Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[manueljenkin]

Thank you very much @seeteeyou. I will give them a shot sometime.

 

I am interested to look into the code and see if I could come up with modifications!

[manueljenkin]

On 11/2/2020 at 12:46 PM, seeteeyou said:

 

Maybe you could compile this playhrt.c program first, then try it with SqueezeCore without having to enable networking at all?

 

Available here and it's written in C

 

http://frankl.luebecknet.de/stereoutils/player.html

http://frankl.luebecknet.de/stereoutils/frankl_stereo-0.7.tar.gz

https://bitbucket.org/frank_l/frankl_stereo/src/master/src/playhrt.c

 

A further optimized version was posted here (Google Translate)

 

https://www.aktives-hoeren.de/viewtopic.php?p=190192#p190192

 

Feedback seemed to be quite positive (Google Translate)

 

https://www.aktives-hoeren.de/viewtopic.php?p=190544#p190544

 

---

 

Another ASIO WAV player for Windows here and it's called PlayWave, it could be combined with various versions of MinorityClean etc.

 

http://www.myav.com.tw/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=20459807&perpage=12&pagenumber=19

 

PlayWaveVC64Cache_20200818

https://www.dropbox.com/s/35j3l1vbbf47pzi/PlayWaveVC64Cache_20200818.rar?dl=0

 

Singxer F-1 libusbK driver

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kimi5bacn53dbmw/USB_Audio_2_0_F1_physical_align_page_20200818.rar?dl=0

 

Musiland Digital Times 2 libusbK driver

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wajqrpfvnz7w70n/Digital_Times_2_Interface_0_physical_align_page_20200818.rar?dl=0

Hi. I tried playwave. It was a bit hard to set up. It was throwing error before playback so I tried it only for a very short time before stopping (because my dac is prone to buffer undderun crackles). Within the short time I felt like it was overall very clean but I think I heard some distortion or clipping likely due to some config settings I made.

 

Did a few more experiments. I first tried xxhighend but couldn't get it to work properly in my system.

 

Since music playback generally improved with full ram buffer based players I wanted to give RAMDisk configs a try. I downloaded AMD RAMDisk and created a 2GB RAM drive. Installed musicbee, PlayPCMWin and albumplayer one by one on the RAMdisk and configured all to use full RAM buffer. Then I tried playing the local music stored in the drive (since I have already ensured memory playback I didn't initially feel like putting the songs to the memory disc). All the players sounded cleaner for the most part (compared to having them installed in hard drive) but also had the 8khz hiss/resonance like PlayPCMWin did in earlier normal disc. It seems fine initially since the remaining frequency spectrum is cleaner and more detailed but gets increasingly annoying as time goes on. Then I tried another experiment. I moved the songs to RAMdisk and then played them. It surprisingly made a meaningful improvement with a reduction in 8khz hiss and lesser overall haze despite the players already configured to do RAM playback. I have no reason why this happens. But even now the 8khz hiss was quite hard especially when high pitched voices are present in the music. And I preferred musicbee + ram playback installed on local drive instead of ramdisk because of this reason. Apart from the 8khz hiss, in PlayPCMWin the overall higher pitches felt slightly softer, lacking that last edge of bite and bass also felt a tad aliased for lack of a better word (despite the better resolution). This softness was worser in PlayPCMWin installed in non-ram disk so it's an improvement here.

 

So after everything was done I thought I'll make one final experiment. I uninstalled my apogee dac driver and reinstalled it on the RAMDisk. And now everything made started falling in to place. The 8khz hiss on all the three players reduced drastically and the bass improved a lot. PlayPCMWin is my favourite of the three in this config (settings mostly default, only priority being changed to pro audio thread). There is still an 8khz hiss but it's much milder and occurs only in very few songs. PlayPCMWin also retains a much milder version of that slightly soft tone where the upper registers lack that very last ounce of bite but PlayPCMWin is overall cleaner and less hazier than the other players I've tried. Overall, aside from this occasional 8khz tizz and mild softness it's spatial and resolution properties are excellent now and dare I say, I can hear more detail than even wtfplay!!

[manueljenkin]

@PeterSt I need your help please! 😁

[manueljenkin]

8 hours ago, andrewinukm said:

@manueljenkin Thanks to your experimentations and generous sharing, I've followed some of your footsteps to very good results.

