work well at all if you use it with a playlist loaded in the transport window as full screen then shows just a single list and not albums in that case).

 

In full-screen mode, on the left side you always have a full album set and on the right side you have a playlist editor. Both are filtered by the filters entered in desktop mode. In addition the left cover flow view has it's own search functionality. So I don't exactly understand what you mean...

 

It might be interesting for you to do a poll of how people are actually using HQ Player. Perhaps you will be surprised and find out that most are just dragging files in or opening playlists from iTunes and that your tree-oriented Library window and the full screen windows are not being used much. I of course don't know--I can only speak for myself as one fairly new HQP adherent.

 

I would encourage to blank your mind about anything you have previously learned about player GUI logic and take a fresh look how HQPlayer works.

 

It's just like for Windows or Linux user switching to OS X and finding it's GUI logic really awkward. I personally still cannot understand the idiotic logic of detaching active window menu bar to top of the screen instead of keeping it attached to the window where it belongs to... I didn't understand it when it came out in first Macs in 80's and still cannot. For me, good thing is that OS X on command line is pretty much familiar to any long time *nix user.

[Miska]

Where is the logic in an application quiting the moment you close the last window? One may still be browsing or doing something in Photoshop and just because you close the document window does not mean the whole program should unload.

 

No it doesn't happen:

 

Can I make you a deal? Keep the interface exactly like it is but give us the ability to specify our own IP address for what the desktop app should look for the NAA on the network. That would make me (and some others) very happy!

 

This is something I'm certainly looking at. But it's a bit tricky thing to do, otherwise I would have already done it.

 

At the moment when you select a NAA output you select two things at once, the NAA device (not IP because it can change, just a name) and the output device behind it. If this is split out, the entire thing needs to become two-step process where you first enter the IP and then later you would select the output device. I have not yet figured out a way to do it without complicating the GUI...

 

I'm trying very hard to balance the number of settings and flexibility. Lot of settings means lot of possibilities for something to go wrong.

[Miska]

So it seems to me that HQP wants an Internet connection before it will connect to the DAC via the NAA. Maybe Miska can clarify what is happening here.

 

You need a DNS server available on the network... Internet connection as such is not necessary.

[Miska]

Why aren't we using static IP? I'm already using it for my CAPS server running JRMC and my NAS/Vortexbox. Would it help if the NAA were assigned a static IP? I ask because I am about to go down this rabbit hole.

 

Because it's not plug-and-play...

 

I mean nothing prevents from using static IP's with NAA, I have mine configured for static IP. But the IP is not expected to be static. Instead you give the NAA a name (by default, it's "default") and it is found by the name, regardless of which IP it happens to have. But at the moment the network is expected to "full-fledged".

 

It's not all that different from AirPlay or Miracast/WiDi.

 

I don't think there's necessarily any benefit connecting PC and NAA directly, instead of normal switch-based connection. My switch has all kinds of optimizations computers don't usually have, such as low power ethernet. And with some switches you can optimize PSUs by using PoE injectors.

[Miska]

I believe the Max volume should be -3 db and the Min volume set to something like -60 db.

 

Setting max to -3 dB is good way to avoid accidentally hitting limiter. -60 dB is very quiet usually, almost like mute, so if smaller adjustment range is suitable, then bringing up the minimum volume to -40 dB or something makes adjustment with mouse easier because the range is smaller.

 

Another way I use sometimes when preamp or integrated amp is used is to set max 0 and min to -6. Then the recommended -3 dBFS setting is 12 o'clock position of the knob and the steps are large.

 

These values are not used when using SDM from what I understand.

 

Volume control for SDM can be enabled by unchecking the "DirectSDM" in DSDIFF/DSF Settings -dialog. Then also DSD content and PCM-to-SDM has volume control, but by default the direct mode is enabled to keep DSD truly direct from source to DAC.