Popular Post Geoffrey Armstrong Posted December 21, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted December 21, 2018 I think it makes sense to have a separate thread on the new HQPlayer Pro. For those who haven't been following the posts on the HQPlayer thread, it allows you to record the results of using any of HQPlayer's up-sampling filters, ditherers/modulators for up-sampling/conversion between all supported formats. So a redbook 16bit/44.1 khz file can be converted to DSD at the highest sample rate supported by your DAC. In my case DSD512 with the most demanding filter and modulator combination. The result can then be played back on your player of choice as a native DSD file. I use HQPlayer Desktop for playback, with the direct DSD option checked. It is aimed at the pro market as part of the post-production/mastering process for creating final output files for distribution. In this scenario I imagine it will be more commonly used in the opposite direction of downsampling, say a DSD source file to a smaller PCM file for CD production use on streaming services. For the semi-pro/amateur users who want to up-sample convert from PCM to DSD there are a number of interesting implications. Going all the way from a PCM source file to 48x512 using poly-sinc-xtr with ASDM7, as I did yesterday is quite an extreme use. A 3 minute or so track ended up as at least a 1GB DSF file. The results of the one minute result I was able to listen to was tantalising. It meant I could use my Mac Pro 2013 model running Win 10 to play this 48X512 poly-sinc-xtr produced file through my T+A DAC 8 DSD, where the Mac pro can handle a max of DSD128 with real time up-sampling. If Chris and others here agree, I believe discussion of HQPlayer Pro would be better served by this separate thread and it would be a good idea to move existing posts from the HQPlayer thread to here. Geoff 4est, louisxiawei, Jud and 3 others 2 4 Owner of: Sound Galleries, High-End Audio Dealer, Monaco Link to comment
gdpr Posted December 25, 2018 Share Posted December 25, 2018 Hi Geoff I am also playing with the new HQPlayer Pro to upsample, in order to help me test the capabilities/limitations of the T+A 8DSD Dac , and especially the behaviour of the Amanero USB module with native Linux driver. I am running into a small challenge - tracks upsampled to DSD512 (x 44) are not imported in Roon. Neither is metadata, edited by dbPoweramp, visible after saving in dbPoweramp. In JRiver however, all metadata is there, and also the track can be played (at least when converting to PCM - as I am just checking out on my 'work'PC. Everything works fine with DSD256 upsampled tracks. Any similar experience at your side? Any advice is more than welcome Dirk Link to comment
Geoffrey Armstrong Posted December 25, 2018 Author Share Posted December 25, 2018 Hi Dirk, I didn't get that far before leaving for London and Christmas with my family. I just converted one file to DSD512 and played back the result in HQPlayer Desktop, without using roon. Will experiment a lot more with this when I get back and add further comments here. Geoff Owner of: Sound Galleries, High-End Audio Dealer, Monaco Link to comment
Miska Posted December 25, 2018 Share Posted December 25, 2018 Just as a note regarding Pro and metadata. For sources that contain ID3v2 metadata to destinations that can also contain ID3v2 metadata, the bare ID3v2 data is copied through. In practice, this means that from anything else than FLAC to anything else than FLAC, ID3v2 goes through. FLAC metadata (Vorbis comments) handling is still incomplete and needs to be translated between Vorbis comments and ID3v2 which is not very straightforward because each have their own concepts. For example if you convert from AIFF to DSF, you can have all ID3v2 info copied as-is to the DSF. HQPlayer supports ID3v2 also for WAV and DSDIFF, although these are not standard. But I believe also JRiver does the same. Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
gdpr Posted December 25, 2018 Share Posted December 25, 2018 Hi Jussi My question was not about automatic transfer of metadata. For a track upsampled to DSD512, I see a message that the file is corrupt or the file format not supported. On my Windows10 pc, using dbPoweramp, I can enter metadata but they are not visible after saving. only in Jriver my manual edits are visible, and is the track playable. I can copy the file onto my Roon music hard disk (Linux based music server), but the file is not recognised, and not imported. so I cannot play it. All works perfect on either machine upsampling to DSD256 Dirk Link to comment
