[agentsim]

Quote:

I'm noticing that BetterSound still doesn't respect the Sound Check setting in iTunes. I have the option checked to respect volume adjustments but is that only for the manual adjustments when you view Get Info or are we talking about the system iTunes uses to know to drop or raise the volume on individual songs?

Yes that is an annoying limitation. iTunes doesn't publish the Sound Check values for each track so I don't see how I can implement that feature.
 
Can anyone confirm if Pure Music or Amarra can be configured to use Sound Check? If so, I can snoop around a bit and reverse engineer their technique

 

 

[agentsim]

New version (0.19) available here.
 
Changes include:

1. Mimic OSX volume control keyboard shortcuts
2. Add volume control slider
3. Fix crash if upsampling enabled while playing FLAC
4. Fix potential crash due to total samples in the file being incorrect
5. Fix doubling of play count
6. Fix position update in iTunes after seeking
7. Do not attempt to use non LPCM formats
8. Handle unsupported files from iTunes elegantly
9. Podcasts don't remember position when resumed with BetterSound

 
This build should fix the compatibility problems that iamoneagain and uelover have been experiencing. Let me know if you guys find any other bugs.
 
Thanks!

 

[iamoneagain]

When I first tried with integer mode on I got no sound again.  I then unchecked it and it was working like before.  Tried checking integer mode again and this time it worked.  Not sure why it had to go through one failure.  Now everything seems to be working great.  I'll play around with it later tonight and see if I find any problems.

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

Agentism, are you parsing the .itl file or are you grabbing data from the .xml file? I did some Googling and it seems that's where it's expected to be stored. It might be worth your time to ask the developer behind iVolume how he sets the sound volume as it might provide an insight into how he sets and retrieves the data.
 
Option B might be to add the ability to do it on the fly. This would be an issue on older Macs but since you're only supporting 64-bit Macs it wouldn't be too big of an issue especially since it's only doing it at the speed of the audio. Of course, you'd want to make that an option to disable for people with slower Macs.

 

[agentsim]

Thanks for the link. Actually this looks quite straightforward, Sound Check is just stored as a tag on each file.

 

[agentsim]

New version (0.20) available here.
 
Changes include:

1. Further output function optimizations
2. Drop option for volume adjustment
3. Option to use sound check (only for mp3, Apple Lossless)
4. Fix no sound when playing/resuming track after starting BetterSound when iTunes is paused
5. Fix iTunes position off by 1 second after seeking

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

Is it just ALAC or is it all M4A audio, like AACs as well?

 

[Currawong]

 
Quote:

When you have only 1 output device, iTunes doesn't update its position since it isn't playing anything. The latest version has the option to update the track position in iTunes, is that option selected?

Definitely checked.

 

[agentsim]

Quote:

Is it just ALAC or is it all M4A audio, like AACs as well?

Should work with AAC files as well.

 

[jhwalker]

Thank you so much for doing this work!   I've tested / used all of the alternative Mac players (except for Amarra, there's no way I'm paying that much!), and this is certainly competitive with all of them.  As convenient as Pure Music (i.e., more convenient than Decibel or Audirvana), sound  comparable to PM / Audirvana - what's not to like?
 
I'll keep a close eye on this - thanks again.

 

[Talos]

I've been using BetterSound for several days now, on a very high-resolution system, and can confirm that BetterSound is in fact very significantly better than Audirvana.  Just thought it was worth mentioning that, since that is the point of the thread.  Good work, agentsim.

 

[glt]

Being an exclusive access device and enforcing no oversampling, does this allow arbitrary native bitrate playback? In other words, if I have a 44.1K and 96K song in the library, would this allow the playback of the 44.1K song at 44.1K sample rate and the 96K song at 96K playback automatically?
(I would try it myself, but I use W7/iTunes and the only Mac I was able to access needs to be upgraded to the latest OS)

 

[agentsim]

 
Quote:

Being an exclusive access device and enforcing no oversampling, does this allow arbitrary native bitrate playback? In other words, if I have a 44.1K and 96K song in the library, would this allow the playback of the 44.1K song at 44.1K sample rate and the 96K song at 96K playback automatically?
(I would try it myself, but I use W7/iTunes and the only Mac I was able to access needs to be upgraded to the latest OS)

Yep, that's exactly what it does.

 

[discombobulation]

hey, thanks for your work on this awesome piece of kit.
 
Testing so far reveals extremely satisfying sound quality!
 
Only one major problem for me, every time I start it up, turn it on, change song or change position in a song, MSN Messenger shuts down. I have no idea what could be causing this, but I'm running a 2011 17" MBP, with the latest OS/BetterSound/MSN.
 
Cheers

 

[agentsim]

 
Quote:

hey, thanks for your work on this awesome piece of kit.
 
Testing so far reveals extremely satisfying sound quality!
 
Only one major problem for me, every time I start it up, turn it on, change song or change position in a song, MSN Messenger shuts down. I have no idea what could be causing this, but I'm running a 2011 17" MBP, with the latest OS/BetterSound/MSN.
 
Cheers

Because BetterSound takes control of the sound card, no other programs can access it. My guess is that MSN expects to have access to the sound card, when it doesn't, it crashes.
 
If I'm right, you can workaround this by installing a virtual sound card like Soundflower. In that case, BetterSound will take over your real sound card and play music, and MSN will output sound into the virtual sound card. You won't hear any sound from MSN, but hopefully it won't crash.