Is there such a thing as an audiophile music player for windows?
Mar 2, 2020 at 4:26 PM Post #106 of 138
Thank you very much for bringing hysolid back to my attention. Two months ago when I tried I was put off by its broken android remote app.

Yesterday I re installed it, and borrowed an ipad to control it. Wow!! Never knew windows could sound this good. I am really in love with the player design. No unneccessary user handles like scrubbing etc. Only play/pause. So super well structured and well timed instructions for the cpu to go though before pushing it to usb. And the detail improvement is staggering, even when pitted against the next best I've heard.

I have for few months used bass library based players like winyl, musicbee,xmplay and hqplayer as my reference. Albumplayer was a lot more analog sounding but didn't have that stronghold in dynamics that winyl had. Audirvana was fine but not as good as winyl. Didn't like jriver/roon much using as streamer and server in same system they sounded slightly like an input clipped amp (their architecture is better suited for Ethernet playback). All these players were levels ahead of mud-fi foobar (yea I'm fully with you on foobar being not high fidelity enough, and it's been measured as well). But all those players still had issues going in one way or other - glarey and intense but well textured, or laid back but lacking in texture (apart from foobar which had neither in a positive note).

I thought it was inherent to recordings or reproduction method. Boy was I wrong. Now I can hear a thousand shade in the treble notes with hysolid. Thank you so much. If anyone is still using foobar, I'd say the difference from foobar to hysolid on a decent DAC+amp system is greater than the difference from hd598 to hd600.

Note: all tests were done in asio whenever supported. Have made enough attempts to ensure that the differences are not stemming from un intended modifications in any configuration i set. No upsampling/resampling, no bit depth upscaling or padding.
Cool man! With some of the reception I seem to get on this forum its rewarding to have some positivity! So glad you reported your experiences and seems like you tried a few more than I did. Years ago I tried sooooo many players my head exploded. So when I decided to ditch cPlay and I heard how great Hysolid sounded compared to some of the other options out there, I knew it was a keeper.

Asio IMHO is a prereq for the best sound anyhow and hysolid once set up just works. I am leaving my gear on now and playing 24/7. Hysolid has not crashed in the last month I have left it playing....it just works. And since it seems to support high bitrates its probably pretty future proof.

Do you have a link for the foobar measurements???
 
Mar 2, 2020 at 7:45 PM Post #107 of 138
Cool man! With some of the reception I seem to get on this forum its rewarding to have some positivity! So glad you reported your experiences and seems like you tried a few more than I did. Years ago I tried sooooo many players my head exploded. So when I decided to ditch cPlay and I heard how great Hysolid sounded compared to some of the other options out there, I knew it was a keeper.

Asio IMHO is a prereq for the best sound anyhow and hysolid once set up just works. I am leaving my gear on now and playing 24/7. Hysolid has not crashed in the last month I have left it playing....it just works. And since it seems to support high bitrates its probably pretty future proof.

Do you have a link for the foobar measurements???

Sent you a pm. And yep, I've tried so many players on windows (near 20). I could hear difference between every single one of them and even changing buffer settings made sonic differences. I got down to bass library based players - winyl and musicbee as my reference after multiple analysis. Until I got hysolid to work, and it overtook both of them by a big margin. I have kind of figured out how hysolid makes good sound, but I need to experiment further.

On the other hand, I have uninstalled hysolid now, since I found something that sounds even better - wtfplay. It is an absolute by the book, simple and focused music player OS. It live boots and stores to ram. There is no gui, but the cli is easy to use (takes about 30 seconds to learn).

Improvement from hysolid is the dynamic range. Make sure you have a good amp. Doesn't sound as immediately bassy as hysolid but everywhere else is a huge improvement in my system. The stereo field wasn't great with hysolid (super center channeled, probably because of 32bit) and it got near perfect with wtfplay.
 
Mar 4, 2020 at 10:53 AM Post #108 of 138
Sent you a pm. And yep, I've tried so many players on windows (near 20). I could hear difference between every single one of them and even changing buffer settings made sonic differences. I got down to bass library based players - winyl and musicbee as my reference after multiple analysis. Until I got hysolid to work, and it overtook both of them by a big margin. I have kind of figured out how hysolid makes good sound, but I need to experiment further.

On the other hand, I have uninstalled hysolid now, since I found something that sounds even better - wtfplay. It is an absolute by the book, simple and focused music player OS. It live boots and stores to ram. There is no gui, but the cli is easy to use (takes about 30 seconds to learn).

Improvement from hysolid is the dynamic range. Make sure you have a good amp. Doesn't sound as immediately bassy as hysolid but everywhere else is a huge improvement in my system. The stereo field wasn't great with hysolid (super center channeled, probably because of 32bit) and it got near perfect with wtfplay.


I'm waiting for a new cable to use the headphone amps instead of the speakers to see if the difference between players became bigger. As for wtfplay I'm not able to make it sound, when I push enter on the playlist I have nothing but silence :sob: ...
 
Mar 4, 2020 at 11:10 AM Post #109 of 138
I'm waiting for a new cable to use the headphone amps instead of the speakers to see if the difference between players became bigger. As for wtfplay I'm not able to make it sound, when I push enter on the playlist I have nothing but silence :sob: ...

Please check if you have chosen the proper hardware hw:x and commandline. And for songs that have more than one word with spaces use ' to maark it. Say I have a song named mysong1.flac in /media/sda/, the code will be

wtfplay -d hw:1 /media/sda/mysong1.flac

But if I have the song name as my song 1.flac, I need to have the command as.

wtfplay -d hw:1 /media/sda/'my song 1.flac'

What is your dac btw, and it's uac2 compatible right?
 
Mar 4, 2020 at 11:28 AM Post #110 of 138
Please check if you have chosen the proper hardware hw:x and commandline. And for songs that have more than one word with spaces use ' to maark it. Say I have a song named mysong1.flac in /media/sda/, the code will be

wtfplay -d hw:1 /media/sda/mysong1.flac

But if I have the song name as my song 1.flac, I need to have the command as.

wtfplay -d hw:1 /media/sda/'my song 1.flac'

What is your dac btw, and it's uac2 compatible right?

I have an old VdacII, I'm using wtfcui not the commandline, so I think is fine even if they have more words and spaces in between? In my system the hardwares are: hw0: PCH (intel I think), hw1:Nvidia, hw2: m2496, I'm chosing the last one

...so the problem could be my dac?
 
Mar 28, 2021 at 11:40 AM Post #113 of 138
ITunes on Windows 10 loaded with 24/192 ALAC files sent to DAC via usb.
 
May 7, 2021 at 11:48 AM Post #115 of 138
I did a quick thread search and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned AIMP yet:

https://www.aimp.ru/

Foobar is getting so old, and AIMP feels much more modern. You don't have to use any plugins to get ASIO, you just select it as the output and it just works.

It has playlist and metadata features similar to iTunes, and the developer is very responsive and updates quite often (he fixed a bug for me very quickly).

There's also a portable version available, so I can put all my music on a USB drive and carry it, the player, my playlists with me between work and home, which is very nice.
 
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May 7, 2021 at 1:08 PM Post #117 of 138
Looks pretty encompassing. I will be ultimately surprised if it can write play counts to media files though. So I'm still sticking with Foobar 2000.
And, foobar2000 handles 5.1.
 
May 7, 2021 at 2:33 PM Post #119 of 138

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