Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[manueljenkin]

I don't know about kenrockwell but amir measured it and he didn't find any such abnormalities on the wrt distortion. Measures as good as many desktop grade dacs (Note: I'm mentioning this only because you wanted to know in terms of measurements. I am not a big fan of such limited measurements which dont capture all aspects of sound).

 

It is a current feedback amp and has a logic that controls current as per the load. It can be plugged directly into an amp without any issue. It output 5V line out at 100% so I use it at 55, or -8db for 2V line out (controlled by asio/alsa driver, nothing in software volume scaling).

 

It is interesting how the shures behave since it sounds very sharp to me and far more detailed than my hd800 and hd700, yet the measurements don't show it. Shure srh940 is the best headphone I've ever heard outside of srh1540 and the only change sonically felt between the two was a minor change to fr. Srh940 is the fastest and cleanest CSD measured at goldenears, along with good attack transients.

 

I don't want to get deeper into that again. I only mentioned the "best" analysis tools I have. Here is the rest of the list.

 

My other dacs and amps : geek out 450, topping nx4dsd. (Apart from groove and burson fun). The sparkos is used in the fun, replacing the V6 vivids it came with.

 

My cables : apogee stock cable, supra usb cable 1m, uptone uspcb cable.

 

Headphones :

Shure srh1540, Hd700, hd598, hd800 ( Hd800 is without earpads, it sounds too bassy for my tastes with earpads), Sony mdr cd1700 rev1, Sony mdr F1, Sennheiser urbanite xl, fostex thx00, akg sextett, Sennheiser hd425 vintage (dead left channel, under repair), beyer dt1350 and few other headphones I don't remember at the back of my head.

 

The changes reported were consistent across multiple mix and match of these sets, with the srh1540 showing the most easily audible intensity of changes along with hd800, urbanite xl. Others like hd700, hd598 showed a moderate change or in case of cd1700 and fostex thx00, no change.

 

I wouldn't be engaging in further discussions on the gear specs part since it will be moving off topic, and the companies aren't paying me to defend their products. I speak out what I hear, thats all. If you don't agree, fine, there are others who agree, especially audio professionals.

 

My best reference gear atm is srh1540 + apogee groove + uptone uspcb + burson fun with ss3601, and running wtfplay and that is what I use to judge products primarily.

 

Someday I'll get to own a qualia 010 or raal sr1a, but till then this will be my reference.

[manueljenkin]

33 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

I don't know about kenrockwell but amir measured it and he didn't find any such abnormalities on the wrt distortion. Measures as good as many desktop grade dacs (Note: I'm mentioning this only because you wanted to know in terms of measurements. I am not a big fan of such limited measurements which dont capture all aspects of sound).

 

It is a current feedback amp and has a logic that controls current as per the load. It can be plugged directly into an amp without any issue. It output 5V line out at 100% so I use it at 55, or -8db for 2V line out (controlled by asio/alsa driver, nothing in software volume scaling).

 

It is interesting how the shures behave since it sounds very sharp to me and far more detailed than my hd800 and hd700, yet the measurements don't show it. Shure srh940 is the best headphone I've ever heard outside of srh1540 and the only change sonically felt between the two was a minor change to fr. Srh940 is the fastest and cleanest CSD measured at goldenears, along with good attack transients.

 

I don't want to get deeper into that again. I only mentioned the "best" analysis tools I have. Here is the rest of the list.

 

My other dacs and amps : geek out 450, topping nx4dsd. (Apart from groove and burson fun). The sparkos is used in the fun, replacing the V6 vivids it came with.

 

My cables : apogee stock cable, supra usb cable 1m, uptone uspcb cable.

 

Headphones :

Shure srh1540, Hd700, hd598, hd800 ( Hd800 is without earpads, it sounds too bassy for my tastes with earpads), Sony mdr cd1700 rev1, Sony mdr F1, Sennheiser urbanite xl, fostex thx00, akg sextett, Sennheiser hd425 vintage (dead left channel, under repair), beyer dt1350 and few other headphones I don't remember at the back of my head.

 

The changes reported were consistent across multiple mix and match of these sets, with the srh1540 showing the most easily audible intensity of changes along with hd800, urbanite xl. Others like hd700, hd598 showed a moderate change or in case of cd1700 and fostex thx00, no change.