bmoura Posted December 26, 2018 Share Posted December 26, 2018 According to a post on the Gear Slutz forum, Tom Caulfield says that HQ Player Pro 4 offers true DSD channel mixing and level change capabilities that would be very interesting to those in the pro world doing DSD recording. Quote Signalyst has announced the beta of their Pro version of HQ Player, which now includes true DSD channel mixing and level changing. To my knowledge, this is the first true DSD mixing and level change capability since the original Sonoma, SADiE, and Genex mixers of 15+ years ago. I've used it extensively in file prep for NativeDSD.com in creating all the deliverable DSD bitrates from a raw pure (only edited) DSD edited master, but now can use its mixer function for my own 5.0 channel ITU surround DSD recordings, where spot mics would be helpful in concertos. I'm so delighted to see Signalyst productize their already proven player software so that it outputted into a file structure, and included channel mixing. I've been using a customized channel level change and DSD bitrate conversion only version of this for several years, and have been very pleased. The addition of channel mixing now allows minimalist mic, DSD purest, recording engineers and producers the ability to produce DSD projects end to end. -- Tom Caulfield 1 1 https://www.gearslutz.com/board/showpost.php?p=13697356&postcount=1&s=788dd2584e7a465a93caf3e2d7255b52 https://www.signalyst.com/professional.html Solstice380 1 Link to comment
gdpr Posted December 26, 2018 Share Posted December 26, 2018 15 hours ago, ddetaey said: Hi Jussi My question was not about automatic transfer of metadata. For a track upsampled to DSD512, I see a message that the file is corrupt or the file format not supported. On my Windows10 pc, using dbPoweramp, I can enter metadata but they are not visible after saving. only in Jriver my manual edits are visible, and is the track playable. I can copy the file onto my Roon music hard disk (Linux based music server), but the file is not recognised, and not imported. so I cannot play it. All works perfect on either machine upsampling to DSD256 Dirk UPDATE I have tested with XISRC – SAMPLE RATE CONVERTER of Xivero. Same problems/errors, so nothing to do with HQPlayer Pro. Apparently there are one or more issues with DSF files upsampled to DSD512, file size?, .... Any idea is welcome Dirk Link to comment
Miska Posted December 26, 2018 Share Posted December 26, 2018 10 hours ago, ddetaey said: I have tested with XISRC – SAMPLE RATE CONVERTER of Xivero. Same problems/errors, so nothing to do with HQPlayer Pro. Apparently there are one or more issues with DSF files upsampled to DSD512, file size?, .... Some limitation of Roon maybe? I'm not sure how much they've done testing with DSD512 content which is quite rare. DSF in itself doesn't have practical size limits. But observing difference between file sizes crossing 2 or 4 GB boundary may indicate potential problems. Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
joelha Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 Please forgive me if this question has already been answered or if the answer is easily found outside this forum, but what will this software cost and when will it be available for purchase? Joel Link to comment
simonklp Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 2 hours ago, joelha said: Please forgive me if this question has already been answered or if the answer is easily found outside this forum, but what will this software cost and when will it be available for purchase? Joel Hi Joel, although I remember I had read the answer somewhere else, it still took me some time to find out the right thread. The simple answer is to send an email to @Miska. For details, please refer to the thread below. Cheers. https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/19715-hq-player/?do=findComment&comment=908065 Link to comment
joelha Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 Thanks for taking the time to try to help me out, simonkip. Joel Link to comment
simonklp Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 7 hours ago, joelha said: Thanks for taking the time to try to help me out, simonkip. Joel Hello Joel, not at all. You are welcome. Cheers. Link to comment
Tannoymike Posted December 31, 2018 Share Posted December 31, 2018 I have just installed HQPlayer Pro Beta just to see if I like it better than HQPlayer which suffered from high CPU usage on my system. Installation went fine no problems but when I try to set it up with the network box selected my SOTM 200 does not appear in the box for the device. Any ideas? or is the software not suitable for the SOTM. Link to comment
Geoffrey Armstrong Posted January 2, 2019 Author Share Posted January 2, 2019 Happy New Year everyone! The reason I started this thread on HQPlayer Pro is that I'm hoping we can use this to discuss the implications of offline up-sampling with HQPlayer's features for both true "pro" use and (keen) amateur use as an offline up-sampler. Some of these implications are applicable to other offline up-samplers as well. When considering how best to use these tools, the main question I've asked myself is… Do I really want to go to the time and expense of creating new permanent versions of some or all of the music I own with offline up-sampling, or do I just want to up-sample on an ad-hoc, temporary basis one, or a few albums at a time for each listening session? I'm leaning towards the latter approach for the following reason… Whatever offline up-sampling method I use, something better may come along in the near future. Do I really want to offline up-sample my complete music library or size-able chunks of