[leeperry]

I like uLilith in WASAPI, especially as it natively supports VST3 plugins without latency, what's another player with good sound that's equally easy to use and supports VST plugins please?

 

[manueljenkin]

I like uLilith in WASAPI, especially as it natively supports VST3 plugins without latency, what's another player with good sound that's equally easy to use and supports VST plugins please?

During the trials I did not use any plugins. I tried my best to have things in bit perfect setup. Is there any change to ulilith you could recommend me?

Not many players I've liked a lot did anything more than mere playback - wtfplay, PlayPCMwin and hysolid. I do like ulilith, though not as much as wtfplay or PlayPCMwin and am open to trying plugins especially for crossfeed and eq if you can suggest me proper configuration of them

 

[ok computer]

Thanks to @manueljenkin for introducing me to yet another obscure music player. Did a little ABing of PlayPcmWin to winyl and musicbee. PlayPcm is definitely a step up in terms of incisiveness and textural rendering. Images are more solid than either of the other players. The edges on transients are a little sharper and more defined as well. Seems to have the most calm background of the three. I think I definitely have a preference for ram players. I think that might be the big differentiating factor between musicbee and winyl. Musicbee tends to be a touch more clear for me. Winyl has a little more smoothed over homogenization of the sound, although it's very slight.

Overall, I like PlayPcm quite a bit. It has an immediacy to the sound similar to wtfplay. It also, in the limited testing I did, seem to have something going on in the top end where the treble can be a touch fatiguing. I'm not sure what it is exactly since I'm sure all of these players probably measure the same in terms of frequency response, but that is the one negative I heard with it. Using a song that I mastered recently as a reference the clap was a little bothersome, where I did not notice that on any of the other players including wtfplay. On that same track however bass texture and depth was preserved noticeably better than any other windows player.

Wtfplay is still king by a good margin. It's simply superior to my ears, across the board, in terms of lack of noise, image solidity, soundstage definition, tonal density, transients, etc...

For the windows players I have tried I would rank them as follows: PlayPcmWin = *Xxhighend > **HQplayer = Musicbee > Winyl > Foobar2k = Jriver > Windows Media Center

*I've talked about this enough here I think, but xxhighend is still probably the best sound I've ever gotten from windows, it's just not worth my time to screw with anymore. I even own a license lol. How quick and unproblematic wtfplay and PlayPcm are make it hard to justify. I may eventually come back to this player when I have a ton of free time, but I can't really recommend it anymore with what else is out there. I think PeterST deserves more credit for what he does though, because (IIRC) he was working on his player before Audiophile Optomizer, Fidelizer, Jplay, HQplayer and those sorts of programs came about. All of them to some extent are trying to do the same things.

**HQplayer is really hard to rank because you can change the sound of it so much. I do think the theory is sound of offloading the upsampling from the Hardware side to the PC since you have more processing power available and can perform the upsampling prior to playback while also having control over exactly what kind of digital filter you use. However in my experience the benefits are more of a trade off. No idea why this is the case. Sometimes it seems like you get some benefits in terms of fatigue and stage, but usually it seems at the expense of transients and tonal density.

A special thank you to @leeperry as well. I acquired a few usb tweaks from him recently in a trade. The USB regen with ifi power supply connected to my DAC via uspcb along with the very nice Belkin USB pcie cards have reduced the noise and jitter I'm getting from my PC by quite a bit! There is absolutely more calm and blackness in my system now. I find the slight greyness and haze inherent to my PCs usb that was bothering me slightly before to be almost completely gone.

And to answer your question about music players with VST compatibility, There are none that exist that compete with the best players. I've always had problems using vsts outside of DAWs. Foobar only supports 32bit vsts. Jriver can host them as well, but I had a lot of problems getting it to work consistently when I tried.

 

[manueljenkin]

Thanks to @manueljenkin for introducing me to yet another obscure music player. Did a little ABing of PlayPcmWin to winyl and musicbee. PlayPcm is definitely a step up in terms of incisiveness and textural rendering. Images are more solid than either of the other players. The edges on transients are a little sharper and more defined as well. Seems to have the most calm background of the three. I think I definitely have a preference for ram players. I think that might be the big differentiating factor between musicbee and winyl. Musicbee tends to be a touch more clear for me. Winyl has a little more smoothed over homogenization of the sound, although it's very slight.

