Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[motberg]

On 5/3/2019 at 12:07 PM, austinpop said:

Just wanted to update this thread on some interesting Euphony/Stylus features coming down the pike.

 

@romaz and I have had detailed interactions with Željko Vranić, the lead developer of Euphony. He and their team have been very receptive to our ideas and recommendations. You've already seen the rollout of the outcome of some of these discussions in the latest release, in the form of the support for bridging, and the addition of expert parameters for Squeezelite command line options, and for setting CPU frequency.

 

Very soon, the expert options will be expanded to allow ethtool command line options. This would enable overriding auto negotiation of speed, and setting 100Mbps for an Ethernet interface.

 

As many of you have found, the Stylus player in Euphony has significantly superior SQ to Roon. Of course, functionally, Stylus does not match the sophistication of Roon's library management and UI. For many of us, Roon library management has become a non-negotiable, as there is just nothing like it out there. As currently implemented, Stylus is a monolithic, standalone player, that does not have a remote interface. We asked Željko whether they could make Stylus an endpoint that could work with Roon.

 

Well, to our delight, it looks like they have done it. We've tested a prototype endpoint implementation of Stylus - let's call it StylusEP for now. The final released name is TBD. Like squeezelite, StylusEP looks like a Squeezebox to Roon.  This enables both distributed configurations (Roon core on server, Stylus EP on endpoint), as well as standalone (Roon core + StylusEP).

 

In terms of SQ, Roon core + StylusEP approaches, but doesn't quite match the SQ of Stylus. Since there is no control of what Roon Core does internally, the team couldn't implement 100% buffering, for example, the way standalone Stylus does. Still - the SQ of the prototype Roon core + StylusEP I tested was head and shoulders better than standard Roon, and even better sounding than Roon core + Squeezelite with large buffers. It also did not suffer the glitches that have plagued those of us who've tried to live with Roon + squeezelite. 

 

The team needs to do some more testing, but I've been told that they hope to ship this in a GA release by the end of the month.

 

This is pretty exciting stuff!

 

 

 

I hope this will lead to a easy to configure dual-PC version of Stylus (hopefully requiring a single license though....)

 

I have no interest in Roon, but have tested Stylus briefly and think within a dual-PC configuration, it could possibly unseat Windows Server/JPlay in my systems for ease of use as well as sound quality.

 

[RickyV]

17 hours ago, RickyV said:

Question: is the 8 GB enough for Euphony? I read somewhere that Euphony also uses the os drive for buffering music so maybe 8GB is a bit small for best sq.

 

From the Euphony site:

 

Solution

Yes, you must have dedicated HDD/SSD to install Euphony. It cannot include any other software/partitions. Euphony is first installed on USB by writing complete Euphony disk image to it (this only support Legacy boot). Later, when installing on chosen internal disk from euphony application this disk will be automatically formatted and partitioned (4 partitions) before restoring euphony operating system file structure to it (this supports UEFI boot). 

Similar to USB requirements you need at least 8GB disk capacity for your permanent Euphony installation. If you are planning to use this disk for you music library then, of course, it should have a lot more capacity. If you already have a disk which contains your music files you can attach it too, either internally, via usb or via network. Most optimal is to have big SSD disk but Euphony employs several optimizations so your playback will not suffer no matter where the song files actually are: on slow disk, attached usb drive or network.

After Install, system partitions will take 8GB capacity, all the space left will be used for data partition where your music library can reside.

 

 

[RickyV]

Alternative SLC SSD:

Western Digital green ssd,

Adata SU650.

 

[Chopin75]

Yes, I have done this myself, my Euphony OS is running on a 2.5" SSD internal drive, which can be placed into the PC directly.

 Best to have separate LPS booting it. Currently I am still not able to do the V3 trial for some strange reason, at least not able to boot via USB stick. Euphony OS works great otherwise, though I still dislike the library management of the stylus so perhaps those combination of Roon+ Euphony would work for some, I don't use Roon, only single box system. 

It does not really matter where your music is stored, as you can use "Ecache" that immediately load the file into the drive of the OS (but not RAM) and then when you play the file, it is loaded into RAM (at least this is how I think it works). I store my music on external HDD (Spin) and I can't tell much difference with playing directly (except if your computer is not powerful enough, there may be signal disconnect when you try to load the file into the Euphony OS, while playing music at the same time). I think if you Don't store music locally in there Euphony OS drive, 8 GB may be adequate but since SDD are so cheap, perhaps a 128 GB at least so you can easily keep some music locally that you play all the time.  

It also takes a bit of time to load/connect external library to the Euphony OS. 

[RickyV]

I have asked Željko too if 8GB is enough. He said it was if local files are elsewhere and the cache to drive function is off and buffering is at 100% SQ is as good as it can be, he said.

