New OSX Opensource audiophile player : Audirvana

[damien78]

Audirvana is an opensource project for an audiophile player for OSX.

I've started this project for the fun of getting my hands in this domain and try to get more knowledge of the sources of sound quality.

 

You can download it from http://audirvana.googlecode.com

 

Any comments, and contributions are welcome!

 

 

* Native playing of FLAC, libSndFile (WAV, AIFF, ...), ALAC and other quicktime formats (AAC, MP3, ...)

* Direct sound path, directly to the CoreAudio HAL for pure bit perfect sound

* Audio Device exclusive access mode

* HAL I/O using DAC native physical formats "Integer Mode" (instead of CoreAudio 32bit float)

* Automatic sample rate switching

* Up/Oversampling capability

* Plays completely from memory

** Tracks are loaded, decoded and sample rate converted in a memory buffer before being played

** Minimizing CPU and hard drive activity to lessen sources of interference

* Gapless playback by using a double buffering mechanism (playing track and next track)

* Transparent split load for loading tracks of any size

* Background tracks loading/decoding (including sample rate conversion)

* Playlist (m3u & m3u8 formats) load/save

* Handles Apple IR Remote

* Automated updates downloading (using Sparkle)

 

Currently works on 10.6 Intel Macs with any CoreAudio compatible DAC

 

This is still a beta release for this opensource project in active development.

 

Here is a tentative TODO list, and as I have a life outside this project any contribution is welcome:

* Dithering implementation, with tests on 16bit files improvement

* Tracks library with iTunes database access and folders crawling (mainly for FLAC)

* Remote control (through UPnP control point?)

* And bug fixes...

 

[CG]

Very nice work!

 

[Sasaki]

Audirvana sounded fantastic! Fairly transparent with hi-rez tracks. Smooth and realistic. Thank you for sharing.

 

 

[4est]

Has anyone compared this to Ayrewave, Amarra or Pure Music? I am curious, but cannot try the program yet as I need to update to 10.6 on my present system. Off to Amazon it is...

 

[Encore]

"Currently works on 10.6 Intel Macs with any CoreAudio compatible DAC". Does this mean that it will work with something like the Hiface EVO?

 

[damien78]

Encore: It should work as Hiface EVO is CoreAudio compatible (= has drivers for the Mac). But I don't have one to confirm.

 

Anyway, just try by yourself!

 

[Encore]

Thanks, I'll give it a try when I get around to trying my Mac as a replacement for my netbook ...

 

[rockerz]

Forgive my ignorance, but how does one load tracks? I can't seem to make it work.

 

[damien78]

In the playlist window (currently titled untitled until I implement the load/save mechanism), you either click on the '+' button that raises a file open dialog, or you drag & drop from the finder or itunes. And then click on play.

 

[wgscott]

This is really nice. Thanks for posting.

 

Any tricks to getting the binary in Contents/MacOS to accept a file as a command-line argument?

 

Oh, and thanks for making it open-source.

 

 

 

[damien78]

Thanks!

 

On the TODO list... Will also include playlist (m3u & xspf formats) loading from command line, or dbl click in Finder.

 

But highest priority is using Grand Central Dispatch to get the load operations perform in the background and not delay playback start.

 

[joeinid]

Looks very interesting, thank you for the hard work.

 

Joe

 

[wgscott]

This really sounds superb. The audio midi switching works flawlessly.

 

[One and a half]

I like the sound, accuracy is a little above Ayrewave, good tight bass, extreme treble is great (high hat). Brushes on snare drum are difficult to reproduce, Audivarna does well to nail this, not 100% but for a beta player of considerable merit. Soundstage is wide, far better than Ayrewave which can be flat.

 

I don't mind the lack of volume control, prefer it and will use analog in amplifier as usual.

Pure Music can go that step furhter in comparison, Audivarna can't be dismissed on this first round. Very nice sounding player indeed!

 

There's a lot to do, for sure, but I would encourage the developer to keep going, to play FLAC and Apple lossless in one player is a big plus for me, without the draconian software locks from another mob.

 

Suggestions:

- Add FF & FR buttons to fill in the player graphic

- fix the 4s lag for the sample rate converter (on the list, OK)

- What's the "CPU OVER" Alarm? i5 has plenty of processors :)Activity monitor reports just 1.7% of duty.

 

[sauerball]

According to the display in the bottom right and what Audio MIDI Setup are telling me, the software is changing the sampling rate but not the bit depth. I'm on 10.6.5 and connecting to Nuforce Icon HDP via USB.