Overall, I like PlayPcm quite a bit. It has an immediacy to the sound similar to wtfplay. It also, in the limited testing I did, seem to have something going on in the top end where the treble can be a touch fatiguing. I'm not sure what it is exactly since I'm sure all of these players probably measure the same in terms of frequency response, but that is the one negative I heard with it. Using a song that I mastered recently as a reference the clap was a little bothersome, where I did not notice that on any of the other players including wtfplay. On that same track however bass texture and depth was preserved noticeably better than any other windows player.

Wtfplay is still king by a good margin. It's simply superior to my ears, across the board, in terms of lack of noise, image solidity, soundstage definition, tonal density, transients, etc...

For the windows players I have tried I would rank them as follows: PlayPcmWin = *Xxhighend > **HQplayer = Musicbee > Winyl > Foobar2k = Jriver > Windows Media Center

*I've talked about this enough here I think, but xxhighend is still probably the best sound I've ever gotten from windows, it's just not worth my time to screw with anymore. I even own a license lol. How quick and unproblematic wtfplay and PlayPcm are make it hard to justify. I may eventually come back to this player when I have a ton of free time, but I can't really recommend it anymore with what else is out there. I think PeterST deserves more credit for what he does though, because (IIRC) he was working on his player before Audiophile Optomizer, Fidelizer, Jplay, HQplayer and those sorts of programs came about. All of them to some extent are trying to do the same things.

**HQplayer is really hard to rank because you can change the sound of it so much. I do think the theory is sound of offloading the upsampling from the Hardware side to the PC since you have more processing power available and can perform the upsampling prior to playback while also having control over exactly what kind of digital filter you use. However in my experience the benefits are more of a trade off. No idea why this is the case. Sometimes it seems like you get some benefits in terms of fatigue and stage, but usually it seems at the expense of transients and tonal density.

A special thank you to @leeperry as well. I acquired a few usb tweaks from him recently in a trade. The USB regen with ifi power supply connected to my DAC via uspcb along with the very nice Belkin USB pcie cards have reduced the noise and jitter I'm getting from my PC by quite a bit! There is absolutely more calm and blackness in my system now. I find the slight greyness and haze inherent to my PCs usb that was bothering me slightly before to be almost completely gone.

And to answer your question about music players with VST compatibility, There are none that exist that compete with the best players. I've always had problems using vsts outside of DAWs. Foobar only supports 32bit vsts. Jriver can host them as well, but I had a lot of problems getting it to work consistently when I tried.

Very interesting to note because I feel I am travelling the backwards in time. The more I read Peter's write up at audiophilestyle the more I understand computer audio gremlins. I used to think RAM playback is where it stops, but I realise there's another stage, the cpu cache which is even more consistent and quicker than RAM, and tweaking it properly will likely reduce even the amount and frequency of RAM access (and hence the access noise).

Also amusing to be able to understand the effort that goes into something like a signalyst dsc1 or sdtrans384.

I would begin my audio playback software project in only 32 bit arm, since my current sbc is limited to 32bit. Once I get the first version right wrt usability (I doubt I can achieve the best fidelity with it), I would likely dive into 64bit instruction sets, and try to run through the arm equivalent of AVX instructions. Hopefully I am able to contribute something to the community.

 

[hq136185925]

I have tried DSC1, just give up the Delta-Sigma architecture, DSC1 has a capacitor on the channel path, which it is not DC coupling, the sound is clean but super thin, you can not even hear the background

 

[manueljenkin]

I have tried DSC1, just give up the Delta-Sigma architecture, DSC1 has a capacitor on the channel path, which it is not DC coupling, the sound is clean but super thin, you can not even hear the background

Is this referring to DSD in particular or Delta-Sigma in general? I'm not a fan of dsd personally, but I do have to appreciate the work miska has done on that. I surely would go for PCM oversampling personally. Have you tried chord stuff? I often interact with rob at headfi and learnt quite a bit from him. And their design seems to be very well optimized on a lot of fronts. I am not into the lower tier mojo/Hugo, but Mscaler and Dave are interesting. R2r wouldn't cut it for my personal use case because of warm up time requirements.

