Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[manueljenkin]

A comparison of music players on windows, linux, android I have done.

 

Note: Most of these software are free so you can try and check for yourself. This is only relating to USB dac connected to PC directly and using a general asio/uac2 driver. If you have a network streamer or signal regenerator/reclocker or any other protocol, the inferences may not carry over. Your mileage may vary on protocol support.

 

For all of the tests/analysis, I have tried my best to make sure there is no additional zero padding, upsampling/oversampling etc is in play within the server system. I almost always used ASIO with proper buffer configurations wherever supported (almost all of them do except strawberry, mediamonkey etc). More on the technical breakdowns at the end of the analysis.

It is too early to conclude the causation of these changes but a look into USB audio protocol (asynch) gives better clue. It works more like UDP than TCP in that it doesn't guarantee a failure when packets go missing or get corrupted during transmission. There is a possibility they could just get concealed, either by any logic/fsm in the usb receiver, or the fact that a delta Sigma dac can behave as a natural packet loss concealer. I have done experiments and I have found that the more constrained and the more buffer underruns the harsher/grainer the sound gets to and extent and past that I get serious crackle noises. So yep I have experienced till there, on a system that would be shown bitperfect by any software analysis inside the computer. The key to this is to be able to probe at the i2s pins of the usb to i2s.

Gear used - surface book 2015, apogee groove, supra usb cable, burson fun, sparkos ss3601 opamps, shure srh1540, OnePlus 3. Few other headphones, dac and amp were also used to ensure coverage on other parameters, and they fit well with the same descriptions.

 

1. Windows groove player - really low fidelity. You got a pig fat low pass applied on top of the digital stream (no clue why) and very bad in overall implementation. When you scroll and play back instead of playing from start, you lose details (the only player that I've come across that does this).

 

2. Windows media player - not as terrible as groove but forgettable.

 

3. Foobar2000 - has lots of plugins and features etc. General "I'm an audio enthusiast" circle tries to push this forward but unfortunately sound isn't the best. Its quite poor to be honest, and even music players in android sound better. Outdated asio and wasapi plugins, measurable distortion and just overall sloppy implementation. Quite softened and smooth but in a very artificial and dry manner. A far cry from the best kind of fidelity you can get from windows. Nice tool for streaming from internet though, thanks to variable buffer on the input side of the player.

 

4. Winyl - the first music player software that had decent fidelity on my tries. You can hear the different textures of bass instruments and the detail/depth/resolution is insane. As my friend calls it, it is DAW level audio quality. A bit artificially sharp sounding due to some buffer management issues. Not the smoothest with bad with low res music, you want that, don't look at this. You can hear a sheen of dither noise (i assume, don't quote me) on top of voices in 16bit music as well. Not quite perfect and not ultimate resolution. I had a short trial with certain background task cleaners/audio enhancers and it did show improvements in sustain detail and left right coherency. Don't know how it uses ram but I wish it could flush the full song to ram and play back from there with high system priority. Peers to winyl are xmplay, musicbee and hqplayer both of which sound almost identical at identical settings.

 

5. Hqplayer - it's as good as winyl in equivalent settings. But it's a lot more feature rich. Lets you try custom upsampling PCM or DSD conversion options and can help get a better stream to your dac than the internal digital filters which can sometimes be low fidelity in the DACs. Also lets you try high precision fir filter convolution for a usable high precision eq.

 

6. Musicbee - the best competition to winyl. It's from the same audio library so sounds similar for the most part. But winyl has a more robust port configuration setting afaik and has less artefacts on that front. However winyl let's down in its buffer, while musicbee takes lead there. It doesn't have the winyl characteristic harshness once the buffer is set to load full song to RAM. Has almost all features of foobar, but built in and usable from the get go and actually sounds good. For some reason the player volume is at 50% by default which I recommend you to set to 100% and use the dac control panel to control the volume. Software volume control is most often poor on any player software, unless it's super sophisticated with 64bit precision and stuff like those (roon has those options).

 

7. Jriver - not as good as winyl not as bad as foobar. It sounds a bit compressed and loud in comparison to winyl. Quite clean otherwise. If you loved the geek out you may like this but it doesn't sound "correct" with usb dacs. People have had better luck with jriver sending data to network streamers.