 

Listening to Radiohead 'Kid A' (FLAC) with it right now.

 

Thanks again!

 

[cfmsp]

"Soundstage is wide, far better than Ayrewave which can be flat."

 

wow, if true, this is great news!

 

Can you share (the names of) a few of the recordings you used to determine that the soundstage is far better than Ayrewave?

 

thanks

clay

 

 

[SteveS1]

Is there anything obvious I'm missing? I can't seem to get iTunes stored albums to load in the correct track order.

 

Steve

 

[damien78]

Joe: thanks for the proposal!

 

First way is to find bugs and a way to easily reproduce them. In this case you can even use the bug tracker in google code (issues tab).

 

Second if you have Obj-C coding expertise is to propose to take one of the TODO list items (UPnP experts are welcome...)

 

Third if you have audio algorithm expertise, I'm always interested in innovative proposals to implement. That was one of my initial goals when I started this project.

One of them is to get a very good noise shaping dithering algo to implement not too destructive dithering volume control.

Other ideas in 16/44.1 improvement are welcome.

 

Damien

 

[damien78]

One and a half:"CPU over" alarm is mainly used for debugging purposes.

It is triggered by CoreAudio HAL that indicates the reading callback that fills the driver buffer has taken too long time.

Most of the time it means missed samples, and that glitch should be audible.

 

When are you getting this alarm ? What occurence ? Is it when switching track? With or without sample rate change ?

Any detail you may have will be very useful.

 

Adding FF & RW buttons, though redundant with the slider can be nice and is very easy to implement, the longest part is drawing the buttons BTW, what increment? 10s as for the Apple remote buttons ?

 

SteveS1: I'll look into this iTunes drag&drop, should be "fixable"

 

[Lizard_King]

Thanks for your efforts. I use an older mac 10.5 (non intel) cpu and a M2tech Hi-Face. Will I be able to use your application?

 

[Matias]

An opensource audiophile player for Mac... nice! This type of initiative makes me start to think of getting a Mac someday.

Until then this was unthikable due to the locked nature of all things Apple.

Huge congratulations for doing this. I hope you find lots of developers to help you.

 

[wgscott]

When I compiled it (from yesterday's svn), I got a lot of warnings saying that there were implicit conversions that resulted in some variables getting 32-bit instead of 64-bit namespaces.

 

If you link to static libs, you have to upgrade every time there is a bug-fix in one of those libs. Wouldn't it be advantageous to link dynamic libs?

 

Also, if you want it to be a fink package, I could do that (I might need a bit of help at some point).

 

 

[wgscott]

I should have added I also get the glitch in playback of long 24/96 tracks, with the red CPU warning thing flashing. CPU is near idle at 3% to 7%. I have 2 gig total memory; the preferences indicate I can allocate 1 gig to the program?

 

[damien78]

Fixed in version 0.1b

 

[DanRubin]

I can't get this application to open, it crashes immediately. Any suggestions?

 

Added: It works fine on my work MBP but not on the Mini that I use as a server. Here's part of the crash message I get:

 

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

 

Application Specific Information:

abort() called

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSPlaceholderDictionary initWithObjects:forKeys:]: number of objects (0) not equal to number of keys (3)'

*** Call stack at first throw:

(

0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff880dacc4 __exceptionPreprocess + 180

1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff886260f3 objc_exception_throw + 45

2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff880a40d7 -[NSDictionary initWithObjects:forKeys:] + 215

3 Audirvana 0x0000000100006384 -[AppController setVolumeControl:] + 337

4 Audirvana 0x000000010000dfa0 -[AudioOutput selectDevice:] + 1069

5 Audirvana 0x0000000100007836 -[AppController awakeFromNib] + 355

6 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8808947d -[NSSet makeObjectsPerformSelector:] + 205

7 AppKit 0x00007fff871f8aa3 -[NSIBObjectData nibInstantiateWithOwner:topLevelObjects:] + 1445

8 AppKit 0x00007fff871f6cd9 loadNib + 226

9 AppKit 0x00007fff871f61e9 +[NSBundle(NSNibLoading) _loadNibFile:nameTable:withZone:ownerBundle:] + 248

10 AppKit 0x00007fff871f6021 +[NSBundle(NSNibLoading) loadNibNamed:owner:] + 326

11 AppKit 0x00007fff871f35a3 NSApplicationMain + 279

12 Audirvana 0x0000000100004aa8 start + 52