 

I wouldn't be engaging in further discussions on the gear specs part since it will be moving off topic, and the companies aren't paying me to defend their products. I speak out what I hear, thats all. If you don't agree, fine, there are others who agree, especially audio professionals.

 

My best reference gear atm is srh1540 + apogee groove + uptone uspcb + burson fun with ss3601, and running wtfplay and that is what I use to judge products primarily.

 

Someday I'll get to own a qualia 010 or raal sr1a, but till then this will be my reference.

Most of the inferences were made from my "reference" gear, but as subset was tested with other gear to ensure there isn't a serious proxy in play.

[manueljenkin]

Yaaay. I've finally got my android system to Sound good. Turns out the battery optimisations were the culprit.

Changed that in system settings for uapp, and had to fiddle out some options regarding volume control in addition (still experimenting, some inconsistencies). Other settings as before - bit perfect output and the likes. As it stands the sound out of this setup is as good as, if not better than a well configured musicbee/winyl on windows. Linux (wtfplay) on my laptop is still noticeably better no doubt but this android setup is enjoyable too.

And it sounded good out of a phone with an old battery and couple of adapters for usb connection. Would be servicing my phone battery eventually and hopefully I'll see even better gains, since my dac gets its power from usb port.

 

I've asked a question in the cables forum, please do reply if you can. Post 1726 

 

[manueljenkin]

I have finally got around to trying PlayPCMWin, Smallplayer, Ulilith and JetAudio. There is a change to my system during this analysis. Earlier I used my apogee groove (Dac-AMP) + HD800 (nopads), or apogee groove (Dac 2v out) + Burson fun (sparkos ss3601 opamps) + SRH1540. PC remains same - surface book. This test was done using topping nx4dsd, and urbanite xl, both of which are brighter, noticeably less resolving than the formers, but I've tried my best to decouple this from the music player effects. I've personally experienced each link in the chain imparts a specific sonic footprint, regardless of changes in the other links (except when the links are tied together, like Output impedance correlations). I also did the USB selective suspend removal, and removed system sounds as per this guide from focusrite : https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Optimising-your-PC-for-Audio-on-Windows-10 . Buffer size on my dac was set at 32768 samples, the max permissible value, on all scenarios except Ulilith (reason below).

 

1. JetAudio - Unfortunately it doesnt seem to support asio/wasapi. And sq was only Okay. I'm not even sure if it supported usb asynchronous audio. Enhancements were turned off. I'd be happy to give it another try if anyone can guide me to set this up in bit perfect Asynchronous audio.

 

2. SmallPlayer - Sq in terms of texture was alright not much problem with unnatural shimmer or bad boomy or bootleggish bass, but noticeably mistimed. Pans, etc weren't so great. Not sure if it supports usb asynchronous, I doubt it considering how old it is and the sound, I seriously doubt it. I guess it would be a very nice pairing with internal cards on pcie or otherwise. I did try it on my Laptop speakers directly and it performed quite well there, but a bit quiet and extremely lacking in bass. (I guess showing the speakers with their actual properties instead of faking density using compression or other artefacts. It had noticeably more energy and speed than I'm used to with my laptop speakers). I'm gonna keep it for my laptop speaker playback.

 

3. PlayPCMWin - Very nice. I like it a lot. One of the few players that compete well against musicbee in my setup. Had to fiddle a little with settings. Settled on Exclusive mode with Pro audio priority. 16bit downscaling I left to truncation instead of other options, but it's not a deal since my dac accepts more than 16bit data streams. In terms of sound reproduction, while it is noticeably different from musicbee, neither of them feel coloured or wrong. It's the presentation, and texture around instruments where the differences pop in. PlayPCMWin sounds a lot more efforless compared to Musicbee. Musicbee has a bit of an edge to the sound and as if the instrument had an accompanying low level noise band, in comparision to PlayPCMWin where the instruments sounded fairly natural without any additional band/texture around them. However I feel that there is a problem with that too, PlayPCMWin seems to shave off the edges to the sound of instruments a little. I find transient hits to be slightly more impactful and real despite the slight noise around them on musicbee, while PlayPCMWin seems to mute it just a tiny bit away from what could be perceived real. It is tiny, but it is noticeably and makes me wanting a little more attack. It also makes bass guitars and low level echoes harder to follow than Musicbee even though it is cleaner on that aspect. I can sum it up this way. Musicbee shows good detail and hints of what could be hidden extreme detail, but is a bit distracted sounding. PlayPCMWin shows good detail in better precision but doesn't try to extract the hidden extreme details like musicbee does. PlayPCMWin is the closest I have gotten from windows to my current reference WTFPLAY linux distro, in terms of texture, effortlessness and most importantly lack of color. Hysolid, another player for windows, is more detailed than PlayPCMWin and also is just as effortless while extracting a lot of shades of shimmer, but is more denser sounding than what could be perceived real (think PlayPCM win = HD800, Hyslolid = LCD2). It's a bit of toss between hysolid and PlayPCMWin, but hysolid is buggy, PlayPCMWin is not. WTFPlay is still my reference/champ, it has the texture, and effortlessness of PlayPCMWin but also far more detail, better realistic impact, and believable sound than all of PlayPCMWin, Hysolid and Musicbee.