• Laptop as source, dual boot a "clean" Win10 with only Winyl & Tidal + Fidelizer + MinorityClean. Definitely much better than "dirty (busy)" Win10, even with the same Fidelizer & MinorityClean.
• WTFplay—WOW! Knocked it out of the ball park. It's very difficult to go back to Win10 after WTFplay.

 

Currently I'm wondering a few scenarios:

• RaspPi+Pi2AES vs. WTFplay... which would win. Have you compared RPi against WTFplay? 
• Other Linux based audio players for PC. How do they compare against WTFplay?

 

_____

my digital chain:   laptop > USPCB > ISO Regen > Lush^1 cable > DAC.

personal sound preferences:   precise pin-point imaging, clean-effortless sound, mid-range clarity, likes vocals. 

Thank you very much for the kind words. I would recommend you to reserve your appreciation to the people who actually made the software. I merely shared opinions. The developers of playpcmwin (yamamoto2002) and wtfplay (frd) are also members at audiophilestyle.

 

I haven't tried raspberry Pi network yet. I have an allo Sparky but haven't tried using it yet (don't have a good quality psu to power it up), but ethernet is generally known to be fairly clean in comparison to usb. I will be trying a few other players both Linux and windows - xxhighend, gentooplayer etc shortly but in the long run I feel like investing in something like sdtrans384 (I'm trying to make a usb variant of something similar, I'm still in the learning phase though, so it'll be a while before I can move into that area). My dac is also likely to change, I'm interested in investing in something like dddac or amb gamma 3 with custom i2s input (probably from the sdtrans384).

[manueljenkin]

@yamamoto2002 setting the playpcmwin as default player for music, whenever I double click a song it opens a new playpcmwin window (or task) instead of overriding the existing one. Is there any way to change this behavior?

[manueljenkin]

14 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

 

Thank you for your suggestion, I'll add this functionality on later versions.

 

When multiple PlayPcmWin instance plays music simultaneously with WASAPI shared mode, sound is mixed and I think it is great 😁

 

Haha. Now that you've said it I need to experiment this trick before you fix it.

[manueljenkin]

I finally got around to trying XXhighend (version 2.1.0) yesterday, and I feel I should have done this months ago - it sounds absolutely phenomenal. It was a messy set up/configuration process, which i'll get to in the later paragraphs, where I'll share all the downsides.

Let me start with the pros.

1. The sound is fantastic, by far the best I've heard so far. There's two aspects to the great sound. First is the reduction of CPU activity and hence the lower noise. 

This player runs on RAM, and has options to reduce background tasks, and also optimized to do minimal data transactions so as to have least noise (I'm simplifying the description of a complex process, which in its entirety is far more content than I could understand in full).

Most players I have tried that didn't do RAM based playback had a layer of digital haze to them, except one case of hysolid, which, without being RAM playback based, was clean but then it also had an artifically dense sound. And when other players were used in customized RAM playback, while the overall noise in most areas
of the spectrum decreases, some residuals pick back up at certain frequencies, especially at 8khz, and some kind of artificial softness at times. So the fix isn't a trivial <just push it to RAM and forget>. I described the RAM player experiments in full (for musicbee, albumplayer, playpcmwin) in a previous comment.

Of the music player softwares I have testsed, this is just the second one that I have come across that had neither an immediately obvious digital haze or a coloration (other one is wtfplay), and just the third I have experienced that didn't have a harsh digital haze (wftplay and hysolid are the other two).

This is not to say that xxhighend and wtfplay sound identical, they certainly have differences in sound, but they both don't seem to have any obvious deviations (or probably equally deviated from realism in either ends). XXHE sounds like a direct upgrade for album player, retaining a lot of the general texture/presentation of album player but with less haze and more detail, while WTFPLAY is a different sound one that I have not found an equivalent for.
Of course this would mean little if your dac had some extremely high end isolation, but I believe for a lot of cases, it would make similar differences as discussed above.