it, when I might want to repeat the effort if something better comes along. For example, supposing Jussi comes up with new and, possibly better up-sampling filters/modulators in the future (not unlikely given his track record) would I really want to go through the whole process again? All I've upsampled so far is one track at just over 3 minutes to the most extreme level of DSD512 x 48 using poly-sinc-xtr + ASDM7. This yielded a file of just of 1gb and took approx 10 mins on my Mac Pro (2013) running Win 10 pro. A full album might end up at about 24gigs and take, perhaps 4 hours. Is it worth it? Based on what I heard, yes definitely! I used the first track from Anna Netrebko's Souvenirs album. The music was just "in the room" and I could hear things she was doing with her voice that I hadn't heard before. In a sense she seemed "less perfect, more human". There seems to be greater variety which might be glossed over at lower sample rates. I've heard this at DSD256 in real-time with HQPlayer Desktop; but this is the first time I've been able to hear it through my T+A DAC 8 DSD at the maximum DSD512 as that would be too demanding for any of the machines I have in house. So, I've decided my approach with HQPlayer Pro is going to be to batch up-sample just a few albums over-night, if possible, in preparation for a special treat of a listening session the next day. In a way that brings me back to the kind of discipline required for playing back vinyl and away from the huge choice of music at our fingertips with the streaming services and large local libraries. Of course that convenience is still there; but I will have decided to set aside the time to listen to those few albums at their best. The remaining question for me is, will I be able to bear to trash the resulting files after listening, or will I end up using this approach to build up a select library of DSD512 poly-sinc-xtr/ASDM7 up-sampled/converted albums. It'll be very interesting to hear from others on how they plan to use or are already using this tool. Owner of: Sound Galleries, High-End Audio Dealer, Monaco Link to comment
lucretius Posted January 2, 2019 Share Posted January 2, 2019 I too am having a problem with metadata, when converting a flac file (44.1k) to DSF file (DSD128). Also, loading one file at a time is tedious. I would like to load a library of "masters" automatically. mQa is dead! Link to comment
Miska Posted January 2, 2019 Share Posted January 2, 2019 4 hours ago, lucretius said: I too am having a problem with metadata, when converting a flac file (44.1k) to DSF file (DSD128). FLAC contains metadata in different format than other files (Vorbis comments vs ID3v2) and the (never perfect) translation between two different metadata formats is still missing. 4 hours ago, lucretius said: Also, loading one file at a time is tedious. I would like to load a library of "masters" automatically. Intention is to load album at a time. So you select source folder (album) and destination folder where you want that album to go. You can also load as much as you want same way as with HQPlayer Desktop by using drag-and-drop to the HQPlayer window, but then the result is not necessarily gapless anymore (the result may be a bit undeterministic). Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
Geoffrey Armstrong Posted January 3, 2019 Author Share Posted January 3, 2019 Quote You can also load as much as you want same way as with HQPlayer Desktop by using drag-and-drop to the HQPlayer window, but then the result is not necessarily gapless anymore (the result may be a bit undeterministic). Just curious as to why this should be the case. If you add an album folder as the source and produce all your output files from that, why could the result be different than dragging and dropping all the individual tracks from that album onto HQPlayer Pro's playlist? (As far as the "gapless" aspect is concerned). Owner of: Sound Galleries, High-End Audio Dealer, Monaco Link to comment
lucretius Posted January 3, 2019 Share Posted January 3, 2019 On 1/2/2019 at 4:55 PM, Miska said: FLAC contains metadata in different format than other files (Vorbis comments vs ID3v2) and the (never perfect) translation between two different metadata formats is still missing. OK. Thanks. On 1/2/2019 at 4:55 PM, Miska said: Intention is to load album at a time. So you select source folder (album) and destination folder where you want that album to go. You can also load as much as you want same way as with HQPlayer Desktop by using drag-and-drop to the HQPlayer window, but then the result is not necessarily gapless anymore (the result may be a bit undeterministic). I assume that the intention to load only one album/folder at a time is related to outputting files to only one folder at a time. It would be nice to be able to convert an entire folder structure (e.g. Masters\Artist\Album) to a similar folder structure (e.g. Converted\Artist\Album). Failing that, it would be nice to not have to keep changing the input folder even if one needs to change the output folder. I could see the possibility of HQPlayer Pro incorporating all the functionality that is currently available in HQPlayer, so that one would not need two pieces of software (i.e. one player and one file converter). Limiting the functionality of HQPlayer Pro to file conversion, then any chance of a VST2 and VST3 plugin? Thanks. mQa is dead! Link to comment