 

4. Ulilith - Seems to have issues with large buffer sizes, was stuttering heavily on 32768 samples on the buffer so I dropped down to 2048 samples. Works great in Wasapi. It is very different from PlayPCMWin and Musicbee. Both the star and pitfall of the show is the treble. Its sizzly, shimmery, but also aggressive. It is not distorted or fuzzy. It is very real, but very forward and in your face. Like you are standing next to a cymbal crash, with no muting off of any part of the sound. Oucch. My current setup being a bit treble fuzzy doesn't help it much either. I expect it to be a lot more enjoyable when I get back to my Srh1540 or HD800. It veers on the opposite end of PlayPCMWin if you keep Musicbee in the middle. Both Ulilith and PlayPCMWin sound cleaner than Ulilith, but both show deviations in either directions. While PlayPCMWin is mellow and laid back, Ulilith is forward and aggressive but without any of the general distorted feel which i get when eq'ing up the treble. I love the energy and shimmer of Ulilith, but I would have to be very careful of system pairing. One more point to note, I first tried buffer to Auto from 32768 which was unbearably aggressive during cymbal crashes. Setting it to 2048 made it more bearable, I think fixing it to a more optimal value would help me get it to good enjoyable levels while still maintaining that aggression.

 

I would be experimenting further on both PlayPCMWin and Ulilith with my other gear and other settings, as of now, I like PlayPCMWin a lot for windows and Ulilith as a flavor player. Musicbee still remains my go-to choice due to it being the middle of the line, despite its minor issues, but all 3 are compromises in one way or other, when compared to something like WTFplay.

 

I plan to move out to streamers where these player swaps would likely start to make lesser difference, I just made these posts to help people looking to extract the best of their existing system.

 

Tldr:
Wtfplay Linux - still the best, by a large margin
Musicbee - a good compromise land in windows, nowhere near as detailed or clean as wtfplay, but still good enough for me.
Play pcm win - closest to wtfplay in terms of texture and lack of colour/noise but also noticeably lower detail, slightly less than even musicbee. Ever so slightly muted in the attack.
Ulilith - Clean and aggressive. Opposite of playpcm win. I love the flavour but pairing can be iffy if the rest of your chain is aggressive as well.

[seeteeyou]

Awesome comparisons among so many candidates, thanks a lot for taking the time.

 

So far wtfplay seemed to be the champion and there's another comparison as follows

 

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/24966-ecdesigns/page/23/?tab=comments#comment-1070708

 

Just wondering if SqueezeCore + LMS were able to rival wtfplay by any chance?

 

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58398-squeezecore-a-minimal-audio-os-running-squeezelite/

https://audiodigitale.eu/?p=228

Quote

I built SqueezeCore because I needed a lightweight, minimal, plug&play OS to use it as a squeezelite player. The whole OS is 17MB and when running it occupies around 60MB of RAM; SqueezeCore must be installed on a USB drive and will run completely in RAM.

 

[manueljenkin]

3 hours ago, seeteeyou said:

Awesome comparisons among so many candidates, thanks a lot for taking the time.

 

So far wtfplay seemed to be the champion and there's another comparison as follows

 

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/24966-ecdesigns/page/23/?tab=comments#comment-1070708

 

Just wondering if SqueezeCore + LMS were able to rival wtfplay by any chance?

 

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58398-squeezecore-a-minimal-audio-os-running-squeezelite/

https://audiodigitale.eu/?p=228

 

Thank you for the kind words and the links. Unfortunately my experience stops here. I am yet to try any networked audio chain or signal regenerator. If I ever come across and make a post/comparison, I'll tag you. The sdtrans384 is something I'm interested to get when I have the budget.