I like my Apogee groove delta Sigma dac/amp a lot after these tweaks, it's clean and has fairly high bandwidth (not much roll off till like 60khz), but it's only pcm music. Of course it's kinda an inexpensive dac to boot so I would expect improvements moving up the ladder, but for now I don't find it very steely or lacking in ambeance unlike most other delta Sigma I've tried.

 

[leeperry]

I took care of the english translation of uLilith so I know it pretty well, make sure to set its rendering thread to "realtime".

indeed, the whole point of VST plugins is xfeed + EQ, this tutorial is mandatory for headphone use IME: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/how-to-equalize-your-headphones-a-tutorial.413900/

My R2R Soekris DAC's sound great right away, no need to warm them up for 2 days ^^

But as okcomputer said, the USB interface very much matters and at this game JCAT PCI-E controllers + low-noise untouched 5V PSU are hard to beat IME.

Audirvana PC is also pretty good FWIH, supports VST plugins too but didn't try it.

And to answer your question about music players with VST compatibility, There are none that exist that compete with the best players. I've always had problems using vsts outside of DAWs. Foobar only supports 32bit vsts. Jriver can host them as well, but I had a lot of problems getting it to work consistently when I tried.

All I know is that the electronic music I produce in 24/88.2 sounds better live rendered in Reaper than played back in uLilith WASAPI whatever 24 or 32 integer.

foobar sounds subpar by a mile and JRIVER's GUI is unbearable, besides I really like the "Open current folder in uLilith" right-click Explorer option that was added at my request.

 

[leeperry]

and also forcing 0.5ms windows timer granularity helps quite a bit but I bet y'all did ya homework

 

[manueljenkin]

I took care of the english translation of uLilith so I know it pretty well, make sure to set its rendering thread to "realtime".

indeed, the whole point of VST plugins is xfeed + EQ, this tutorial is mandatory for headphone use IME: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/how-to-equalize-your-headphones-a-tutorial.413900/

My R2R Soekris DAC's sound great right away, no need to warm them up for 2 days ^^

But as okcomputer said, the USB interface very much matters and at this game JCAT PCI-E controllers + low-noise untouched 5V PSU are hard to beat IME.

Audirvana PC is also pretty good FWIH, supports VST plugins too but didn't try it.


All I know is that the electronic music I produce in 24/88.2 sounds better live rendered in Reaper than played back in uLilith WASAPI whatever 24 or 32 integer.

foobar sounds subpar by a mile and JRIVER's GUI is unbearable, besides I really like the "Open current folder in uLilith" right-click Explorer option that was added at my request.

Thanks. I mentioned in my posts that my source was only direct usb out of my surface book. I am intrigued by features of ulilith however I cannot do a proper analysis due to restricted hardware. I hope to try it again when I get a decent signal regenerator (looking at ifi iusb but it's too expensive for me). Audirvana is okay on windows. Slightly worse than musicbee. And thanks for the intuition on soekris. The options seem plenty tbh.

I need to try XXHIGHEND. I had a discussion with Peter at audiophilestyle and had a lot of new learnings, wrt reconstruction of sampled signals. I like his approach of using Dirac pulses to do reconstruction, instead of a Nyquist sinc low pass filter that would smear the transients (Nyquist low passing correlation are perfect only during steady state which never occurs in real music, or almost any real phenomenon). The low noise footprint of the tool is just an additional bonus.

 

[mariopepper]

For example uLilith had quite a good sound as for me. But it's also very simple to use ManyManuals as a helper if you don't understand something about your music player model. But anyway uLilith is very good option ( I've used it for several years)

 

[Bernard23]

I'm intrigued by Winyl (I have been using J River and Tidal for some years now, especially former since release #16). I rarely use J River anymore, as I no longer have a separates system, I moved into Sonos about 3 years ago or so, and stream either from online content via Tidal or Spotify; or my CD collection that is stored on a NAS, which Sonos can access and stream also.
I've installed the Winyl app, but can't see the NAS on my network when I go to add a library, so I'm assuming it won't steam over a network? I'm having some issues with my NAS, it's a WD MyCloud, which has the most appalling user interface and experience of anything I've ever owned, not least the inabilty of the device, cloud and network not recognising same password credentials, a real pita.

