Best player software for compact disc?

[Keith_W]

I just am. I have over 4000 CD's, and I have not finished ripping them yet. I will still be playing CD's for some time to come. Until that time comes, I need software for playing CD's.

 

I will be using the optical drive on my PC. It is not the world's best transport (certainly not in the same class as my CD player) but I believe that software exists to read the entire disc to memory and play from there. What would you recommend?

[wgscott]

I would recommend ripping the CD if you go to the trouble of sticking it into the drive.

 

Usually CD drives on computers make a lot of physical noise, and generally aren't particularly pleasant to control. But to answer your question, you can just use the media player provided with the operating system to do this. iTunes can do it.

[Keith_W]

Sorry, I should be more clear. I forgot to mention that I am on a Windows 10 PC.

 

I do not wish to rip the CD, I will do it separately. When I am listening to music, I would like to just sit back and listen to music. And not worry about tagging the CD, finding artwork, putting it in the correct folder, and so on. All whilst using a tiny computer screen (7" monitor attached to my music PC) and a tiny wireless keyboard with a touchpad.

 

All I want is software that will ensure bit perfect playback from the optical drive. Yes, I know that the OS can do it. But it only reads the disc once and interpolates any missing data. Is there something like Exact Audio Copy but for playback?

[zackthedog]

Foobar2000. You can even upsample, use DSP plugins, whatever. You can also choose Wasapi, Kernel Streaming or ASIO to your DAC.

[Miska]

HQPlayer can play CDs straight off the disc

[audiventory]

I would recommend ripping the CD if you go to the trouble of sticking it into the drive.

 

Usually CD drives on computers make a lot of physical noise, and generally aren't particularly pleasant to control. But to answer your question, you can just use the media player provided with the operating system to do this. iTunes can do it.

 

Psysical noise is most strong moment there.

 

Safe pre-ripping can help for some CDs for detecting/correcting of errors. But there are not too many damaged CDs.

 

I suppose, same issues for "usual" hardware player. Possibly computer's CD-drive even more safe than the CD-player's one.

[Norton]

Many of the playback packages favoured on this forum will play straight from CD. Certainly I've done so with both HQP (recommended, especially if you also want to transcode for a DSD DAC ) and JRiver. I'm fairly sure that MPD can do so too.

 

If you specifically want memory playback then try wtfplay. I've not tried it yet with a CD drive but I can't see why it wouldn't work. It's free so just experiment. As it loads the whole of each track into RAM before playback, might be rather slow from CD rather than ripped file from SSD?

[One and a half]

Quite a few years ago, Axialis software produced a neat car CD player lookalike. It's still available. It may need some work since it was designed for Win98, but Win10 has compatibility built in, usually changing the shortcut which might work. Free to trial. The disc is looked up on the net, and displays track names, album, artist etc.