2. The above are comparisons with "arc prediction" turned off. Arc Prediction is a built in feature of XXhighend, and it is a custom interpolation algorithm! It is not a sinc filter, and its not even a general linear filter. The specifics of this is not something that @PeterSt would be likely to share, but it is some kind of polynomial fitting algorithm, along the lines of splines. And turned on, XXHE sounds way better than anything else I have heard reproduced on a digital system, and this alone makes the software worth the price IMO. The best references of an instrument I could relate the real world sound to would be flutes which I am quite familiar with. This is the first time I am hearing the micro textures and tonal gradations, (and the tonguing patterns if any) of the flute being rendered with such realism from a system.
And the same realism extends to anything that has subtle gradients and shifts, the sound of winds, claps, foleys etc sounding far more realistic than I have heard before. The next big improvement is with spatial tracking. Whenever the mix has a panning/rotating object, I feel at much better ease visualizing its entire trajectory without abrupt cuts with this. For anything that is dynamic, and preferrably natural (well mastered synthetic music works great as well), the arc prediction does a wonderful job of filling the points in a way that imo makes best fidelity from a listeners perspective (may not be from the perspective of an APX555).

Yes I have tried Hqplayer, with it's oversampler on my pc. Regarding the digital noise, it sounds as hazy as musicbee or winyl (not surprising as they are based on same library), though I guess you could use a network streamer to mitigate a lot of these noise, so for most people it would be a non issue. However, coming to the oversampling, I even tried some high tap custom oversampled data I got from others using different filters and while it did changes, it never brought anything that would make me use it over the built in OS and Noise shapers in my ESS based dac (Apogee groove, supports upto 192khz 24bit), but arc prediction has done that for me. With any music that has a compressed structure though, I felt I preferred the arc prediction off than ON, as the bass density (or thickness) felt a bit reduced and it sounded bland for lack of a better word. Of course, you don't judge a race car by its ability to run on a bad terrain, but it's quite an easy fix here to just turn off the arc prediction in those scenarios. There is optional choices for custom filter tuning, but I restricted myself to let my dac do its own OS job for that scenario feeding 1:1 data. This is not a knock against hqplayer. I am well aware that it works fantastic on many other systems and for sure would be a better alternative to an oversampling ic on the dac chip for many cases, but there's something quite exciting and realistic about arc prediction that I haven't found  elsewhere. Maybe I should try some NOS too someday.

I am generally averse to playback software costing money, more so considering WTFPLAY actually sounded better than almost all the paid ones I have tried, but this is one time where I would say it is worth it. The interpolation algorithm makes a very meaningful difference, and can actually be considered a significant part of the DAC. This definitely makes its way to the top of my wishlist. Now to the problems.

1. It is likely to screw up with your system. Always try on a spare system first. It has an issue with windows 10 on my system where the player removes the background wallpaper and replaces it with black screen.

2. I actually tried to make it run a few months ago and failed, and its the main reason for the delay in trying this tool. The instructions are mostly unclear and the UI is very unintuitive without a proper guide (even with a guide, I would call it barely passable) hence I felt that I would add a personal guide to using it.

a. It requires dotnet 3.5 installed as a pre requisite. Windows 10 afaik doesn't come with dotnet 3.5 installed as default.

b. Xxhighend doesn't seem to have an installation procedure, coming in a compressed portable package that could be run without installation.

c. On first run of the executable it does certain things, one of which is making your windows background screen black (point a). It doesn't have a progress bar, so it would be necessary to wait for a while.

d. Once it is loaded you are treated with a very scattered UI. I'll try to give an idea of what/where each setting is.

To the left top is the settings for Arc prediction ON/OFF, Custom Filtering ON/OFF, Volume control and Volume Normalization ON/OFF. I haven't played around enough with volume normalization as I haven't tagged my music yet with volume information.

To the middle of the top you have options tagged P, L, S and H. Selecting each toggles the middle window between them. P refers to the playlist, I haven't figured out what L means, and S refers to the settings.

You need to go to settings and configure for your dac in the output for its device buffer size (you can get this from your dac's driver control panel), and DAC settings to choose what sample rate and what word length it supports (mine is 24 bits 192.0 Khz).
At the very bottom of the settings you have options to disable certain additional services if you intend to cut down the noise even more.

Once done with settings go back to playlist to see options at the bottom for play, stop , prev etc. Explore is the command to open file manager to input a music file. Load doesn't open file manager, I don't know it's utility. Clear option clears the current playlist.