 

[manueljenkin]

I'm intrigued by Winyl (I have been using J River and Tidal for some years now, especially former since release #16). I rarely use J River anymore, as I no longer have a separates system, I moved into Sonos about 3 years ago or so, and stream either from online content via Tidal or Spotify; or my CD collection that is stored on a NAS, which Sonos can access and stream also.
I've installed the Winyl app, but can't see the NAS on my network when I go to add a library, so I'm assuming it won't steam over a network? I'm having some issues with my NAS, it's a WD MyCloud, which has the most appalling user interface and experience of anything I've ever owned, not least the inabilty of the device, cloud and network not recognising same password credentials, a real pita.

I don't think winyl supports network storage. Maybe try musicbee or playpcmwin? Playpcmwin has the source code freely available so you could probably tweak it in case it doesn't support NAS out of the box.

 

[Bernard23]

Tbh I've always been happy with J River, and since I already paid for the license, and knowing it can stream from a network is probably the solution.
EDIT: It seems that I can't download the old version of J River that I have, and would likely need to pay for the upgrade to the latest release which I don't wish to do, so will check out your suggestions...

 

[Bernard23]

I don't think winyl supports network storage. Maybe try musicbee or playpcmwin? Playpcmwin has the source code freely available so you could probably tweak it in case it doesn't support NAS out of the box.

Musicbee does support network streaming, if only I could get my NAS to show itself. How can a password work for one webpage, and not another, or the app. I've been here before with Western Digital, it's UI is appalling. My only option is to log in via the cloud and download my entire library onto another connected external HDD.

 

[manueljenkin]

Did a few more experiments. I first tried xxhighend but couldn't get it to work properly in my system.

Since music playback generally improved with full ram buffer based players I wanted to give RAMDisk configs a try. I downloaded AMD RAMDisk and created a 2GB RAM drive. Installed musicbee, PlayPCMWin and albumplayer one by one on the RAMdisk and configured all to use full RAM buffer. Then I tried playing the local music stored in the drive (since I have already ensured memory playback I didn't initially feel like putting the songs to the memory disc). All the players sounded cleaner for the most part (compared to having them installed in hard drive) but also had the 8khz hiss/resonance like PlayPCMWin did in earlier normal disc. It seems fine initially since the remaining frequency spectrum is cleaner and more detailed but gets increasingly annoying as time goes on.

Then I tried another experiment. I moved the songs to RAMdisk and then played them. It surprisingly made a meaningful improvement with a reduction in 8khz hiss and lesser overall haze despite the players already configured to do RAM playback. I have no reason why this happens. But even now the 8khz hiss was quite hard especially when high pitched voices are present in the music. And I preferred musicbee + ram playback installed on local drive instead of ramdisk because of this reason. Apart from the 8khz hiss, in PlayPCMWin the overall higher pitches felt slightly softer, lacking that last edge of bite and bass also felt a tad aliased for lack of a better word (despite the better resolution). This softness was worser in PlayPCMWin installed in non-ram disk so it's an improvement here.

So after everything was done I thought I'll make one final experiment. I uninstalled my apogee dac driver and reinstalled it on the RAMDisk. And now everything made started falling in to place. The 8khz hiss on all the three players reduced drastically and the bass improved a lot. PlayPCMWin is my favourite of the three in this config (settings mostly default, only priority being changed to pro audio thread). There is still an 8khz hiss but it's much milder and occurs only in very few songs. PlayPCMWin also retains a much milder version of that slightly soft tone where the upper registers lack that very last ounce of bite but PlayPCMWin is overall cleaner and less hazier than the other players I've tried. Overall, aside from this occasional 8khz tizz and mild softness it's spatial and resolution properties are excellent now and dare I say, I can hear more detail than even wtfplay!!