8. Albumplayer - It was promising as it was coded from scratch and gave me options to prioritise it. I set it up at the best possible settings - asio, full song to ram, high system priority. It sounds a bit softened but not bad like foobar - this thing has depth. I don't know if this is what people call as analog. It sounds very different from winyl but very hard to compare which is better. The general opinion from my side is albumplayer is a little too midrangey and slightly muffled for the most part but with a bass punch somewhere (could just be distortion). On one song it just sounds softened and dull but on another it carries a lot of bass weight. Midrange detail is typically more visible on albumplayer but winyl produces the same with a tiny bit more edge. Most of the time albumplayer is softer but sometimes it can sound exceedingly bright or hard hitting. One thing i like though is that it can bring back that tactile feel in bass in certain songs which i mostly lost with winyl. It sounds weightier and more natural which i like but i just can't get over the resolution winyl offers typically. I wouldn't be doing further testing since I have heard players that outperform both winyl and album player by a significant margin. If the formers are a bit contrasty, edgy and in my face, album player is a bit soft and nice to listen with a different presentation of detail. Idk if it's distortion or just another way to present it or even better accuracy.

 

9. Aimp: I wanted it to sound identical. But unfortunately it didnt. Couldn't find anything bad but the winyl/musicbee kind of players have a sense of texture and aimp has a different texture and imo aimp texture is smoothed off and wrong. Lacks depth. Can't be sure if it is volume or the volume control or anything of that sort. Not a particularly bad player but I'm not particularly impressed.

 

10. Mediamonkey: didn't have an asio output so used wasapi. Didn't like it. Sounded like a low pass filter or bass boost was applied. The liveliness was missing. Can't say i noticed a difference between wasapi and asio in other players but will return to testing media monkey in asio if it improves.

 

11. Audirvana. Not bad. I like it. But winyl still better texture retrieval/detail. Winyl shows the texture and depth noticeably better. Audirvana is a little softer. Bass is even less tactile than winyl on audirvana. (Yep I did try changing settings on audirvana). It was created by an UCLA graduate I think, can't be bad (and it's not), but then again winyl is super lightweight with no bloat, runs on a rock solid audio library, and has multiple other checks to ensure better detail. I'd rate audirvana above jriver (and of course we are well beyond foobar at this point). Didn't sound like it had any compression or anything of that sort. Just not fast enough/transparent enough.

 

12. Roon: to be honest the settings I described above is sub optimal for roon. They recommend you to use your pc as a roon source and another endpoint device like raspberry Pi or ethernet streamer. I can see why. With the same pc acting as both source and endpoint fidelity suffers significantly. It sounds as if I input clipped my amplifier. Doesn't have as muddy artefacts as foobar but I don't like it since it doesn't sound transparent and has a clearly audible aberration. However if your system uses ethernet receiver or roon supported endpoints, I assume it'll be very good owing to the custom roon protocol and compliance control.

 

13. **Hysolid**: My first ever OMG moment. The difference from foobar to winyl was a little bit more than the difference between DACs I tried. The difference from winyl to hysolid was more than the difference between multiple tiers of headphones. If you had said that a year ago, I'd have laughed at you, but now that I have heard, I cannot unhear this. If I have to describe it's sound concisely, I'd say saturated and detailed. It is not the most transparent and has an obvious character that is fairly borderline warmish but without the Treble suffering anything. In fact, Treble texture was the biggest improvement from winyl - finally all the hf noise is gone but without being gooey unresolving mud like foobar. Started to hear a million shades of cymbals and digital hi hat synths (listening to mausam and escape right now). And everything else follows, vocal textures (whispers and so forth), bass instruments. Inter channel integrity still not perfect (I guess maybe coz due to it being 32 bit) but otherwise Sounds stellar. The difference in decay texture and detail with hysolid. The sound of water drops, the sound of claps, vocal textures. Feels like the first time I upgraded from hd598 to vsonic gr07. However it got a serious catch/dealbreaker. It's buggy. the architecture is in such a way that you need to have a separate control system. Android app didn't work (it broke after android 6 and never got an update I guess) so I had to use it on iOS. Running through asio to my computer.

