Best FLAC player for PC? - Page 12

Pretty much, some programs have less jitter than others, but it's mainly just a UI preference unless you have an insane speaker system or STAX...

 

 

 

 

I'm quite fond of Winamp. It's much easier to customize than foobar  and sounds just as good (maybe missing 1% extra definition that foobar offers)

 

Edit: And it does gapless playback without plugins

Edited by PanamaHat - 4/6/13 at 3:20pm

whats the best flac player for a mac?

Audirvana

fidelia

Just started using Foobar out of curiosity and because Winamp kept crashing...

So far foobar is amazing. I did a little comparison to see which could render my .flac files better and foobar wins. It just sounds more.. fluid

Pretty upsetting because I paid for winamp pro for the advantage or being able to convert .flac to mp3, but apparently foobar does this too.

Foobar2000 is my PC player of choice.  Among its myriad of plugins, you can get lost in the various scriptable ways to customize and extend FB2K's functionality.

 

Its embedded CUE+ artwork support are what made me switch from Winamp years ago.

 

For Linux, QMMP offers similar embedded CUE support.

It's hard to have a definitive answer to this question. If you stick with Mac then it would be easier to use either AIFF or ALAC. By using these two formats, you can try out a lot of players such as Audirvana Plus, Amarra, Decibel, Fidelia, BitPerfect, Pure Music, ... and use iTunes for library management purpose. When you change to other OS, I'm quite sure that they support AIFF and ALAC very well.

I use Foobar2000 with WASAPI and the sound is good, but better sound could be achieved with a good sound card though.

To me, this goes without saying;  what I've always found interesting is the (non-)effect of upsampling, like the SoX or SRC upsamplers.

So far the best flac player I have used is the aplayer talked about earlier in this thread.

http://albumplayer.ru/english.html aplayer is designed for playing CD's and albums ripped to flac, alac, ape etc with the best possible sound quality. It is lightning fast with no audio glitches even on Windows Vista (notorious for audio dropouts during playback).

Interface is simple with track list and album art. There is no overblown media library, just a simple, fast access drop down menu.

Audio quality is excellent.

For me this is the perfect flac player I have yet to find something I don't like about it.

Edited by dandelion - 4/10/13 at 10:30pm

Foobar2000

Eventually I'd like to get coax or optical out from my set up, but I use a laptop to stream to my odac. Is there a way to do this? I'm not so sold on usb conversion, but if someone points me to a good one, I may bite.

I run USB exclusively wether it's directly to the device or to an I^2S connection (Empirical Audio I2S Off-Ramp).  I can't find the reference, but George Cardas had an article discussing digital vs. analog, and specifically Toslink, asking the question of why you would want to introduce yet another conversion/deconversion in the stream (presumably introducing jitter).

 

There may be other factors, such as RF interference or running over long distances, but it's my opinion that Toslink buys you nothing unless you need 192k to your DAC and your USB connection and devices cannot support that.

JRiver