[cykoakustik]

 
Other players to try are AIMP3 and AtomicPlayer (Windows Vista or Windows 7 only).
Both have WASAPI support.  
 
I have foobar2000, AIMP3, and AtomicPlayer installed and use regularly.  
 
If you upgrade to Windows 7, try any of these players with WASAPI.
 
It's all personal preference.  Whichever features you prefer with the addition of
WASAPI/ASIO support, etc.
 
Try them all and use the ones you like.
 
As for JPLAY and 99 Euros to use its full capabilities, that's your choice.
 
JPLAY claims to be the best sounding player.  Well, I'll gladly stand behind
foobar2000, AIMP3, AtomicPlayer compared to JPLAY.
 
 

 

[lipidsnake]

Quote:

 
Other players to try are AIMP3 and AtomicPlayer (Windows Vista or Windows 7 only).
Both have WASAPI support.  
 
I have foobar2000, AIMP3, and AtomicPlayer installed and use regularly.  
 
If you upgrade to Windows 7, try any of these players with WASAPI.
 
It's all personal preference.  Whichever features you prefer with the addition of
WASAPI/ASIO support, etc.
 
Try them all and use the ones you like.
 
As for JPLAY and 99 Euros to use its full capabilities, that's your choice.
 
JPLAY claims to be the best sounding player.  Well, I'll gladly stand behind
foobar2000, AIMP3, AtomicPlayer compared to JPLAY.
 
 

JPLAY is definately the best sounding out of those, but it still does not justify the high price. i would recommend foobar or atomicplayer. simple, decent features, decent SQ and free
 

 

[hamburgerladdy]

Quote:

I'm embarassed to say that I think I can hear a sonic improvement using JRiver. There are a couple of problems however. For some reason the tree view in the left pane is unable to display individual FLAC files, which is strange. Also, the main pane to the right seems to display my entire collection which might not be a problem for a small amount of files but I have over 70,000 tracks.

 
The JRiver is playing now with a trial. The best distinction I read between it and foobar2k is that JRiver is like a sharpen button on a TV remote. I agree, but some tracks lose out in and sound better in the foobar player.
 

 

[Mr Headphones]

I prefer using Itunes. It's easy to use and the library make it so much easier to browse through all your songs.
 

 

[RonaldDumsfeld]

Another very satisfied foobar2000 user here.
 
  http://www.foobar2000.org/

 

[Solrighal]

Quote:

 
The JRiver is playing now with a trial. The best distinction I read between it and foobar2k is that JRiver is like a sharpen button on a TV remote. I agree, but some tracks lose out in and sound better in the foobar player.
 

I think this is pretty accurate. My speakers aren't really good enough to discern a real difference but my headphones are and it's definitely a more "precise" sound when compared to Foobar. I like it. The interface however...

 

[autoteleology]

I'm kind of new at this, so I've used Winamp with a DSP plugin (Stereo Tool), but seeing how nobody else has mentioned it, I must be missing something.

 

[alinux33]

Hello to Everybody, this is my first post on this forum.
Since I've discovered AIMP player, I've become a big fan of it as I found that it's user interface to be much more friendly than the one in Winamp or Foobar (I still did not succeeded to setup the Foobar interface to a friendly look..), as for quality of output, I can't distinguish between the one that comes from Foobar or the one from AIMP3, they are the same for me, so I went with the one with the better GUI: AIMP3 - I find it brilliant for a free player.
Regards, Alin

 

[mrsmiles]

i dont see how the sound changes depending on the music player you use, i don't see how this is even possible, for those that think it makes a difference in sound care to explain? it seems more like placebo then anything else.
 
anyways i use foobar2k, does everything i need it to do, its simple and clean, and very customizable
 
[edit]
jplay seems like an interesting choice for a music player, has some features i haven't seen from other players, but at 99 euros not likely for me to buy it.
ill try the trail for the moment though.

 

[Elysian]

I thought the same as you, though I've generally heard slight differences between various audio players (from free to high-end software).  Jplay is the first player which, for me, sounded dramatically different.  I'd suggest giving the trial a shot to see if it does anything for you, as the trial is very lightweight and does not require an installation.

 

[Head Injury]

It's likely JPlay colors the sound. If not, I'd like to know the facts behind the changes.

 

[Elysian]

Jplay comes off as far more transparent and neutral to me than Foobar.  Foobar sounds, for lack of a word, noisier to me on every track I tried.  I'd recommend trying the trial software before passing judgment, as it's less than a megabyte, is a single file, and requires no installation.
 
I don't really want to get into too much detail at this time as I'm communicating with the Jplay creators and will try some adjustments to the configuration.  I'm going to also try Jplay vs Stealth vs Fidelizer vs Foobar.  I've never heard much difference between the various PC and Mac audio players, but Jplay surprised me.  Those guys may be onto something about memory-based playback.  I know Foobar can do it too by changing the pagefile config, but the difference wasn't as stark as this.  I should give the Foobar pagefile tweak another try, though.

 

[Head Injury]

You can make anything sound more "neutral" and clean with some careful placement of peaks. I think if there were something wrong with Foobar (and all other popular players) that's causing degradation of sound, someone would have come up with a reasonable explanation for it by now, and JPlay would publish explicit reasons why they sound better. They seem to claim jitter is the reason. They should back that up. 

 

[J.Pocalypse]

Before, I just had a stock Foobar2K, running with ASIO. Just a few days ago, I switched the buffer ( Settings > Advanced > Playback > Buffer ) I gave it a value of 200000 (KB) ( an idea i read on a previous post some place ), and have switched to Kernal Streaming. I think it's an improvement over just ASIO.. Give it a try. See what happens.

 

[Elysian]

Head Injury: Read up on Jplay's website, as well as on the history of cPlay, Stealth, and Fidelizer.  They're all pretty straightforward on how they're approaching the problem.  There are about 4 years of posts on other associated audio forums which I'm not going to link to, with lots of theory and testing on different approaches.
 
I doubt every single one of these programmers are lying about the changes they're doing with memory management, jitter reduction, application process priority management, buffers, etc.  People have been experimenting with these approaches all the way from early cPlay.
 
I was skeptical until I gave one of these players a shot.  The sound is definitely different.  I haven't decided if I like it more or not, but at least on my setup, the changes are very obvious.