Hey welcome to Head-fi. I'm glad we could help get your audio card running.
I never heard of DeaDBeef. Looks good from what I see on their website. I'll make sure to try it out. Thanks for the tip.
As for your last question, the search tool should be able to help you with it. I would recommend reading the D100 reviews, Project86's reviews of the D100 and the M-stage along with the long thread that followed.
The home page http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ uses the spelling "DeaDBeeF" but that's not important. I've been using it since version 0.5.0 and recently 0.5.2 is released. This is a great player that allows direct hardware output through ALSA so mixer problems are easy to eliminate. As a player it sounds great but you need another program for library management, and the user interface is rather simple. It does support equalizer, replay gain and SRC resampler.
The first thing I did was check if it inserted gaps between the songs. Nop, perfectly gap-less! Now that's cleared, let's see what Deadbeef has to offer, and how it compares to Aqualung. Note that being gap-less is the main reason I would use a player like Deadbeef or Aqualung over Amarok. Amarok 2.5 still inserts gaps between every tracks, which is a serious pain when listening to musical albums where every songs flow into each others.
I really like the interface. It's simple. It's like a stripped down Foobar2000. It has all the geeky information on the status bar. The playlist isn't as clean as Aqualung, but I like how you can chose the sort order right from the playlist. Aqualung has a complex script that reads both the ID3 tags and the file names, sorting the songs according to what it finds there. It's a nice feature and it makes clean playlists, but I often find myself double-checking against the folder to see if the songs are ordered properly since aqualung's playlist doesn't show the track numbers.
Another winning feature that DeadBeeF has but Aqualung lacks: Last.fm scrobbling. I know it doesn't change anything on the music, but I'm a stat geek and I love last.fm.
I tested the last.fm plugin of DeaDBeeF (damn type-setting is getting annoying to type, lol) and can confirm it actually works.
Now for the technical "bit perfect" stuff. The "Sound" tab of Deadbeef's preferences lets you use the output plugin (ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio...). There's also a drop down menu to chose the output device. All the devices and sub-devices are shown as names, which I believe were stripped from $aplay -L.
kim ~ $ aplay -L
default
Default
sysdefault:CARD=Intel
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
Default Audio Device
front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
Front speakers
surround40:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Analog
7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
HDA Intel, STAC92xx Digital
IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output
sysdefault:CARD=Audio
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
Default Audio Device
front:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
Front speakers
surround40:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=Audio,DEV=0
DigiHug USB Audio, USB Audio
IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output
If you chose "Default Audio Device", the audio will be routed trough Dmix and re-sampled to 48kHz. In order to send the audio stream directly to your DAC, you need to use "Front Speakers", which is the equivalent of hw:1,0 in my case.
Deadbeef does have a plugin that lets you chose the output sample rate and the quality of the re-sampler, just like Aqualung. What's impressive about Deadbeef is that it can change the output sample rate on the fly, while playing! With Aqualung, you actually have to restart the whole application. This setting can be changed from the "DSP" tab. This tab lets you also chose the order of the processors. EQ or Re-sampler before, as you prefer. Other processors should also be there if you activate them. Sadly though the volume control does not show up in this chain. With aqualung you can actually chose to have the DSP before or after the volume control.
As I was writing this, my playlist went from 44.1 to 48kHz. Remarkably, so did the output frequency of Deadbeef. This simple thing just sold me to Deadbeef over Aqualung. As I said earlier, to change the output freq of Aqualung, you have to restart the application, which means it will end up re-sampling if your playlist contains different sample rates. For example, I have some albums from Pink Floyd in 96 and others in 44.1kHz. I often just place all the albums into a single playlist. I could set the output sample rate to 96kHz, but since I use the best sample rate converter (what less would you expect from an head-fier?), aqualung ends up taking 25% cpu. so I set it to 44.1kHz. Having 96khz recordings down-sampled is... ridiculous, to say the least. Besides, my DAC already over-samples, so why waste CPU time on it?
I also tried the built-in equalizer. It's interface looks great, but it's not as functional as a dedicated processor like JAMin. I expected it to though, looking all high-tech as it does.
I didn't try to boost some frequency as I have all volumes to 100% already... but lowering some works perfectly. It doesn't seem to insert any artifacts into the music. That's great, considering Gstreamer's EQ inserts weird stuff into the music, even when using as subtractive equalizer. (Gstreamer is SUCH a mess, it makes me gag). The reset buttons and the enable switch directly on the interface are a nice touch that makes the feature more functional.
In the short time that this first impression was made to be, DeaDBeeF has pulled all the right cords to pull itself on the shelf of Great players. It won't become my first player though. DeaDBeeF is not a library manager and so Amarok will keep it's place as my #1 music player. But with gap-less playback, on-the-fly sample rate change and Last.fm scrobbling, it single-handedly dethroned Aqualung as my audiophile music player for serious listening.
I took DeadBeef out for a drive last autumn - sounds good! Also, took Linux for a drive with a few other players properly configured; all sounded good.
I tried DeaDBeef, too. It works pretty well, but in my case it didn't give me as much flexibility in choosing the output. The only choices it allowed for "front speakers", etc. were related to my default sound card. I was able to select my add-on card in the same drop-down, but it appeared to go through DMix. So far, the only players/tools that gave me a way around have been Audacious and Audacity. An interesting thing I noticed with Audacious was that it must be eating processor cycles from both cores. When I was playing some music, I started a virtual machine in Virtualbox and everything just slowed down with interruptions to the music. Any way to limit the resources a player grabs?
I guess I need to try a couple of the players mentioned in the link above....
BTW I ordered a Fiio E17 this morning. It looked like It was the least expensive way to get connected at work and at least come up with a device that isn't almost 10 years old. I tried using my pcmcia card at work on a couple of laptops with some with Nuforce IEM's that I have but it was dropping volume on one of the channels..... Strange because it doesn't do that on either the Debian or Ubuntu config's at home....
I'm really liking the M-stage or the Yulong D100 for home.....Not sure which DAC to go for with the M-stage.
You may have already found out that the music player software you mention above all can support bit perfect output (though Guayadeque seems to have an issue with hi res files on my system). I'm listening to Quodlibet right now, and it sounds pretty good.
Also include on the list:
- Audacious - like deadbeef, a lightweight music player that, on my system, sounds terrific.
- Clementine - though I thing sonically the program leaves a lot to be desired, it is a more feature rich music management / playback program.
Thanks for the reply. Seems like Audiacious and Aqualung are the two with which I've had the most success. I frequently use Debian and Debian Mint so it seems like the versions of most of the other programs are older. Normally I would go ahead and upgrade the dependency packages, but I think it was Clementine that looked like the dependencies posed a little too much risk. I've been using the ALSA base thus far, but I've started fooling with JACK. I'm thinking that even the slightly older version of DeaDbeef that I'm using would probably be even better with it.
I installed Kubuntu 12.04 on a fresh disc. This package kit comes with Amarok 4.8.2. This version of Amarok now features gap-less playback!!
I've been waiting for this features for years. The original Amarok had this feature before they re-wrote all the application. I now do not have the need for other music players like Aqualung or Deadbeef. Great.
There's also better support of ID3 tags. It can guess tags from file names or fetch them from the web. There's an option in the settings that's supposed to make Amarok embed the cover arts into the files themselves. I turned it on but it doesn't seem to work. It might be triggered only when there's no covers already in the directory... I've got some more tests to do in order to confirm this.
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