[manueljenkin]

Well I guess I was a little quick to conclude PlayPCMwin lacks impact, it was actually the secondary system, mainly the dac I used that was lacking, just that it was masked by the noise in musicbee and PlayPCMwin showed it as is. Went back to my primary systems and PlayPCMwin has all the grunt and kick, and the effortless details with all headphones, including the urbanite. Not quite as good as wtfplay but it's very good. I forgot that I never tried nx4 on wtfplay - it is actually a little muted sounding on a good source.

 

Ulilith is just as expected. Forward treble hits. Just not as obnoxiously harsh as on the topping + urbanite xl but still quite forward, and cleanliness is retained. Can get fatiguing quite quickly. The threshold time counter just ticks a bit slower here.

 

Update: also I can hear noise band whenever I have content around 8khz when using PlayPCMwin, I think this also affects the low end a little, especially if the hit comes in around the 8khz band together with the bass (guessing this must be USB frame noise 1/125us). This did not happen with Wtfplay with the same system and wtfplay was all round noticeably better, so this is unlikely to be a complete fault of the dac, and has happened with all DACs I own. Wonder what is happening here! Is PlayPCMwin likely playing around with the usb output power profile too? In fact this particular issue wasn't distinctly audible even with other players despite them having a bevy of other noise. Is it something relating to how the spread of noise affects the analog section, like if it's a single noise band, it being more reactive/unstable than if it were a wide noise band? My supra usb cable also had a similar but far worse effect and caused a bootleggish sound signature. I'm assuming it's something related to a specific noise profile, might be similar or different to the above. I have tried everything right now using either stock groove cable or uptone uspcb. I'll try to pair up supra with PlayPCMwin and see if the effect compounds or nulls or modulates into something esle.

 

Is there a known way to get this fixed? PlayPCMwin seems to come eerily close to fixing windows audio for me, this particular issue aside. I'm thinking of a simple regenerator or a 8khz notch filter in the ground plane of the data line. I think going external power would also help.

[manueljenkin]

I realised PlayPCMwin developer is here. Hi @yamamoto2002. Thank you so much for this wonderful piece of software. I love it. Can you guide me if I can get rid of this 8khz issue?

 

pc - surface book 2015

dac - Apogee groove

cable - uptone uspcb.

 

Also, does it have restrictions on use of signal regenerators? My friend got this error when trying to use with his micro iusb 3.0. What I understand so far from the error is that it is looking to see if the address of the dac/slave buffer/memory (889000A, assigned by windows when plugging in) is free for taking in transactions, but since the iusb seems to be holding itself as the master for it, it doesn't seem to be free. Or is 889000A the address of iusb and it is refusing to slave to the PC and free itself?

 

Also if I were to try to make a music playback software either in Linux or windows, using full buffer to ram, are there any references you would recommend me? I am thinking of using ALSA in Linux to make one for my Allo sparky, mostly a headless one. Need guidance in what to look for when optimizing the device for lowest noise and better timing on the usb output line. Anything relating to cpu cache processes/coding to reduce even ram access?

[manueljenkin]

Another doubt I have is regarding the fetch of data from RAM. Does the 64bit version use a fetch of 64bits or more data at once (AVX, or SSE) or does it do a 32 bit or less fetch. I'm guessing the former would fetch sample for both channels in one shot (even multiple samples if more than 64 bits), while for 32 bit it would have to do a channel by channel fetch. I cannot ascertain this to any parameters yet, but curious to know if the correlation I'm thinking holds good with respect to stereo separation.

[yamamoto2002]

Thank you for using PlayPcmWin.

 

On 9/20/2020 at 12:05 PM, manueljenkin said:

Update: also I can hear noise band whenever I have content around 8khz when using PlayPCMwin, I think this also affects the low end a little, especially if the hit comes in around the 8khz band together with the bass (guessing this must be USB frame noise 1/125us). This did not happen with Wtfplay with the same system and wtfplay was all round noticeably better, so this is unlikely to be a complete fault of the dac, and has happened with all DACs I own. Wonder what is happening here! Is PlayPCMwin likely playing around with the usb output power profile too?

8kHz noise is High Speed USB packet noise. I don't know exact mechanism to cause this but PlayPcmWin sets computer power state to high-performance-ish when Render thread task type setting is "Pro Audio" (this causes to call Multimedia Class Scheduler Service API). "Timer Resolution = 1ms" setting also may cause power usage increase (but it may cause no effect when other app sets timer resolution. Need to observe the change of actual timer resolution value). These settings can be changed on Detailed settings window.

