HQ Player

[Miska]

3 minutes ago, tranfa said:

I'm having an odd behaviour coming to the meters: after the first closing of the system, I can't visualize them anymore...and I don't think I changed much in the settings.

 

Is the dialog missing or the meters just not operational?

 

4 minutes ago, tranfa said:

Also, coming to the conversion, I'm not sure I fully understood the limitations of the evaluation version.

 

There are currently three limitations at the moment, although I may change this in future:

1) Application operates for 30 minutes per run, just like Desktop and Embedded

2) Output files contain max one minute of audio, rest is silence

3) PCM output resolution is limited to 24-bit

 

(3) shouldn't make much difference in practice, because for example FLAC can accept only max 384k and/or 24-bit.

 

[tranfa]

35 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Is the dialog missing or the meters just not operational?

 

 

There are currently three limitations at the moment, although I may change this in future:

1) Application operates for 30 minutes per run, just like Desktop and Embedded

2) Output files contain max one minute of audio, rest is silence

3) PCM output resolution is limited to 24-bit

 

(3) shouldn't make much difference in practice, because for example FLAC can accept only max 384k and/or 24-bit.

 

 

 

The dialog is missing.

 

On conversion, I tried dsd->dsd to different frequencies and to the same frequence but with filters on. The first one did not work but the second one worked, only for a while a now it doesn’t. Not sure if this is intended.

 

[Miska]

7 minutes ago, tranfa said:

The dialog is missing.

 

State of the UI is stored at exit, so windows should reappear in same places and sizes at next startup. If this goes wrong, you can pass "--nostate" command line argument to the binary and it will ignore stored state and fall back to default sizes and positions.

 

9 minutes ago, tranfa said:

On conversion, I tried dsd->dsd to different frequencies and to the same frequence but with filters on. The first one did not work but the second one worked, only for a while a now it doesn’t. Not sure if this is intended.

 

DSD->DSD is always with fixed conversion algorithm, except Direct SDM which gives you just bit-perfect copy. I would need to know all the settings, including DSDIFF/DSF settings to know why it is not working. It is probably better to discuss this over email...

 

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Input doesn't matter in that picture, those are defined by the output. Input device is only used when you enter the input URI as source, such as "audio:default/705600/2". HQPlayer itself can convert anything to anything, but DACs naturally impose limits on what they can accept. Null Output lifts those limitations by exposing output that supports everything.

 

Thanks. I should have spent more time with the manual ?. Was too excited and impatient!

[truemusic1969]

@Miska

I tested it for HQ Pro. Great! Old user of the HQ ,HQ Pro is exactly what I need.How to buy?

 

thank you！

[Miska]

6 minutes ago, truemusic1969 said:

@Miska

I tested it for HQ Pro. Great! How to buy?

 

Some time after New Year I hope to have final release and option also in the web shop for buying it.

 

Meanwhile you can contact me over email.

 

[Bob Stern]

11 hours ago, Bob Stern said:

Ogg PCM is the only option offered by Ladiocast.  No FLAC, AIFF or WAV.

 

11 hours ago, Miska said:

The notice on top of the spec is not very promising:

https://wiki.xiph.org/OggPCM

 

Thanks for looking into this.  My impression is that the spec is unambiguous with respect to stereo streams, and the disclaimers apply mostly to the mapping of speakers for surround sound.  Nevertheless, I understand why you would not want to spend time supporting a format no one uses.

 

I asked the Ladiocast developer to consider adding Ogg FLAC encoding.  Another user made the same request a few months ago, but I don’t expect it to happen.  (I also wasted a lot of time trying to build Liquidsoap but ran into conflicting dependencies, and its Core Audio support is not documented.)  So I'm giving up on FLAC streaming.

 

Can I download the complete usage instructions for Embedded without the installer so I can familiarize myself with it before attempting to create a Linux virtual machine?

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

Do you have Roon?

 

Just wondering if you could use its Internet Radio feature to create a “station” based on the url from your server. Then the format wouldn’t be a problem.

 

I’ve had some success with this with both Spotify and Apple Music, getting Roon to play them thru HQPlayer.

 

That was using “Nicecaste”, unfortunately no longer supported on Mac

[Miska]

18 minutes ago, Bob Stern said:

Can I download the complete usage instructions for Embedded without the installer so I can familiarize myself with it before attempting to create a Linux virtual machine?

 

It is included in the package, but if you send me email I can send the readme and one example config over email.