Miska Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 8 hours ago, lucretius said: I assume that the intention to load only one album/folder at a time is related to outputting files to only one folder at a time. It would be nice to be able to convert an entire folder structure (e.g. Masters\Artist\Album) to a similar folder structure (e.g. Converted\Artist\Album). Failing that, it would be nice to not have to keep changing the input folder even if one needs to change the output folder. Maybe at some point, but not initially. I would assume most recording studios will produce one album at a time. You can sort of do that already with drag-and-drop, but the result may be a bit unpredictable. 8 hours ago, lucretius said: I could see the possibility of HQPlayer Pro incorporating all the functionality that is currently available in HQPlayer, so that one would not need two pieces of software (i.e. one player and one file converter). These will likely diverge more and more over time, so there is no intention to try keeping the same functionality. Target use cases are so different (record label/studio production vs home listening). 8 hours ago, lucretius said: Limiting the functionality of HQPlayer Pro to file conversion, then any chance of a VST2 and VST3 plugin? No, because VST doesn't support DSD. And many VST plugins are even limited in what PCM sample rates they can process. For example 768k may not be supported. lucretius 1 Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
Miska Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 15 hours ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said: If you add an album folder as the source and produce all your output files from that, why could the result be different than dragging and dropping all the individual tracks from that album onto HQPlayer Pro's playlist? (As far as the "gapless" aspect is concerned). For unrelated DSD tracks, just like in HQPlayer Desktop / Embedded, pop/click prevention is performed. Unrelated tracks may also be in different format, like sample rate, etc. HQPlayer assumes that individual tracks don't necessarily belong together or that they are not necessarily in the original order. Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
Geoffrey Armstrong Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 Quote HQPlayer assumes that individual tracks don't necessarily belong together or that they are not necessarily in the original order. Wouldn't it be possible to check the "Album" meta-data tag? If it is present and all the tracks have the same value for that tag, I think it would be safe to assume they all belong to the same album and are in the correct order. Owner of: Sound Galleries, High-End Audio Dealer, Monaco Link to comment
Miska Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 1 hour ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said: Wouldn't it be possible to check the "Album" meta-data tag? If it is present and all the tracks have the same value for that tag, I think it would be safe to assume they all belong to the same album and are in the correct order. I don't want to rely on existence of metadata, especially since commonly sources are WAV and DFF. (Pyramix for example outputs these, which would be one typical source) Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
lucretius Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 8 hours ago, Miska said: 16 hours ago, lucretius said: Limiting the functionality of HQPlayer Pro to file conversion, then any chance of a VST2 and VST3 plugin? No, because VST doesn't support DSD. And many VST plugins are even limited in what PCM sample rates they can process. For example 768k may not be supported. Good point! mQa is dead! Link to comment
copy_of_a Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 @Miska yesterday I've tried to downsample (source and target PCM) with HQPpro (Trial). There was no sample rate option to downsample... only options to upsample. Is HQPpro only able to downsample or am I missing something? thanks! ____________________________________________________ Mac Mini, HQPlayer | iFi Zenstream | Intona 7055-B | Singxer SDA-6 pro | Vincent SV237 | Buchardt S400 | SPL Phonitor One | Beyer DT1990pro | Avantone Planar II Desktop: Audirvana Origin | Intona 7054 | SMSL M500MKII | NAD C 316BEE | Aperion Novus B5 Bookshelf | Lehmann Rhinelander | Beyer DT700proX Link to comment
Miska Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 35 minutes ago, copy_of_a said: @Miska yesterday I've tried to downsample (source and target PCM) with HQPpro (Trial). There was no sample rate option to downsample... only options to upsample. Is HQPpro only able to downsample or am I missing something? thanks! What rate did you want for output? Is it not listed on the rate drop-list in main window, even when you select "PCM N/O" output mode? Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now