 

14. Regarding android. Where do I even begin. What a forcibly gronked system is all I can say. A forced resampler makes every headphone sound like a hd598 <<sigh>>. Just overall low fi and I rather prefer it sending the stream as bluetooth signal and listen than to use stock android stuff. The only instance where I could get decent sound out of android is when using uapp or hiby music (and an external dac coz the internal dacs also mostly suck). I envy lg users coz lg has a reworked kernel and music player that apparently doesn't screw these things too much, apart from actually having a usable sound chip.

 

15. After all these, I tried my attempt at linux distros. First tried ubuntu without setting up alsa, just pulse audio. As expected disappointment. Then I tried ap-linux, a fork of arch Linux with audio optimizations and kernels built in. The installation process was a pain and unfortunately it didn't support my network card. I couldn't do further updates and sound quality wasn't anything to write home about in that config. I thought I had hit a dead end and had to resort to battling windows.. until.....

 

16. WTFPLAY: this sounds amaaaaazing. All sorts of good adjectives - transparency, detail, effortlessness. There is no character I can attribute to this other than those of the recordings themselves, and maybe minor effect changes by changing buffer settings or some BIOS settings (and apparently changing RAM changes sound, since different RAM will have different memory refresh properties and response times). It is a live cd, so no need to install. Just burn to pendrive, boot from the drive. It'll load to RAM and run from the RAM. When you play a song it'll be decoded and loaded to RAM and played from there, instead of buffers from storage drives. It is super focused in audio tasks and has very minimal daemons. Doesn't have any instruction cycle stealing process - no network, no mouse/mouse polling, not even a battery probe. This is what makes it great since it can respond back to the data request from the dac in a timely fashion, and also there is no sudden noise spike in USB bus owing to noise from CPU interrupts/power state shifts. It sounds great and has been my reference for the last 4 months. Haven't had the chance to compare to ethernet streamers, but within system software, this is leagues above everything available on windows, with hysolid being the only thing that can even be compared, and even that is not as transparent. Highly recommend this player.

 

Continuing some technical analysis from top.

 

ASIO communicates both the bit depth and sample rate along with volume control info in the control frames, as per my understanding. It for sure communicates sample rate that way and I can see it even in my DAC control panel. If you send something with 32khz sample rate via asio to my dac it will refuse to pick it up and throw an error. In other operating system like mac os, we have other data structure for sending the data,including left justified 8-24 inputs. 

 

I did further investigation on this topic earlier. Hqplayer lets you choose the bit depth it sends to the dac. Winyl sounds closer to hqplayer configured to have same bit depth as the music file. Which means winyl is not doing any unnecessary padding. I have actually found padding to reduce detail in my system, making it artificially soft. I can for sure confirm that padding actually reduces detail, in my system and not improve. Custom upsampling using HQplayer is a completely different story altogether, I have tried a few and have been able to see how they "change" the sound but on a pure performance level it was on par with winyl, and worse when additional functionality was being used. Also my system was not up to snuff to try the high precision improvements. There's not much way zero padding can bring in such an amount of difference as heard through the players. Also if all of them do the same thing they should all sound the same which they clearly don't.

 

Most of these improvements can be correlated to how the softwares handle the music playback at the instruction level. Which means libraries used, the stability of plugins used, memory consumption, buffering etc. I have made some investigations on what makes winyl superior to peers in bass audio library and also its one pitfall compared to its peers. It does perform optimizations with regards to usb root control as well. I was trying to see if I can make it play full song from RAM like I can do on musicbee, but after I tried hysolid, i've stopped that approach. I am 100% certain the way a library, the instruction set and features are implemented make an insane level of difference. Changing buffer and load to ram changes things. So many small changes changes things. The way their instructions are structured and the way they behave with other io has a correlatable effect on sound. In a normal music player, you need handles for i/o, trying to see where the user wants to scrub to which means your instructions will have structure in a way it keeps asking for memory pointers. The better ones do a more streamlined getting it closer to just store in a register and keep shifting it, and using it. And as I mentioned above, in my device stack the differences are bigger than different tiers of headphones.