 

On 9/20/2020 at 6:22 PM, manueljenkin said:

My friend got this error when trying to use with his micro iusb 3.0. What I understand so far from the error is that it is looking to see if the address of the dac/slave buffer/memory (889000A, assigned by windows when plugging in) is free for taking in transactions, but since the iusb seems to be holding itself as the master for it, it doesn't seem to be free. Or is 889000A the address of iusb and it is refusing to slave to the PC and free itself?

 

8889000A is HRESULT error code returned from IAudioClient::Initialize and it means the audio device is in use, may be other music app uses the device with ASIO or WASAPI exclusive. Or the device is set to default playback device of WASAPI shared mode and the endpoint is set to not allow exclusive access.

 

Open control panel > sound > playback devices tab > your device property > Advanced tab

• Check Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device
• Check Give exclusive mode applications priority

to fix.

 

Surface Book 2015 runs 64-bit operating system and memory address should be 16 digit hexadecimal number, not 8 digit.

 

18 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

Another doubt I have is regarding the fetch of data from RAM. Does the 64bit version use a fetch of 64bits or more data at once (AVX, or SSE) or does it do a 32 bit or less fetch. I'm guessing the former would fetch sample for both channels in one shot (even multiple samples if more than 64 bits), while for 32 bit it would have to do a channel by channel fetch. I cannot ascertain this to any parameters yet, but curious to know if the correlation I'm thinking holds good with respect to stereo separation.

 

PlayPcmWin uses CopyMemory and it is reasonably fast,  I don't know implementation details of CopyMemory. I think memory to memory copy method does not affect to channel separation performance.

 

 

On 9/20/2020 at 6:22 PM, manueljenkin said:

Also if I were to try to make a music playback software either in Linux or windows, using full buffer to ram, are there any references you would recommend me? I am thinking of using ALSA in Linux to make one for my Allo sparky, mostly a headless one. Need guidance in what to look for when optimizing the device for lowest noise and better timing on the usb output line. Anything relating to cpu cache processes/coding to reduce even ram access?

 

Linux is more interesting, where all the parameters can be controllable and there is no black box.

 

IIRC USB packet is sent by hardware-defined timings, software sets the data to a send queue and USB host controller will pick it up on the next send timing, and software cannot control the timing.

 

On this article there is an experiment of USB packet noise difference with several different configuration

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2015/05/measurements-usb-hubs-and-8khz-phy.html

 

[manueljenkin]

Thank you very much @yamamoto2002. I tried experimenting with the priority settings, toning down to normal/high priority from critical and the other settings and it did help ease things quite a bit.

 

I'm still in the process of exploring audio gremlins, everything seems to affect the sound.

 

My friends also wanted to express their thanks to you for taking time and effort to write such a beautiful tool. 😊.

[One and a half]

Just a couple of updates for:

 

MusicBee:

 

Quite a nice interface, there are a few minuses though and really troubling. Since I couldn't listen to DSD, that was the end of SQ judgements.

 

- No cover Art for DSD64

- Crashes when playing any DSD

- ASIO and WASAPI only, no network streaming support

- Uninstall doesn't. Add/Remove, then manually remove.

 

AIMP:

 

BIG minus - doesn't adjust to the sample rate of the file, needs to be completed manually. itunes clone!

 

Audirvana for Windows

 

- Not liking transport issues for DSD.

 

 

[seeteeyou]

On 9/19/2020 at 4:20 PM, manueljenkin said:

Thank you for the kind words and the links. Unfortunately my experience stops here. I am yet to try any networked audio chain or signal regenerator. If I ever come across and make a post/comparison, I'll tag you. The sdtrans384 is something I'm interested to get when I have the budget.

 

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

Quote

... und nach einer weiteren Woche kommt von mir folgendes, anwenderbezogene Feedback:

 

Playhrt war für mich der bevorzugte Player, seit ihn Frank veröffentlichte. Ich verwende playhrt, weil playhrt ein Player ist, der nichts anderes macht, als das abzuspielen, womit er gefüttert wird. Und das erwarte ich von einem Player, und nichts mehr.

