An Audio Player like Audacity

[Merdril]

I was wondering if you guys have any suggestions for an audio player that has similar sound quality to Audacity. I've given up on WMP in favor of foobar2000, which brought audible improvements. However, I find that songs played through Audacity (I don't use it as a music player, if that's what you might be wondering) brings out the trebles and highs and makes the bass more defined as compared to foobar2000. The improvement in bass isn't much, but the difference in trebles and highs between foobar2000 and Audacity is quite noticeable. I was wondering if you guys know of any audio player that has virtually the same sound quality as Audacity (for Windows XP and above).

 

[falis]

You might try cplay http://cplay.sourceforge.net and an ASIO driver (or ASIO4ALL, which is actually kernel streaming) for your card. UI is a bit crude, but there are a couple of java utilities they mention in the manuals for creating playlists, cue sheets and so on.

I use it with the Isone Pro VST plugin http://www.jeroenbreebaart.com. Very nice.

- Ed

 

[Ham Sandwich]

What version of Audacity are you using?

Audacity doesn't do anything special when playing music. In fact, quite the opposite. It doesn't support any bit-perfect playback modes unless you get a special build that has ASIO support. So it's just using the regular Windows audio APIs for audio. Audacity can do realtime dithering or sample rate conversion. Do you have anything like that enabled?

Try setting Foobar up with DS (DirectShow) and similar dithering and sample rate conversion as you're doing in Audacity and you might get Foobar to sound like Audacity on your setup.

 

[Merdril]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ham Sandwich /img/forum/go_quote.gif What version of Audacity are you using? Audacity doesn't do anything special when playing music. In fact, quite the opposite. It doesn't support any bit-perfect playback modes unless you get a special build that has ASIO support. So it's just using the regular Windows audio APIs for audio. Audacity can do realtime dithering or sample rate conversion. Do you have anything like that enabled? Try setting Foobar up with DS (DirectShow) and similar dithering and sample rate conversion as you're doing in Audacity and you might get Foobar to sound like Audacity on your setup.

Thanks, this worked great. I set foobar to the same bit rate and sample rate as my DAC, which Audacity already had. I also turned off the replay gain in foobar, and that seemed to improve low bass tones a bit.

ASIO4ALL with foobar2000 keeps crashing my computer when trying to set it up. The file that Windows XP cites as the issue is ksaud.sys, which is a Creative-made file. Maybe the Creative DAC isn't compatible with ASIO? Although that would seem odd considering its a relatively new product.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

You could try using Kernel Streaming instead of ASIO4ALL. Go to the Foobar web site and download the Kernel Streaming component. It might work, it might not.

ASIO4ALL isn't a true ASIO driver. It's more of an ASIO wrapper around kernel streaming. It cheats. It's actually talking kernel streaming to your sound card rather than talking pure ASIO. It's worth a try. The Foobar kernel streaming component might work even though both ASIO4ALL and the Foobar kernel streaming component are doing kernel streaming.

Kernel streaming bypasses the kmixer thing that Windows XP does. ASIO bypasses the kmixer as well. Two methods of accomplishing the same thing.

I wonder if the KS in ksaud.sys stands for kernel streaming? Probably.

 

[Merdril]

Kernel streaming worked; it's much like Audacity in that it has the same sound character. But kernel streaming under foobar2000 doesn't clip, not even a little (similar to using the DAC in Ubuntu). I don't know if it sounds "better;" songs sound so different under this mode. But thanks for the knowledge, I'm listening to some of my favorite songs right now using kernel streaming; I might have to rethink my sig, I'm getting quite a bit of bass right now.