 

Now coming to the topic of foobar sounding objectively worse. This player showed a measurable worse performance across multiple independent tests. (https://imgur.com/gallery/50P4hRJ). All the above topics, we have few players like hysolid sounding objectively better on all fronts, and other players with custom libraries like winyl,hqplayer,musicbee, etc are give an take between them but all sound better than foobar under any parameter. An accurate player will have more depth and separation for almost any song, and that foobar sorely lacks. There is some processing/added distortion happening without a hint of doubt and that is the reason for lack of detail, not accuracy. The player sounds different across different versions as well as per a report from my friend. The issue has also been reliably measured with different input tones. The aberration is closer to how a limiter/compressor would perform, and guess what, windows volume control has built in limiter and compressors. These were measured in ASIO, in WASAPI and still showed the same aberration both audibly and measurably. What does this tell? It just tells that foobar is broken,and has some processing happening even though it claims not to with the plugins. This is one huge flaw which makes it sound worse than even normal players like aimp, and apart from this, memory handling and other issues are also abundant, which as I said winyl and other BASS library based players do better and completely smack foobar out. I have tried my best to "fix" foobar. Have tried 2-3 different asio/wasapi plugins and all had different issues. Case's asio plugin literally distorted annoyingly at 100%. I'm not moving away from my conclusion at all. I've tried revisiting foobar multiple times (whenever I change something in my chain) in an attempt to see and have always been disappointed. Winyl sounds closer to professional DAWs.

 

Tl:dr: WTFPLAY >> Hysolid >>>> Winyl = Musicbee = Hqplayer = xmplay > Audirvana >> jriver = roon > Aimp > uapp on android > foobar2000 > any bundled music player with windows or non asio supported players.

[Norton]

Totally agree with you re. wtfplay, best evidence I know of that all (presumably bit perfect) software  players most definitely do  not sound the same.

[sandyk]

7 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

3. Foobar2000 - has lots of plugins and features etc. General "I'm an audio enthusiast" circle tries to push this forward but unfortunately sound isn't the best. Its quite poor to be honest, and even music players in android sound better. Outdated asio and wasapi plugins, measurable distortion and just overall sloppy implementation. Quite softened and smooth but in a very artificial and dry manner. A far cry from the best kind of fidelity you can get from windows.

 

Yet many E.E.s tell people to use it for Blind Testing.  Either they are unable to hear how much better players such as the simplistic CPlay , or better still, JRiver 26 sound, OR they don't want people to hear the differences. 

[fas42]

I've found that there is no general rule to follow - previously, foobar2000 was always knocked out because the quality was too poor - with my latest, 2nd hand laptop, foobar2000 was neck and neck with Media Monkey, my preferred player up to that point; in fact, foobar was slightly ahead in some ways.

 

Why should this be? Perhaps the latest version straightened out some kinks, perhaps there was a better match between this hardware and the way the software operated - I would say, every time you change the hardware, and every time a new version of the software comes out, double check that the ordering of subjective quality hasn't changed ... just in case, 🙂.

[sandyk]

47 minutes ago, fas42 said:

I've found that there is no general rule to follow - previously, foobar2000 was always knocked out because the quality was too poor - with my latest, 2nd hand laptop, foobar2000 was neck and neck with Media Monkey, my preferred player up to that point; in fact, foobar was slightly ahead in some ways.

 

Why should this be? Perhaps the latest version straightened out some kinks, perhaps there was a better match between this hardware and the way the software operated - I would say, every time you change the hardware, and every time a new version of the software comes out, double check that the ordering of subjective quality hasn't changed ... just in case, 🙂.

 

  Perhaps you need to use some high quality S/W such as JRiver on something better than a 2nd hand Laptop ?

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

54 minutes ago, fas42 said:

with my latest, 2nd hand laptop, foobar2000 was neck and neck with Media Monkey

Wow! Someone still using Media Monkey!

 

No complaints from me, just hadn’t heard anyone discuss it for about a decade. 

[fas42]

19 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Wow! Someone still using Media Monkey!

 

No complaints from me, just hadn’t heard anyone discuss it for about a decade. 

 

The story is, that I wanted to get decent, best SQ from my previous, HP, laptop - went through the usual suspects, and looked at what other software was available - it just happened to be on the queue.

 

Turned out that it has excellent options, for setting plenty of the parameters "that matter" - think the way @PeterSt does it, with his player. Fine tuning these really made a difference; and gave me quality well above what the others did.

[manueljenkin]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

I've found that there is no general rule to follow - previously, foobar2000 was always knocked out because the quality was too poor - with my latest, 2nd hand laptop, foobar2000 was neck and neck with Media Monkey, my preferred player up to that point; in fact, foobar was slightly ahead in some ways.