3. It is easy to mess up with the settings and get artefacted sound. One area I found it very evident is volume control. XXhighend has a volume control that acts in parallel to your Windows DAC volume control. Simultaneously playing around with both XXHE volume and DAC volume at once (with neither at 100%) is guaranteed to introduce a wierd softness/lack of definition in the sound, as if someone applied a wierd lowpass filter. Voices sound fine but unfocused, while drums and cymbals lack all sorts of shimmer if done this way.
My suggestion would be to set up your dac volume at 100% and use XXHE volume control as it would do volume control + interpolation in one go, which sounds very good without any of the above artefacts.

4. A high bandwidth (high slew rate dac) is recommended as per the Dev, and preferably R2R. Otherwise it is likely to mess up the output of the algorithm. My Apogee groove is actually most likely at the corner of passability (has a little over 100khz bandwidth as per stereophile measuremeasurements) but being a delta Sigma it would in the end doing quite a bit of modulations and I guess I'll not be able to see the full potential until I change my dac.

5. No crossfeed. I would have loved to see a well implemented crossfeed plugin for us headphone users.

6. It costs! I think the price is justified but WTFPLAY and Playpcmwin (or maybe daphile too which I couldnt get to work on my system) would still be what I could comfortably recommend because it is free and sounds great for something that is free.

[manueljenkin]

Yes I definitely agree that the price is fully justified! I would actually say bargain. I need to build a spare pc before I can get to use this though. I have a single pc for all my tasks at the moment.

[manueljenkin]

Xxhe sure is massively under appreciated. I hope to try/buy his dac some day but for now my current interest is to build something like a transformer coupled 4 deck dddac1794 and pair it up with xxhe/xxhe os in somewhat nuc like pc (I'm trying to do something interesting, will let you know if it works). I'll look into further upgrades later from there. Any idea of similar inexpensive diy dacs + amps with good bandwidth and high sample rate support? I would prefer to avoid delta Sigma.

[manueljenkin]

12 hours ago, manisandher said:

 

I've been a strong advocate of R2R DACs for a long time, but wouldn't worry too much about this nowadays. My RME uses an AKM delta-sigma DAC chip and sounds really, really good. And in any event, >99.99% of the music we all listen to has been recorded using ADCs with delta-sigma chips 🙂.

 

Regarding amps, I love the sound of my F5 monos - they are simply the cleanest amps I've ever owned/heard. The circuit boards are easily obtained and I think they're pretty popular with DIYers. If class A isn't your thing, I'd look into the class A/B offerings from Neurochrome. I'd personally steer well clear of any class D amps, but that's very much a personal choice based on bad past experiences.

 

Mani.

Delta Sigma adc and dac aren't quite the same thing so the extrapolation (pun intended) doesn't hold (again). I don't have major issues with delta sigma, all my present 3 dacs are ds, but I would want to try r2r when I'm moving up, mainly because of noise shaping/response changes (audible or not, I just want to try r2r lol). Of course r2r today doesn't quite directly relate to just stacking resistors one on top of another, the same way delta sigma doesn't directly relate to a primitive pwm dac. Also note the pcm1794 I mentioned above is not really an r2r. It's some sort of hybrid that I haven't got to understand properly yet 

 

I have looked into first watt amps as refernece to learn from when I was learning analog design. I'm looking for headphone amps though currently, something like Amb beta 22. (I was looking into Amb gamma 3 dac too, for its Wolfson 8741 based design)

[manueljenkin]

1 hour ago, robocop said:

No contest Xxhighend is the best followed by Wtfplay. I came to this some years ago.

A NOS Dac is the best to follow this playback software. I'm not in this camp yet but the Holo May Dac looks very good from what I'm reading.

Do all the processing in Xxhighend and pass it through a NOS dac no filters.

 

Mind you Xxhighend does need to be working from the best dedicated Audio PC one can afford to allow it to perform its best. The source quality is critical. Using the Xx volume is the best.

 

Robert

The analog bandwidth of holo spring and may is considerably less (about 50khz, as compared to a similar priced yggy or other dac that is easily above 100khz). Of course the overall sound is a combination of many parameters, but considering that Peter emphasises on high slew rate (which means high bandwidth in general), I think that might be somewhat of a limiting factor when it comes to pairing xxhe and holo spring.