 

@Chopin75 i am trying to find an SLC ssd, according to @romaz the next best thing after optane.

[austinpop]

23 hours ago, motberg said:

 

I hope this will lead to a easy to configure dual-PC version of Stylus (hopefully requiring a single license though....)

 

I have no interest in Roon, but have tested Stylus briefly and think within a dual-PC configuration, it could possibly unseat Windows Server/JPlay in my systems for ease of use as well as sound quality.

 

 

Stylus is a monolithic player that runs on the standalone machine that is attached to the DAC. As such, there is no such thing as dual PC Stylus.

 

StylusEP is a subset of the full Stylus. It is the playback piece, onto which has been added remote support via SlimProto, the Squeezebox protocol. This requires a SlimProto-supporting music server like LMS or Roon Core.

 

Now if you could persuade Euphony to take the server piece of Stylus and graft SlimProto on it, you would have a Stylus Server, which in conjunction with StylusEP would give you a distributed setup.

 

I’m happy with Roon, so feel no need to advocate for this.

[mozes]

10 hours ago, austinpop said:

This requires a SlimProto-supporting music server like LMS or Roon Core.

If LMS can feed StylusEP, then this is great news. LMS is free so anyone can try it.

[ray-dude]

11 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

Stylus is a monolithic player that runs on the standalone machine that is attached to the DAC. As such, there is no such thing as dual PC Stylus.

 

StylusEP is a subset of the full Stylus. It is the playback piece, onto which has been added remote support via SlimProto, the Squeezebox protocol. This requires a SlimProto-supporting music server like LMS or Roon Core.

 

Now if you could persuade Euphony to take the server piece of Stylus and graft SlimProto on it, you would have a Stylus Server, which in conjunction with StylusEP would give you a distributed setup.

 

I’m happy with Roon, so feel no need to advocate for this.

 

I have been assuming that the skipping and freezing we hear going from Roon core to large buffer Squeezelite was related to Roon and how it interacts with SL (Roon has to jump through all sorts of hoops to do the multi-zone thing...I assumed this is what was messing up large buffer end points).  Do you have a sense of what they needed to do to get Roon to play nice with a large buffer end point?

 

Can't wait to hear the beast!

[austinpop]

24 minutes ago, mozes said:

If LMS can feed StylusEP, then this is great news. LMS is free so anyone can try it.

 

I haven't tried this, but in theory it should work.

[austinpop]

2 minutes ago, ray-dude said:

 

I have been assuming that the skipping and freezing we hear going from Roon core to large buffer Squeezelite was related to Roon and how it interacts with SL (Roon has to jump through all sorts of hoops to do the multi-zone thing...I assumed this is what was messing up large buffer end points).  Do you have a sense of what they needed to do to get Roon to play nice with a large buffer end point?

 

Can't wait to hear the beast!

 

I don't, exactly. Željko did mention he had to fine tune his interactions with Roon to make everything work. The key is to trick Roon into feeding you large chunks of the music while providing the feedback Roon expects, without getting out of sync. Unfortunately, that did make 100% pre-loading a "bridge too far." In practice, the only glitch I see from time to time is that "seeks" - i.e. moving further ahead in a song via the slider - can trigger a skip to the next track. It's nowhere as bad as with SL with large buffers.

[ray-dude]

Interesting....in my "stuck in traffic, thinking of all the things I could experiment with but will never have time to actually do", I was contemplating hacking the Squeezelite code to present two end points to Roon: one large buffer one and one regular one (basically a control path with the small buffer end point, and a bulk transfer path with the large buffer end point).  

 

Roon Core could then stream to both, but the bulk transfer path (connected to the DAC) would sync with the control path directly, and Roon could happily stay in sync with the control path (basically a proxy to maintain sync). 

 

Plan B would have been to have the control path end point process run on the server itself, and have the two end point processes stay in sync over the network (to further minimize network traffic to the actual end point connected to the DAC).

 

Of course, the best answer would have been for Roon to actually fix the sync issues to large buffered end points, but alas, there dragons dwell.

 

Thankfully for all of us, Željko is actually doing the work to make it work!  I am very excited to hear the results and support his efforts!

 

Thanks to you and Roy for the advocacy and pushing things forward!

 

 

[mozes]

2 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

I haven't tried this, but in theory it should work.

Ok, will test it and see if it works

[Dev]

Željko mentioned that he will be supporting Wifi in the upcoming release. So that's a great news for those who are using Wifi at the moment.