 

Why should this be? Perhaps the latest version straightened out some kinks, perhaps there was a better match between this hardware and the way the software operated - I would say, every time you change the hardware, and every time a new version of the software comes out, double check that the ordering of subjective quality hasn't changed ... just in case, 🙂.

I have tried foobar from versions 1.3 till 1.5 . Very similar results. I don't think it has to do with the computer, though the computer by itself can impart sound. I think the more important factor would be the operating system. All my comparisons were done with windows10. Can you check if your other laptop also runs windows 10? Different versions of OS can have different kernel stacks.

[fas42]

Other laptop is dead, but was running 8.1. Current one is using version 10 Home

[manueljenkin]

Is it on your windows 10 machine you are finding foobar to be neck and neck with musicbee?

 

I tried mediamonkey but it didn't support asio, so I moved on. Are you able to get asio working on it?

[fas42]

Yes, on the latest, a small form Toshiba laptop - a few years old now, with rather dicky USB connectors! 😁

 

Haven't tried the ASIO route - and, just looking around found this thread, https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=91485. Would this help at all?

[beerandmusic]

funnny this thread show up tonite...i have just upgraded to jriver 26 yesterday and just tried audirvana first time (windows version).  Jriver has so many features, but seems bloated...i was just thinking i would want something simple to work out of the box that supported dsd.  I haven't done any comparison testing, but i like the simple interface, and i didn't have to google to get it working out of the box like jriver or foobar with dsd. 

 

Is volumio the only player that has a self booting image (good for streamlined os for audio) that supports dsd?

I wish there were more software players that had a self booting image that would support dsd right after boot without hassle of configuring?  I downloaded volumio, but have tried it yet...maybe in a couple days.

 

I also have licensed copies of audiogate and hqplayer and they both sound great, but don't care for the gui...not paying for roon....will likely stick with jriver, but do wish there was something simpler and with better interface than what is out there that also sounds good.

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

funnny this thread show up tonite...i have just upgraded to jriver 26 yesterday and just tried audirvana first time (windows version).  Jriver has so many features, but seems bloated...i was just thinking i would want something simple to work out of the box that supported dsd.  I haven't done any comparison testing, but i like the simple interface, and i didn't have to google to get it working out of the box like jriver or foobar with dsd. 

 

Is volumio the only player that has a self booting image (good for streamlined os for audio) that supports dsd?

I wish there were more software players that had a self booting image that would support dsd right after boot without hassle of configuring?  I downloaded volumio, but have tried it yet...maybe in a couple days.

 

I also have licensed copies of audiogate and hqplayer and they both sound great, but don't care for the gui...not paying for roon....will likely stick with jriver, but do wish there was something simpler and with better interface than what is out there that also sounds good.

 

I found that JRiver 26 had a steep learning curve. You also need to enable it to play from  System Memory.

 However, JRiver 26 can do many other things including conversion of Video formats which may save you from needing other paid software.

[One and a half]

WTFPlay is only available on Linux OS.  Now there's a *steep* learning curve, not for this little black duck. 

 

[Norton]

36 minutes ago, One and a half said:

WTFPlay is only available on Linux OS.  Now there's a *steep* learning curve, not for this little black duck. 

 

Wtfplay is an ultra simple “OS on a stick”,  you don’t need to know Linux to use it (just as you don’t to use a Linux based streamer) and it has an excellent manual.  More significant reasons for not using it may be that it has no gui (text-based control via simple interface or command line),  no networking and doesn’t handle gaps between tracks particularly well.  But it is incredibly simple and fast in use, to my ears closer to transparency than any other replay software I’ve used and of course, it’s free of charge.

[Iving]

... + Hysolid and maybe others only USB?

 

@manueljenkin what in your view would be the best alt. to fb2k for an ethernet/non-USB system PC [ASIO/Dante Virtual Souncard] > RedNet device > DAC - tyia

[AnotherSpin]

47 minutes ago, One and a half said:

WTFPlay is only available on Linux OS.  Now there's a *steep* learning curve, not for this little black duck. 

 

 

You don't need Linux to try the wtf. The image is burned on the usb stick from which the computer with any operating system is started. To understand how to use it is very easy, there are simple instructions online. The settings are minimal. The sound is very good, as it was already said. 
 

[manueljenkin]

28 minutes ago, Iving said:

... + Hysolid and maybe others only USB?

