Streaming 16/44 Audio from any Mac App to HQPlayer Desktop

[Bob Stern]

I devised a scheme for transmitting 16/44.1 lossless audio from any Mac program to HQPlayer Desktop.  The app can be the dedicated music player for a streaming service, such as Idagio or Qobuz, or it can be a web browser playing audio from a streaming service such as Primephonic.

 

Of course, my scheme with its annoying 7-second latency (see below) won’t be necessary for Qobuz after Jussi adds Qobuz support to HQP, but my scheme will remain necessary for my favorite classical streaming service, Idagio.  The ideal solution would be for HQP and Audirvana to add the ability to act as a virtual audio device to receive audio directly from any music player app.

 

My scheme requires the music playing program to be on a Mac, but HQP Desktop can be on any OS.  Also, the Mac portion could be adapted for Windows by someone with elementary programming skills and familiarity with open source software, but I cannot help with that.

 

The scheme "hijacks" the audio and feeds it to an Icecast server, which transmits it to HQP Desktop.  Unfortunately, I believe the Icecast server has a 7 second buffer that cannot be circumvented, so there will be a 7 second delay (latency) between when you start or stop the music player app and when HQP starts or stops the audio.

 

I believe the same scripts also would work with Audirvana with only minor modification.

 

The scheme is quick and easy to use after the initial installation, but the initial installation has a lot of geeky steps.  Therefore, I recommend that anyone without experience with the Mac Terminal and elementary scripting should wait until a few geekier users try it successfully.

 

Thanks to Geoff Armstrong for beta-testing this and making several valuable suggestions for improving the scripts and the installation instructions.

 

I'm pretty busy for the next 2 months, so I don’t have much time to answer questions, but Geoff has offered to answer all questions he can.  (In fact, it's only at his urging that I'm not delaying posting this.)

 

Installation instructions and scripts are in the zip archive linked below:

Instructions & Files 2019-04-11.zip

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

For me to be able to send the audio from any app to HQPlayer is a big deal. Although I have my own Kodi based, multi-platform solution for local files, Qobuz and Tidal, I was missing the ability to play Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube or any app you care to think of, through HQPlayer.

 

The only real limitation is that you can't go beyond 44.1/16bit flac streams. So even if you have a Qobuz Sublime account you won't be able to send the high-rez streams to HQPlayer with this solution.

 

Idagio is a terrific streaming source for classical though, and it is also currently limited to 44.1 anyway.

 

As Bob pointed out, the set-up and configuration does require running some commands from the terminal app. Once it's up and running though, it just works!

 

Bravo Bob!

[Cebolla]

On 4/11/2019 at 10:54 AM, Bob Stern said:

My scheme requires the music playing program to be on a Mac, but HQP Desktop can be on any OS.  Also, the Mac portion could be adapted for Windows by someone with elementary programming skills and familiarity with open source software, but I cannot help with that.

 

The scheme "hijacks" the audio and feeds it to an Icecast server, which transmits it to HQP Desktop.  Unfortunately, I believe the Icecast server has a 7 second buffer that cannot be circumvented, so there will be a 7 second delay (latency) between when you start or stop the music player app and when HQP starts or stops the audio.

 

@bogihas already devised something similar for Windows, based on the foobar2000 player & the http server element is provided by foo_upnp foobar2000 plugin component:

 

It was originally designed for just providing HQPlayer with foobar2000's own audio content, but it can be relatively easily adapted to provide the "hijacked"/captured audio, even hi-res up to 24bit/192kHz, produced by other applications running on Windows - via the foo_record (aka Recorder, currently at v0.2.1) foobar2000 plugin component (which can capture the audio from any Windows audio input device) and use of a virtual cable audio device, eg VB-Audio's Hi-Fi Cable:

Case's foobar2000 Components - foo_record

VB-Audio Virtual Apps - Hi-Fi Cable

 

BTW, the 7 second delay is also caused by the sound capturing process itself, rather than the just the buffering & network transmission of that captured audio by the http (icecast) server.

 

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

Great! So there’s now a Mac solution and a Windows solution 😃