 

Easiest is to use my bootable image which is custom Linux OS + HQPlayer Embedded. You need to enable EFI boot for it to work. Image is raw disk image that can be sometime used directly with VMs and sometimes you need to convert it first.

 

[Bob Stern]

9 minutes ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said:

Do you have Roon?

 

Just wondering if you could use its Internet Radio feature to create a “station” based on the url from your server. Then the format wouldn’t be a problem.

 

I’ve had some success with this with both Spotify and Apple Music, getting Roon to play them thru HQPlayer.

 

That was using “Nicecast”, unfortunately no longer supported on Mac

 

Thanks for the suggestion.  I don’t have Roon, but I do have Airfoil, Rogue Amoeba's successor to Nicecast.  That's what I intend to use to capture the audio and transmit it in "Air Play" format.  Can HQP Desktop receive the Air Play stream?

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

HQPlayer can’t accept an Airplay stream. So Airfoil won’t be an option.

 

With Nicecaste you would have an input app (Spotify for example) and Nicecaste would create a url, like a Radio station url. In Roon you would then choose to add a new Internet Radio station, paste the URL from Nicecaste and Spotify would then be treated as a “radio” station by Roon and played through HQPlayer.

 

I was hoping the server you mentioned would also allow a radio staion url to be generated, which you could add to Roon in the same way.

 

Or if you can get hold of a copy of Nicecaste, it will still work on older versions of Mac OS (I believe before High Sierra) It’s just not supported.

 

It might be worth you downloading a 14 day trial of Roon to test this.

 

I’ll just add that Nicecaste is/was limited to lossy MP3 streaming.

 

Your OGG/PCM stream from your server should be lossless quality. If you can get it to work in the same way as Nicecaste, I’m interested too ?

[Bob Stern]

17 minutes ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said:

Your OGG/PCM stream from your server should be lossless quality. If you can get it to work in the same way as Nicecaste, I’m interested too

 

Liquidsoap, which I mentioned above, definitely can stream Ogg/FLAC in conjunction with icecast.  You might want to see if you can figure out how to build Liquidsoap on your system and how to configure its input.

 

A year ago I successfully streamed an audio file to HQP Desktop using this command, which might give you a head start:

 

liquidsoap 'output.icecast(%ogg(%flac(compression=5, samplerate=44100, channels=2, bits_per_sample=16)), host="127.0.0.1", port=8000, password="source", mount="liq.ogg", format="audio/ogg", single("path_to_FLAC_ file"))'

 

But I could not figure out how to stream from a Mac audio device.  The documentation refers to Linux ALSA devices and Jack devices.

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

Ok. Thanks for that. I’ll give it a try.

[alec_eiffel]

21 hours ago, Miska said:

 

DSD256, either ASDM5 or ASDM7. Choice of filter is more depending on music and personal preferences. It is nice DAC also in a way that it (IIRC) supports also 48k-base DSD rates.

 

Doing DSD256 for e28's all 8 channels is quite heavy, that's why I got the monster machine for it.  Stereo is not a problem though.

 

If you don't quite have the oomph for DSD256 at 8 channels, you can do PCM at 384k and 32-bit TPDF dithered output as alternative.

 

Thanks !

I'll go for PCM384k then, don't want to invest 2k€+ in a oomph machine. Probably a 500€ i7-8550 based silent PC will do. Performance wise for HQ PLayer Desktop, would you recommend on this platform a WIndows 10 or Mac OS/Hackintosh ?  

 

[kelvinwsy]

If there is a Linux embedded version of HQPlayer Pro - i will like to be a beta tester too. I can test it with various DAC's, NUCs, SOTM SM200 Ultra etc

Thanks Jussi

 

[simonklp]

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 4:41 PM, Miska said:

Embedded is already exactly the way you are asking by having support for realtime audio inputs, but without file output.

 

Hi @Miska, kindly advise where to find the information or procedure about how to connect and use the realtime audio inputs on HQPE. Thanks.

[simonklp]

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:14 AM, Miska said:

 

I don't always list small updates like image rebuilds or such. I also recently rebuilt all networkaudiod packages for Debian.

 

Yes, it is Linux...

 

Noted with thanks.

[ebrandon]

Lately my HQPlayer running on WIndows 10 has been hanging up every few minutes, for a few seconds.  Especially when I'm using Closed-Form.

 

I have an Nvidia GTX 980 graphics card, and have successfully offloaded to CUDA in the past.

 

Now, when I start playing music I see this message, briefly, at the bottom of the window - "hqplayer offload resample=disabled convolution=disabled".  This message also appears in my log file.