[manueljenkin]

8 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

Hi Manuel - what a great effort you did there - again !

 

What will be happening is that you run XXHighEnd on to a random W10 version, while only certain versions are "certified" (by me). For example, the latest normal Desktop version is 14393.0 and nothing newer. This all relates to which services can be shut off while the OS keeps on running stable. This includes the normal UI - just saying. And the first thing which will o wrong at newer versions, is indeed that UI (like the screen staying black forever).

 

Also notice that nothing within XXHighEnd is made for "Attended" playback really. So all you'd see from that is emulation (the UI emulates what the Sound Engine is doing). So others said it as well: all is about UNattended playback, which kills the UI and about everything from Windows (desktop UI). Next its own OSD "interface" remains.

 

I can provide the 14393,0 version, if you want. You will see that all is the most normal and outside of playback the OS is normally usable (even in MinOS (= audio) mode). During playaback (Unattendedly) it is an audio PC only and lame for anything else. But now watch the SQ ... :-)

 

For your special interest: When you apply all correctly, the OS becomes something like 10000 times more lean. The most crucial in that, is the Windows UI (already known from people with Server OSes without GUI). Regarding this latter, it won't matter whether using such a Server OS or just the Desktop OS because XXHE turns both into the same anyway. Server OS is supported up to WS2019.

 

 

Hi Peter. Thank you very much. I have currently reset my pc as I have to work on another project, so I can't try the new version at present.

 

I would like to know if it would be possible to pair up xxhe with a headless single board x86 computer (after undervolting)? I found quite a few atom and amd g series based sbc (some of them for industrial use case) online. Fairly decent amount of cpu cache and RAM too.

[manueljenkin]

4 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

It will work as long as it runs Windows 10 (from X86). But all "undervolting" will sound as bad as can be.

Please keep in mind that I work the other wat around: The Ferrari which drives 80Km/h and wants to accelerate to 120Km/h (high transient etc.) which we do with over-power and not with underpowered 2CVs (which won't even reach 120 as they do 110 only).

Ok so lowering the clock speeds is the better approach.

[manueljenkin]

I am looking to see if I can take any existing x86 SoC boards with a pcie slot and add up a low noise pcie to usb card in it, and run xxhe on that device. Probably also tweak it with a slightly better power supply. It will have its own hard drive/storage with music collection (which shall be pushed to Ram when playing back), and only the control being done through LAN.

[manueljenkin]

11 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

Same thing; you can do that but the SQ will be lousy. You will find that this sounds worse than what you had running.

 

You put so much effort in this all ... why not have a simple separate HDD (or SSD) with the OS and all for XXHighEnd ? All you further need is replace that with the OS(-disk) you normally have. And have it more or less removable. Or put both the disks in there (and change boot by means of boot menu). Or make a dual boot OS.

 

 

Remember, it is again not the way to do it. Have a network connection to your "main" PC and connect the music (by USB or whatever) to that PC.

 

But otherwise, just go ahead as you deem is fine. It will work all right. :-)

Btw, Ferrari's don't do too well these days anyway. Or maybe next Sunday ?

 

Got it. My current machine is an ultrabook (surface book), so no chance of having the hard drives added/removed. I definitely enjoyed the sound of xxhe even on this setup (and pretty sure it'll be much better on a desktop).

[manueljenkin]

@PeterSt off topic to players (on topic to interpolation). Any books/resources you could recommend me on general interpolation, wavelet theory etc?

[manueljenkin]

Just finished watching this lecture. He's a wonderful teacher: 

 

[manueljenkin]

The more I use xxhe the more I'm feeling the ui is genius. If only there was a user manual. @PeterSt, would you mind me making one?

 

Played more with the SFS size allocations and got into nice sweetspot. It sounds breathtaking even on my laptop with a u series processor. It is less optimal than a desktop processor owing to power optimization sequences at the expense of switching noises. Apart from processor, laptop Ram, and other components also have low power optimization choices that can have compromises on access noise and periodicity.

 

Version 2.10 sounds great from the get go but version 2.11 takes some 10 mins or so to sound its best in my system (but after 10 mins of break in/warm up, it sounds better than 2.10 as a whole). I assume this is relating to internal schedulers/power optimizations in windows taking time to adapt to the task. Running fantastic on 8x (352.8/384k) on my geek out 450 (TCM filter on the dac) and it sounds amazing. My friend who has an RME adi2 (slow filter on the dac) also finds it amazing running xxhe at 8x. Is 16x exclusive to phasure NOS1, or can other DACs support it as well. He couldn't get it to work at 16x with adi2 yet.