 

Aber playhrt es war ein störrischer, zickiger Player, welcher einiges an Konfigurationsaufwand abverlangte, und zum Teil auch einige Workarounds mittels erweitertem scripting notwendig machte. Ich musste zum Beispiel, wie schon mal beschrieben, die clocks meiner RME Soundkarten nachtunen, damit playhrt trotz händisch sorgfältig eingestellter --extra-bytes-per-second weder über-, noch unterlief. Und die Geschichte mit dem handsärmeligen --sleep half auch nicht immer weiter, weswegen ich, doppelt gemoppelt, playhrt noch einen writeloop-catloop-Puffer vorschaltete. Und trotz all diesem Unbill blieb playhrt in meinen pipes. Weil es ein präziser Player ist, der nichts anderes macht, als das, was er sollte. Ceterum censeo ...

 

Wenn ein Setup mit playhrt mal nicht lief, was durchaus des öfteren vorkam, dann musste wieder aplay auf die Bühne. Denn aplay frisst fast alles und frickelt im Stillen, vom User meist unbemerkt, mit grosser Wahrscheinlichkeit etwas daraus, was dann auch der Soundkarte bekommt ... Aplay ist wesentlich permissiver als playhrt, ist dafür jedoch in Bezug auf das dem Audiostream aufgebrachte DSP eine verschwiegene blackbox. Und aplay spuckte nebenbei auch wertvolle infos zum Debugging aus, welche es unter Anweisung mittels --verbose und --dump-hw-params preisgab. Aber als standard-player? Nein danke. Zu viel stilles, unkontollierbares Eigenleben.

 

Und nun, nach diesem Exkurs zu aplay - was ist nun mit playhrt nach einer Woche? Sagen wir es mal so: Ich habe seither aplay nicht mehr gebraucht.

 

Playhrt war, wie schon erwähnt, der prinzipiell schlanke und präzise Player, den ich mir wünsche. Und meines Wissens ist es der präziseste Player, den es für Linux gibt. Jetzt ist playhrt noch schlanker geworden. Und zwei der früher notwendigen, empirisch zu ermittelnden Parameter, --sleep und --extra-bytes-per-second, sind durch die Implementation interner Algorithmen hinfällig geworden. Und damit ist playhrt sogar anwenderfreundlich geworden.

 

Als einzig potenziell kritischer und empirisch zu ermittelnder Parameter ist --loops-per-second (LPS) geblieben. Ich hatte bislang den Eindruck, dass LPS nicht beliebig deklariert werden konnte, sondern in Abhängigkeit der Rate und der Anzahl Ausgangskanäle gesetzt werden musste. Dabei scheint es günstig zu sein, wenn in einem 2-Kanal-System der Quotient Rate/LPS Werte von 2^n ergibt. Das heisst, bei einer Rate von 44.1kHz stelle ich die LPS vorzugsweise auf 1050 ein, bei einer solchen von 48kHz stelle ich die LPS=1500 ein. Aktuell, auf einem 8-Kanal-System bei 96kHz habe ich LPS=6000 eingestellt.

 

Fazit: Merci viumau, Frank u Andree

 

---

 

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

[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!!

[acg]

3 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

I first tried xxhighend but couldn't get it to work properly in my system.

 

Persist.  Jump on the Phasure forum and ask questions and you will get it going...it is well worth it especially if you use a NOS dac or a dac in NOS mode. 

[manueljenkin]

@PeterSt I need your help please! 😁

[Juraf24]

On 5/4/2020 at 2:02 AM, 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 [url=https://www.carton-pas-cher.com/]Carton déménagement pour bouteille[/url] - 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, 🙂.

Yes, maybe, but I'm sure they'll find a solution to that.
 

[andrewinukm]

@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. 

[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?

[One and a half]

@yamamoto2002, this is a stop message that doesn't proceed further. The installer starts, then the message. I have full rights to the file, does the installer?

 

How to fix?

 

[yamamoto2002]

4 hours ago, One and a half said:

@yamamoto2002, this is a stop message that doesn't proceed further. The installer starts, then the message. I have full rights to the file, does the installer?

 

How to fix?

 

 

I've received several bug report about this installer error message,  root cause is still unknown. I cannot reproduce the problem on my desk.

 

It seems Portable Zip version of PlayPcmWin works flawlessly on the computer where installer version of PlayPcmWin fails.

[yamamoto2002]

On 12/31/2020 at 6:26 PM, manueljenkin said:

@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?

 

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 😁

 

[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.