 

Does this mean the CUDA offloading isn't working?  Is the likely solution to update my graphics card drivers?

 

Thanks!

 

[ebrandon]

1 hour ago, ebrandon said:

Lately my HQPlayer running on WIndows 10 has been hanging up every few minutes, for a few seconds.  Especially when I'm using Closed-Form.

 

I have an Nvidia GTX 980 graphics card, and have successfully offloaded to CUDA in the past.

 

Now, when I start playing music I see this message, briefly, at the bottom of the window - "hqplayer offload resample=disabled convolution=disabled".  This message also appears in my log file.

 

Does this mean the CUDA offloading isn't working?  Is the likely solution to update my graphics card drivers?

 

Thanks!

 

 

OK - I went ahead and updated my Nvidia drivers.

Now it says "resample=enabled, convolution = disabled"

 

But the 2-3 second long pauses every few minutes were still happening.

 

So I moved some files from my network drive to the PC's local drive and the pauses seem to have gone away.  Are there any settings in HQPlayer, for example to make it download a whole song from a network drive before playing it?

 

[tranfa]

On 12/21/2018 at 10:23 AM, Miska said:

 

State of the UI is stored at exit, so windows should reappear in same places and sizes at next startup. If this goes wrong, you can pass "--nostate" command line argument to the binary and it will ignore stored state and fall back to default sizes and positions.

 

 

DSD->DSD is always with fixed conversion algorithm, except Direct SDM which gives you just bit-perfect copy. I would need to know all the settings, including DSDIFF/DSF settings to know why it is not working. It is probably better to discuss this over email...

 

 

Thank you Jussi, will try to contact you on this once back from a Christmas visit to my family - and especially with my pc in front of me...

[emc_1984]

HQ Player tested on I5-8600T & Windows Server 2016 & NAA - upsample all freq to DSD256 with all types of filters , so if somebody looking for low TDP computer for upsampling , it work.

[MarcinGD]

Hi Miska,

 

I was hoping to save some money on computing power for 48k512. But I see there are some limitations also due to processing power for conversion. I didn't had problem to convert with poly-sinc-xtr-2s it started fast on i5-7200u. For poly-sinc-xtr it needed like 20min just to start the process. I think all depend on the price now and discount for users of consumer version. I would like to go back to T version of i7 processor on my fanless machine.

[Tannoymike]

Previously I used 3.4 HQ Player and the cpu usage was much higher than I was finding when when using JRiver Media player and Foobar, I have just tried HQ Pro 4 Beta and the cpu usage has dropped to around 2% which is similar to that of JRiver. I found this beta version much better on my system during the setup, can't at this stage comment on actual sound quality.

[Racerxnet]

Looking for some help after searching for settings. I just built a new PC and thought I'd try HQplayer to see if there are benefits with sound quality. I can only output PCM to the dac as it's an older TriVista 21. It samples to either 96 or 192k. All rips are .wav from Cds. Is there any way to bypass the internal filters and use just the software filters?  Here are my system specs. 

Ryzen 1700 on Ax370 k3 board.

Ket modded bios.

16 gig ram at 3200.

Win 7 pro.

Foobar .083 or HQplayer. 

Berkeley Alpha USB. 

TriVista 21 DAC. 

Genesis 1.2 speaker system. 

Bryston amps and pre amp. 

Dedicated room and receptacles for all. 

 

Can anyone please give guidance on what filter may work best as a starting point given what I presently have. I only have ripped to .wav from the Cds. Thanks and happy holidays. Mark 

[bogi]

3 hours ago, Racerxnet said:

I can only output PCM to the dac as it's an older TriVista 21. It samples to either 96 or 192k. All rips are .wav from Cds. Is there any way to bypass the internal filters and use just the software filters?

 

To be able to reach 192k sample rate you need to have some UAC2 USB driver available - I don't know if Windows driver from Musical Fidelity exists for that DAC. Win10 currently contains UAC2 driver, but Win7 not.
To be able to reach 96k the UAC1 driver included in Win7 is sufficient.

Then you need

- to setup your Windows audio device to allow exclusive access to the device (fill both checkboxes in Control Panel | Sound | your audio device Properties |  Advanced tab)
- to configure foobar2000 or HQPlayer to use WASAPI access method to your audio device. I suppose ASIO driver is not available for your DAC when it has no USB or I2S input.
foobar2000: File | Preferences | Playback | Output | Device and choose the WASAPI one corresponding to your DAC device
HQPlayer: File | Settings | Backend WASAPI & Device: your DAC device