 

I am planning to build a workstation for my compute purposes by the end of this year or early next year, with Radeon pro vii GPU or similar. Haven't decided on the processor yet, likely the new Ryzens. I am curious if I can use the same machine for xxhe audio as well with minimal changed when playing music (just disabling the pcie slots through bios instead of removing the GPU). Any good choices of Linear Power supplies that can supply this GPU and CPU?

 

I would also like to know what are the possibilities of running xxhe on a hyper v windows server running on top of a lean windows server. I might be using linux/bsd for majority of compute task and separate hyper v windows server or normal windows pro (separate from the one running xxhe) for the windows tools (some circuit design tools etc). I haven't checked much if there's noticeable performance hit, anything I should be aware of? Regarding the Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

[manueljenkin]

2 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

I am not sure whether I addressed it already (probably Yes), but the Mach III Audio PC is explicitly based on a server board. So *the* main difference with its predecessor (Mach II) is the server MoBo.

But this is not really what you asked, and the on experience of several months of trialing with virtual machines (the leanest possible) told me that this was a no-go. Theoretically it already won't work well because of too much in between. This is one layer at least and you will notice it in everything (buffers can't be that small etc. etc.).

 

 

Hmm ... it should be able to work; I have one myself but I did not try it so far, but the fact that @manisandher also has one *and* tried it on XXHighEnd (or on his NOS1 DAC only ?) without further complaints, tells me that it just works. Maybe it is the choice between "Needs 24 bits" and "Need 32 bits", although I recall from ever (RME) back that it will do both. Of course the ADI2 is 32 bits inherently ...

 

 

Personally I have no other experiences than one customer who applied an external LPSU to his Mach II back at the time, had that LPSU even heavily modded (like making it 3x more expensive by an experienced LPSU EE), now has a Mach III with our own LPSU in there, and likes the latter for the way better. So No, I don't know about third party products, but I do know what we apply to our own (and this is about response speed explicitly - see ATX specs).

 

 

I actually forgot to respond to this ...

I have no hands-on experience, nor feedback from customers about the Ryzen CPU's. They should work out for the better (because more lean), BUT since it also requires a new MoBo obviously, it is too far for me to just try (the development of a new Audio PC around a new MoBo takes many months).

XXHighEnd does not use GPU cores/power, so no, that does not help at all. Contrary, the Audio PC should not contain a GPU in the first place (although Server boards like we use, (always) do BUT not on-board of the CPU, which would be forbidden).

 

Btw, the greatest hidden gem of 2.11 (which came without real release notes) is ending your listening day (Unattended Playback) with Pause (E on the On Screen keyboard pad), which causes all to be really "hot" until the next listening session which you'd start with P(lay). This is way better than a listening session of 3 or so hours, because the other (say) 20 hours are really doing more to your system. I myself have only experience with the NOS1, but I think it will apply to all DACs. Remember that this only works when Unattended is in order (works outside of MinOS the same).

Thanks Peter. I'll look into these. I'm more interested into ryzen + Radeon vii pro + of course search of optimal low noise motherboard etc, and disabling vii, either in bios or as a whole since this will be both my number crunching machine for scientific computation and also audio machine. I'll be curious if you ever make a ryzen based one 😬.

 

[manueljenkin]

On 5/4/2021 at 9:37 PM, pompon said:

Try Junilabs player ... it's free and you can optimize the player and specific songs many times.

Mind blowing ...

 

 

Thank you very much. I am using the file optimizer and running the optimized files through xxhighend. It sounds much better than the stock file. Less of the digital haze. I have to make sure only optimized files are loaded in xxhe during playback. If I load a combination of optimized + unoptimized the overall fidelity isn't as good as loading only the optimized file.

 

I also found that in my system I prefer to have everything at 2x or more optimization cycles even if it takes more time. 1x while mostly better feels a little "light" sounding. The problem is it takes a lot of time. Any way to make it a batch operation? I understand batch operation may not be possible in certain scenarios like parallel procs or larger space introducing noise back, but I would be more excited if there's a possibility of batch operation.

