Computer Audio Players

I must be the only person that uses VLC.

 

I don't use VLC for audio because...

1. No gapless playback
2. Supports JACK but badly, which is worse than not at all.

 

Oh I am not really claiming that its great. Most of my music is in ALAC which is easily played by iTunes and other players. For the small small number of FLAC I have I use VLC. If my FLAC collection gets bigger then I'll consider some other software. Probably foobar.

 

+1 Audirvana Plus for OSX - Plus you can remote control via iPhone app. A must for me.

 

My FLAC usually ends up getting converted to ALAC just to keep the library clean.

 

Not many people are aware of this, but I'd recommend to NOT use ALAC and use FLAC even if you are deeply entrenched in Apple.

ALAC does not have any error detection. If a file corrupts, there is no way to know whether the file is damaged or not (other than perhaps some abnormality). FLAC has several detections that will tell you if the file has been corrupted. Very useful to check the integrity of back-up library.

Sure, it does not mean those measures guarantee 100% detection, but it's better than nothing.

 

Error detection during which step? Ripping? Playback? Do other lossless formats have this feature?

 

The wording on the official site is Error Resistant though; quoting directly from here:

Perhaps those with more technical knowledge could expand this further.

 

I've been using JRiver MC for a few years now. Currently using MC21

 

I like Roon quite a bit.

 

I use JRiver Media Center 21 to play FLAC files and HD tracks, as well as my own recordings that are 32/384kHz - best audio player out there IMO

http://www.jriver.com/

Audiophile properties of JRiver:
http://www.jriver.com/audio.html

From JRiver:
"JRiver has earned the respect of many leading audiophile manufacturers and their customers. Media Center is the benchmark of the industry."

Why JRiver?

For the purist
Because the sound engineered into the CD is the sound you will hear when you play the audio. No changes are made to it by JRiver. Nothing will come between you and the recording. The promise we deliver is fidelity and ease of use.

For the person who likes to experiment
If you need to manipulate the sound, you can use JRiver to modify playback. Upmixing, downmixing, bitdepth, speaker control. Because the audio path is fully 64 bit, any adjustments to volume, bitdepth and sample-rate are mathematically lossless.

More

• Support for all lossless formats of audio (FLAC, APE, ALAC, WM), AIFF and WAV files (including tagging)
• Bit-perfect playback (visualized with Audio Path)
• Industry leading DSD support (ASIO v2.2, DoP, SACD, DFF, DSF, etc.)
• Rich DSP environment (Room Correction, Bass Management, VST plug-in support, ReplayGain, etc.)
• Playback from memory

 

The Jriver UI for the Mac is just so bad...
Can't touch this!

 

It's not any worse than Audirvana and the library manager is vastly better. There's a skin (I forget the name) that gives it a really nice OSX look.

 

I like the iTunes UI and Up Next playlist features. Also Apple Music is really awesome. Also having an exact replica of my music on my phone is really really nice. So for me I need apps that integrate with iTunes. I have tried several...

Amarra Symphony: DONT USE THIS EVEN IF THEY PAY YOU. Holy shit I have not used a buggier piece of shit software in a LONG time. EQ presets don't save and load accordingly. Gapless playback works some of the time. Songs take forever to load, and everything is loaded up front, or dynamic loading fails. Change metadata in a song then try to play it causes horrendously sounding static audio glitch that absolutely rapes your ears. Songs sometimes glitch during playback, like holy f**k how do you mess up audio playback DURING a song. This is one of your CORE functions.

And no Amarra, you don't need to do a 'sudo purge' every time you start. Be a big boy and manage your f'ing memory correctly.

Pure Music: works alright. Gapless playback works correctly most the time and songs load reasonably compared to Amarra and pure music preloads the next song dynamically and does the right thing for memory management. However it has a bunch of bugs. It causes iTunes to jump around so you loose your placement when songs load. iTunes Remote app doesn't work when screen goes to sleep. Up sampling doesn't work correctly, does weird stuff like non-multiples of 2 up sampling. Integer mode doesn't work while up sampling. Awful UI bugs make EQ unusable. Lastly the visualizer in iTunes doesn't work with Pure Music.

Audinervana: using this currently in Legacy Mode for iTunes integration. Loads songs really fast!!! Gapless playback is perfect. Up sampling is the best I've seen yet, even let's you play with the filter parameters. Most importantly the whole program is very solid and has maybe one trivial bug I've encountered thus far. Cannot say the same for the other two. Only drawback for me is price and potentially having the Legacy Mode iTunes integration be dropped in the future. However this is by far the best app I've used yet.

BitPerfrect: looks good and for $10 it's the most reasonably priced app that does what I want. However I haven't tried it yet. Looks like it has similar features to audinirvana in legacy mode which is nice. Very curious about this.

Edit: I also convert FLAC to ALAC because iTunes.

 

Today I installed the Roon demo and let it run while I was at work. Finally got to sit down with it about 20 minutes ago. I was pleased to see I could configure its output to go through JRiver's WDM driver and apply digital volume control and crossfeed. Wonderful pure sound and an incredibly beautiful yet detailed user interface. with gobs and gobs of metadata. I'm the type of dude to look up AllMusic reviews and credits on discogs so it's just great. Ah!

 

I went to roon's website to download the free trial, but I am unsure exactly what it does (I have not installed it yet). I use JRiver as well (JRiver MC21). Can you explain exactly what it does and how to set it up in JRiver? I would really like to check it out. Thanks!

 

It will import the music in your "watch folders" and run them against it's huge database of several metadata services to pull performer credits, release numbers, dates, personnel, similar artists, etc. It can also integrate Tidal content into Roon if you have an account. So anyway, let it do its thing and then when you do audio setup you should be able to output directly to your DAC of choice or network device, or you can pick the JRiver option if you have the WDM driver installed. You can set alll the little things too like exclusive mode, resync time for switching sample rates, disabling Roon's internal volume control if you're using Jriver etc. Check it out!

For use with Jriver: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WDM_Driver

I like to route it through JRiver because I think the sound is very good and also I love crossfeed. Plus Jriver lets you use VST plugins like Out of Your Head.

Only big want right now is for Roon to use R128 for volume analysis like Jriver instead of Replaygain.

 

Thank you for the detailed info Azteca! I downloaded the demo and will follow your instructions for installing it in JRiver. I just wish it didn't cost so much! I wish I had a redemption code

 

Yeah, I hear that. I am really really enjoying it but it is still early days and they are building out a lot of features. It isn't horribly expensive (a little more than Spotify per month) but they make you pay for a whole year up front. Plus Tidal integration is a big draw and that costs money too. I am also experiencing some audio glitches at the moment but I'm not going to say that's their fault just yet since I'm using a somewhat complicated setup. Once they integrate more services like Spotify and just generally further develop they'll be damn near unstoppable. I just can't afford to drop that kind of coin up-front for a piece of software right now. I'm genuinely excited from how much buzz they had at RMAF (check out Computer Audiophile's roundup to hear about some of that). Lots of great audiophile hardware and software makers actively trying to integrate Roon.

 

same here, it is really expensive.