 

I am especially interested in trying the Sylus(EP) with Roon server. So far I have only tried Euphony on the server side. I downloaded the latest version from website and ran them on the streamer NUC. The version is 20190405 and I don't see Sylus(EP) in the Audio settings. Am I missing something or its not release yet for general users ? 

[austinpop]

Yes, we were testing a private “dev” build. The StylusEP feature will ship in the next public release by end of month, I’m told.

[austinpop]

4 hours ago, ray-dude said:

Thanks to you and Roy for the advocacy and pushing things forward!

 

Having been in the software delivery business in real life, let me tell you it’s a lot more fun setting requirements than delivering!  

[Chopin75]

On 5/4/2019 at 9:44 AM, Chopin75 said:

Yes, I have done this myself, my Euphony OS is running on a 2.5" SSD internal drive, which can be placed into the PC directly.

 Best to have separate LPS booting it. Currently I am still not able to do the V3 trial for some strange reason, at least not able to boot via USB stick. Euphony OS works great otherwise, though I still dislike the library management of the stylus so perhaps those combination of Roon+ Euphony would work for some, I don't use Roon, only single box system. 

It does not really matter where your music is stored, as you can use "Ecache" that immediately load the file into the drive of the OS (but not RAM) and then when you play the file, it is loaded into RAM (at least this is how I think it works). I store my music on external HDD (Spin) and I can't tell much difference with playing directly (except if your computer is not powerful enough, there may be signal disconnect when you try to load the file into the Euphony OS, while playing music at the same time). I think if you Don't store music locally in there Euphony OS drive, 8 GB may be adequate but since SDD are so cheap, perhaps a 128 GB at least so you can easily keep some music locally that you play all the time.  

It also takes a bit of time to load/connect external library to the Euphony OS. 

Update, Euphony got back to me that my old macbook cannot be booted by latest V3. Need to change some parameters for it work.. I will just try it on my HDplex PC once my new LPS arrives. Stay tune!.  Note there is much improvement in my current old setup with euphony V2 on my 2011 Macbook after I switched to using a nice decware power conditioner. Definitely more space/3D imaging, instrument separation/dynamics. Euphony OS surely is sensitive to power supply, at least for single box system. Not if it is the same with the Roon folks / multibox setup etc..

[motberg]

Just my opinion, but I think that there is a substantial international market for a proper simple player/OS/remote, with HQPlayer based oversampling option (and maybe VST plug-in options for EQ, etc), available as a single software package that will run on both single and dual PC's and offering the highest level of sound quality. 

 

(I am not sure if there is any type of consensus in the industry concerning a technical benefit to the streamer/end-point configuration, but it sure seems to me that a lot of computer audiophiles would consider this is the case. )

[Chopin75]

14 hours ago, motberg said:

Just my opinion, but I think that there is a substantial international market for a proper simple player/OS/remote, with HQPlayer based oversampling option (and maybe VST plug-in options for EQ, etc), available as a single software package that will run on both single and dual PC's and offering the highest level of sound quality. 

 

(I am not sure if there is any type of consensus in the industry concerning a technical benefit to the streamer/end-point configuration, but it sure seems to me that a lot of computer audiophiles would consider this is the case. )

Well, as you may already know, I am a single box guy but most folks here are multibox dudes.  I can't be bothered with multiple boxes both because I am too stupid to try to figure out which boxes do what and also I am running out of space, (I also need to accommodate my CD player, SACD player, Vinyl) but also I am doing multi-channels with at least 3 power amps etc... 5 speakers... there is no way I will want 3 boxes just to do digital files.

Your idea of HQplayer embedded in the OS/server is possible and quite common in single boxes (found in commercial world). The folks here are computer wizards who can do all sort of computer manipulations including changing the  speed of the PC !  This is not for normal consumers. I think I am half way between the regular commercial consumer  vs hardcore computer audiophiles.  - Some tweek/DIY but not completely so.,

Euphony offers this kind of flexibility, - you can just use it as 1 box with embedded HQplayer, (though it clicks with changing track, rather annoying) and sound quite nice, though I am usually only using the euphony Stylus. HQplayer has too much processing at times and has its own sound signature, 

 

Is it more cost effective in an ultra single box vs multiple boxes ?  Not sure. I can imagine the complexity of adding 2-3 LPS, 2-3 bridges etc would just complicate things such that the sound may be contaminated/compromised along the path. But how do I know? I have never tried M-boxes

Someone on this tread (or the euphony thread ?) compared Roon + AL vs Euphony  and Euphony is better (I think it is a simpler pathway too, can't remember the detail). Roon I heard is best for library management and allows one to play music in different locations. But for sound quality, is it actually superior ?? Maybe it is compared with other network playing method ? 