 

NOTE: I have checked the files and the data is intact (ie bit perfect). This tool is about reducing the intrinsic noise associated with the physical (electromagnetic) structure of the stored data. It definitely sounds better.

[manueljenkin]

2 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

I should, because the upgrade path of the Xeon's is a bit dead at the moment. This is BIOS related (super slow boot) and Memory related (the required ECC memory sounds like sh*t).

 

 

*hands-on (I corrected that in my post by now)

I expected this regarding the ECC memory. It has overhead and additional Circuit to function both of which can introduce noise of their own. Maybe it would be possible to re work/de tune the instruction sets around this but I guess that would be a lot of work.

 

On the other hand ECC is useful for other applications 😅. Not a must for me though.

[manueljenkin]

On 5/3/2021 at 3:32 PM, lotusaurus said:

 

I'm keen to try out XXHE, but the documentation is ... challenging. I've been trying to work my way through that, but the first major obstacle is trying to understand what sort of PC I need. While I see that I need only a CPU and a network connection, what sort of CPU do I need? The more powerful the better? Choose speed over cores or vice versa?

I made a set up tutorial for xxhighend: 

 

Please have a read, you are likely to get most of your questions answered there.

 

XXhighend will work on any x86 pc. In general, Server/multi-core in under-clocked mode are better (the parallelism and higher cache, often relate to lower noise and better determinism on the usb data and ground lines) but it's only a rule of thumb.

[manueljenkin]

4 hours ago, seeteeyou said:

I saw 19041.1 on the other thread you just started several hours ago, then I recalled something about the "bare minimum" version of that particular Windows build number

 

ReMin - replicated MinWin
https://github.com/replisys/remin-core

 

Remin project notes
https://osg.wiki/books/servicing/page/remin-project-notes

 

FYI - I did a search on Google and found the specific ISO required for ReMin, though it would take quite a few tries to start downloading the file successfully

 

https://pastebin.com/raw/iMGaaCYJ

 

After that, some packages should be necessary for adding audio support back to the OS

 

https://uupdump.net/findfiles.php?id=c8e87bb7-e741-41c1-b164-d97a56d9fd49

 

Someone posted some instructions here

 

https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/guide-adding-gui-to-server-core-1-21v.76023/page-9#post-1412792

 

And then this one could also be useful

 

https://cloud.mail.ru/public/qRL8/5ijBydZDU/Packs/MultimediaRestrictedCodecs/10.0.19041/

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/help-debloating-windows-10-image-needed.832141/

 

Can you guide me through this please. Is this for getting a low footprint windows 10, or windows server 2019 or windows server 2014? I would like to explore this.

[manueljenkin]

50 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

Please don't do this when using XXHighEnd or everything will be one big out of control mess. This is because XXHighEnd does this herself already (called "MinOS" mode).

 

On another note, XXHighEnd should be used with 14393.0 for best (and super stable) results. This is something for that other thread you created, but it is not easy to incorporate because the thread is already there and it should be in the first post. That means you should be able to edit that (you can ask Chris).

Thank you Peter. I'll try to request permission from Chris on that.

 

And don't worry, I won't do any other tweak for the xxhighend installation. The above tweak I'll try independently with other players in a separate installation. As you know I am trying to learn the whole process so I'm trying out all approaches suggested by different people, but I'll make sure one edit doesn't affect another (mostly when a system edit is done, I'll do a clean reinstall of windows before trying another player).

[manueljenkin]

10 hours ago, micr0g said:

Hi i think Xmplay is the best option and jriver the worst as it sounds muffly

winyl is ok but not for me as i like an interface and usage like winamp.

Musicbee is great but it has so many options and you can't drag&drop a folder to the "playing now"

Playpcmwin is a great option but it takes to long to read just one track so i'm here to ask you if i can do something to load the track faster or if i can somehow to stop the ram loading.

 

Thanks

Ram playback in general imo sounds better and software devs who design these tools might feel the same. Maybe try Junilabs audio player. It is ram playback but felt snappy for me.

 

Non ram playback, there's a player called Lilith audio player. It also supports vst. Maybe give it a try. I'll try to make a total list of software choices soon.

 

Jriver has settings you can tweak.