 

@manueljenkin what in your view would be the best alt. to fb2k for an ethernet/non-USB system PC [ASIO/Dante Virtual Souncard] > RedNet device > DAC - tyia

Unfortunately my experience there is limited. You can try jriver or roon as they are known to play very well with network audio. Or the same players in the list you can try if they work.

 

There are multiple linux distros other than wtfplay just for audio - daphile, Gentoo player etc.

 

Maybe the owner of Uptone Audio might have better suggestions. 

[Iving]

4 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

Unfortunately my experience there is limited. You can try jriver or roon as they are known to play very well with network audio. Or the same players in the list you can try if they work.

 

There are multiple linux distros other than wtfplay just for audio - daphile, Gentoo player etc.

 

Maybe the owner of Uptone Audio might have better suggestions. 

 

ty

 

Commercial/subscription players are anathema to me. I am adamant about this. Your post began with "most players are free" - and I was drawn in! I like fb2k partly for its simplicity. My listening environment matters. I do not want any third party to do my thinking for me, make any suggestions whatsoever - or remind me of commerce when I am listening to music. I want to experience music alone - offline. Call me old-fashioned. I shan't care.

 

DVS requires Windows. No Linux.

 

Appreciate your OP - and thank you for your reply - saves some mucking about 🙂

[manueljenkin]

15 minutes ago, Iving said:

 

ty

 

Commercial/subscription players are anathema to me. I am adamant about this. Your post began with "most players are free" - and I was drawn in! I like fb2k partly for its simplicity. My listening environment matters. I do not want any third party to do my thinking for me, make any suggestions whatsoever - or remind me of commerce when I am listening to music. I want to experience music alone - offline. Call me old-fashioned. I shan't care.

 

DVS requires Windows. No Linux.

 

Appreciate your OP - and thank you for your reply - saves some mucking about 🙂

Can you try smallplayer? Or ulilith? Both of them are free.

 

Or you can do this, just go to the BASS audio library development page. You'll see links to maybe a hundred music players. Try the appealing ones and report back?

[Iving]

1 minute ago, manueljenkin said:

Can you try smallplayer? Or ulilith? Both of them are free.

 

Or you can do this, just go to the BASS audio library development page. You'll see links to maybe a hundred music players. Try the appealing ones and report back?

 

Many thanks

Have made a note.

First priority is sort out bad clusters on a new master Drive from which I have made backups. Only CMD chkdsk revealed the problem when copying failed. Sometimes I just hate IT.

[manueljenkin]

This is why you don't post on reddit: getting attacked on personal gear choices (comments section). I think I'd have got an even warmer welcome posting it at our friend forum : ASR.

 

[nonsynchro]

What a great comparison.

I'm digging Jukebox 2112. I like its interface, the album artwork is wide form taking up half of the screen. It looks really good. I'm in the process of finding images on the net to replace the usual square jpegs. The player has inbuilt equalizer, replay gain and many more customisable settings. And it has VU meters!

N.B. it's not free at $20. I'm not affiliated, but I am a very happy user.

I'd love to know what you think of the audio quality. 

[manueljenkin]

12 minutes ago, nonsynchro said:

What a great comparison.

I'm digging Jukebox 2112. I like its interface, the album artwork is wide form taking up half of the screen. It looks really good. I'm in the process of finding images on the net to replace the usual square jpegs. The player has inbuilt equalizer, replay gain and many more customisable settings. And it has VU meters!

N.B. it's not free at $20. I'm not affiliated, but I am a very happy user.

I'd love to know what you think of the audio quality. 

I'd love to try it at some point of time. It's a windows Store app right? I came across this but sidelined it since it was paid.

[beerandmusic]

6 hours ago, Norton said:

Wtfplay is an ultra simple “OS on a stick”,  you don’t need to know Linux to use it (just as you don’t to use a Linux based streamer) and it has an excellent manual.  More significant reasons for not using it may be that it has no gui (text-based control via simple interface or command line),  no networking and doesn’t handle gaps between tracks particularly well.  But it is incredibly simple and fast in use, to my ears closer to transparency than any other replay software I’ve used and of course, it’s free of charge.

thanks for your knowledge on wtfplay....can you confirm when you say no networking, so you have to have your music stored locally?  Also, you can't control it from remote node? (both local storage and command line interface only option of playing?)