Audiophile music player for Windows/Mac and your opinion...

[sarumbear]

iTunes? iTunes is a more "streamer" and less as a dedicated "player"...

ITunes is not a streamer, it happens to be integrated with Apple Music service, similar to Roon. ITunes has a local library, which can be local or on NAS.

And for Plex and all other players I've put a "others" option in my contenders list.

Fair enough.

Mobile apps are a quite different world...

Indeed, which is where music is played. I haven’t used a desktop based player app for years. Why attached to a computer when you have a tablet or even mobile in your hand while sitting on your sofa/chair?

 

[PaperBoat]

But they're exactly the same. Digital music is just numbers. Bit-perfect means the numbers:
1,2,3,4,5
in a flac/mp3/stream end up being output as:
1,2,3,4,5
and not
1,2,3,3,5
or any other such corruption. Your ears won't have heard any difference because there literally is no difference. You're imagining it; that or you're just another low-effort troll.

I'll be happy if I'm wrong about JRiver because I actually like the "Audio Path" approach in JRiver which Foobar lacks...

 

[Sokel]

Why attached to a computer when you have a tablet or even mobile in your hand while sitting on your sofa/chair?

I do that too with foobar,just install foobarcon to your phone and the pc and your done,you have your entire library (along with the other options) at hand.
There are solutions for everything with a little digging.

 

[sarumbear]

I do that too with foobar,just install foobarcon to your phone and the pc and your done,you have your entire library (along with the other options) at hand.
There are solutions for everything with a little digging.

Of course there is. I used to use Plex. It allowed me to play from many devices independently as it has a client/server architecture like Roon. It even allows you play while outside home. As it’s a generic media player (that supports almost every file format) I was able to have music videos and music tracks in the same library.

I then moved completely to streaming and never looked back. I don’t even own an always-on server anymore. Saving the planet even…

 

[Count Arthur]

Random thought:

It's still called Foobar2000!

That's aged as well as 2001 A Space Odyssey, 1984, Space 1999 and everything else that seemed far off in the future in 1950.

 

[rwortman]

If Roon was free the others would be obscure niche applications. In my opinion the only reason not to use Roon is cost, and I just quit paying yearly and bought a lifetime license. I deleted Foobar after a out an hour. Too much work to get the UI nit to look like a freshman software project.

 

[PaperBoat]

If Roon was free the others would be obscure niche applications. In my opinion the only reason not to use Roon is cost, and I just quit paying yearly and bought a lifetime license. I deleted Foobar after a out an hour. Too much work to get the UI nit to look like a freshman software project.

Foobar/ JRiver/ Audirvana gives you more control over your music than Roon...

 

[Mnyb]

Of course there is. I used to use Plex. It allowed me to play from many devices independently as it has a client/server architecture like Roon. It even allows you play while outside home. As it’s a generic media player (that supports almost every file format) I was able to have music videos and music tracks in the same library.

I then moved completely to streaming and never looked back. I don’t even own an always-on server anymore. Saving the planet even…

Doing the same there is good iPhone and tablet app ( iPeng ) for the LMS server so I controll everything with the tablet .
At one point I even streamed outside of my home , but nowadays Spotify is good enough for that.

Btw LMS can integrate streaming services like Spotify so you can mix streaming tracks with your own library.
And a plug-in makes all LMS player Spotify connect players so friends can DJ at my place . Heck my wife often uses the Spotify connect feature rather than the server itself .

The LMS server also replaces our tuner as it has radio plugins so we use it for radio .

 

[rwortman]

Foobar/ JRiver/ Audirvana gives you more control over your music than Roon...

I used JRiver for 4 or 5 years. In what way does it give you more control over your music?

 

[PaperBoat]

I used JRiver for 4 or 5 years. In what way does it give you more control over your music?

DSP, Library management, Volume leveling and YouTube streaming ability using its own driver...

 

[jae]

I would use foobar2000 v1.6 until v2 is more mature, then swap to v2 at that time. Still many useful plugins are not ported over to v2 yet.

 

[stringham]

JRiver, for management of a large classical library and for built-in EQ. But I do dread trying to do anything new with it, and having to wade through the forum for answers.

 

[PaperBoat]

I still wonder if "bit-perfect" is the last and only thing that any music player needs then why developers are bothering themselves to update/ upgrade their players? Why we are throwing our hard-earned money at them whenever they get updated? How could a music player deliver "better audio" when it's already doing "bit-perfect"? Why upgrade?

 

[jae]

I still wonder if "bit-perfect" is the last and only thing that any music player needs then why developers are bothering themselves to update/ upgrade their players? Why we are throwing our hard-earned money at them whenever they get updated? How could a music player deliver "better audio" when it's already doing "bit-perfect"? Why upgrade?

You're paying for stuff like features, convenience, user experience etc. When free alternatives exist that do the same thing, that can be the only reason.

 

[dartinbout]

Foobar is great, but hard to organise your libary when it's very big like mine. That's why i use JRiver, that does everything right that Foobar does right, but have a better libary system. It's not free altough, but cheap for what you get. If you want freeware, Foobar is better than anything else.

With a library of 122k, nothing else comes close.

 

[AudioBoy]

Why upgrade?

If we are talking about software players, it is obvious that they work under the limitation of the OS API and cannot jump out of this "sandbox" when transmitting signals to your audio devices. At least, if the software player developers do not provide their own drivers for the audio interface (for example, ASIO).

Writing a driver and installing it into the system requires digital certification (approved by the OS hardware team, such as WHQL), so it's much more difficult for developers, and generally unnecessary, to create the bit-perfect software player, since the OS can provide API with all the features , which developers require to achieve the same goal without a special audio driver. As for me, it is very suspicious when an audio player requires its own driver for its work .

So when developers update their players, they usually fix bugs, add user ergonomics features, add tag metadata support for new audio formats and codecs. All this does not affect the quality of the audio signal at all. If the sound engine (built on the API provided by the OS) is working properly, there is no need to update the software player anymore.

In my opinion, the main reason why updates are still around is because the developers want to add new usability features or fix some bugs in the ones that were added before.

 

[jasonhanjk]

Microsoft Groove and VLC. Did not add colour to my sine tone when doing measurements.

 

[PaperBoat]

Microsoft Groove and VLC. Did not add colour to my sine tone when doing measurements.

Wow! You got a quite friendly Windows audio mixer...

 

[Sokel]

Microsoft Groove and VLC. Did not add colour to my sine tone when doing measurements.

I wouldn't measure those for intersample overloads,the result would be off the charts.

 

[rwortman]

DSP, Library management, Volume leveling and YouTube streaming ability using its own driver...

What DSP does it have that Roon doesn’t. What library management functions? Volume leveling? Youtube streaming is needed inside my music server to me. I do get that others listen to a lot of music this way.