 

I am trying to aim for simplicity and use the best (affordable) essential components e.g clock, bridge/LPS and eliminate unneeded gadgets. Use the shortest USB etc .... so no files extracted from far away corner to the end point and going through multiple boxes via ethernet, USB, HDMI and god knows what else it will pass before it reaches the DAC. 

 

 

 

[bobfa]

One of the nice things about all of this software flexibility is that we can build just about anything we want.  I have found that to-date my system has not sounded better than with Euphony.  That is why I started this thread.  The single box Euphony system is great for some folks.  Dual systems with server and endpoint are newish to the Euphony systems design are are great for others.  Change a software config and you have something new to listen to!  

 

Since Euphony 3.0 update they have been doing a lot on their end to improve the system.  They have listened to the community are developing and implementing improvements at a great pace.

 

The Shootout thread where we are talking about AL and comparing it to Euphony is another interesting place for discussion.  Audiolinux is proceeding at an incredible pace on its own.  Most of that is on the AL server thread.

 

What I feel is important here is to find what you want to use, learn about it listen to it and tell others what you have found.    There are very very few pre-conceived notions here.  And most of them have been debunked!

 

Nobody is too stupid to learn and implement these systems as they would like.   

 

 

[Chopin75]

And I forgot to mention, that the Euphony OS is a simple upgrade if you want to try on a current cheap PC that you already have and it works quite nicely with primitive setup and already has much improvement. I think by rebooting into euphony OS even using USB boot  can give quite a bit of improvement considering the noise within common PC. So it is not surprising when used in a proper silent PC with LPS etc the magic comes out much more readily.  

[seatrope]

On 5/5/2019 at 4:55 PM, austinpop said:

Yes, we were testing a private “dev” build. The StylusEP feature will ship in the next public release by end of month, I’m told.

@austinpopRajiv, as it stands right now, is StylusEP subject to the same restrictions as Squeezelite, as far as DSD playback is concerned? WIll it work with DSD256 files?

 

Thanks!

[austinpop]

2 hours ago, seatrope said:

@austinpopRajiv, as it stands right now, is StylusEP subject to the same restrictions as Squeezelite, as far as DSD playback is concerned? WIll it work with DSD256 files?

 

Thanks!

 

Yes. The 192 sample rate limit is imposed by Roon Core. It is built into their Squeezebox support, so applies to any device that presents as a SlimProto endpoint. This means DSD is limited to DSD64.

 

Again, this should not apply if you use LMS as a server, I just haven’t actually tested StylusEP with LMS.

 

I am at High End Munich this week, so won’t be very responsive.

[Holzohr]

So meanwhile, I have bought the Euphony license (and also HQPlayer embedded *ouch*). Thanks again to @bobfa for pointing me to Euphony. 

 

I must say Zeljko is offering great support. I have the Matrix Element H USB 3.0 PCIe card in use so the realtime priorities in rtirq.conf for USB on Euphony (and the same on Audiolinux) seem to be rather useless for my use case. Zeljko was offering to adjust the rtirq.conf via rc. I could adjust it by myself "offline" by booting a Ubuntu Live USB stick and mounting the Euphony partitions with it (the handling with Audiolinux and Gentooplayer before was a good school). Zeljko has made a screenshot from my rcstatus via rc that confirmed the higher realtime priority for the from the Matrix card used irq now.

 

Using an ASRock Z390M-itx/ac mainboard I like the network interface bridging feature very much of course. A simple press on the Bridge button caused a reboot and voilà! I never have seen it that easy.

 

The HQPlayer is missing some of the new filters (sync m or closed form m). They will be added in the next release. Of course I would like to have full access to the HQPe settings but understand that Euphony doesn't want the user diving too deep into the in part confusing settings of HQPlayer. 

 

 

The plan is to buy two more Optane sticks for installing Audiolinux and Windows Server 2019 on them. Though I like Euphony very much I can not stop tinkering for some reason. 🙂

[Holzohr]

5 hours ago, Holzohr said:

The HQPlayer is missing some of the new filters (sync m or closed form m). They will be added in the next release.

 

The new release is out!

 

You can choose Roon together with Squeezelite or StylusEP beside Roon + HQPlayer now. I think the next choosable thing should be Roon + HQPlayer + StylusEP then. 😎

 

 

 

 

The HQPlayer includes all the filters now but I can not save any setting there now. Hmm..

 

 

 

 

 

More expert settings now:

 

[austinpop]

Some examples on using the expert fields...

1. SL parameters example to set buffer sizes: -b 2097152:2097152 -a 52428800:4::
2. ethtool parameters to override auto-negotiation and set a particular interface to 100Mbps: eth1 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off
3. Min/Max CPU freq. parameters: use units like MHz or GHz, for example: 400MHz  3200MHz