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

What is the best audiophile music player for Windows and Mac in 2023?


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PaperBoat

PaperBoat

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I suppose somebody ask before, but where is Linux here? And pretty sure each embedded player is running a Linux version.
Emulation isn't a good thing... Linux distros are lot noisy than Windows/ MAC and you can't run your renowned branded DAC's ASIO drivers natively in Linux because they don't support Linux...
 
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threni

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Emulation isn't a good thing... Linux distros are lot noisy than Windows/ MAC and you can't run your renowned branded DAC's ASIO drivers natively in Linux because they don't support Linux...
What's wrong with emulation? And what is the metric by which you say Linux distros are more "noisy" than other OSes? My moOde boxes don't seem very noisy - what should I be looking out for?
 
OP
PaperBoat

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What's wrong with emulation? And what is the metric by which you say Linux distros are more "noisy" than other OSes? My moOde boxes don't seem very noisy - what should I be looking out for?
Follow this guy and build a extreme lite Windows... Linux, Fidelizer/ Audiophile Optimizer and Process Lasso are absolutely bullshit... Keep it in your mind: lower OS processing = greater sound quality.
 

kysa

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Emulation isn't a good thing... Linux distros are lot noisy than Windows/ MAC and you can't run your renowned branded DAC's ASIO drivers natively in Linux because they don't support Linux...
You are certainly a dreamer! We can run ASIO via wineASIO, but why would we? And is there a difference in sound quality between ALSA and ASIO?

lower OS processing = greater sound quality.

Ugh... Source?
 

threni

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You are certainly a dreamer! We can run ASIO via wineASIO, but why would we? And is there a difference in sound quality between ALSA and ASIO?



Ugh... Source?
Every post is factually incorrect! As they say (said?) on Usenet - *plonk*.
 

ZolaIII

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You are certainly a dreamer! We can run ASIO via wineASIO, but why would we? And is there a difference in sound quality between ALSA and ASIO?


Ugh... Source?
Meh he alludes to power menagement and high utilisation possibly bringing EMI but he doesn't really know how low it really is for processing something like audio this day's nor how power menagement isn't all that great regarding hardware so it doesn't really make a big difference.
On the other hand I believe most of you never heard of Jack (https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki) or lo latency Linux Kernels before.
 

Jmudrick

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Follow this guy and build a extreme lite Windows... Linux, Fidelizer/ Audiophile Optimizer and Process Lasso are absolutely bullshit... Keep it in your mind: lower OS processing = greater sound quality.

I used his debloat tool for my Roon Core install on my Lenovo laptop and it did no harm, has been running great.
 
OP
PaperBoat

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You are certainly a dreamer! We can run ASIO via wineASIO, but why would we? And is there a difference in sound quality between ALSA and ASIO?



Ugh... Source?
Every post is factually incorrect! As they say (said?) on Usenet - *plonk*.
Meh he alludes to power menagement and high utilisation possibly bringing EMI but he doesn't really know how low it really is for processing something like audio this day's nor how power menagement isn't all that great regarding hardware so it doesn't really make a big difference.
On the other hand I believe most of you never heard of Jack (https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki) or lo latency Linux Kernels before.
Sorry guys... But I don't have much time for "Windows vs. Linux"...
 

Sokel

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Did a silly test measuring first playing a 1Khz sine through foobar and then measuring the same through analyzer's internal (perfect) 1Khz signal:

Foobar.PNG

Through foobar



no foobar.PNG


Internal

both.PNG


Both for comparison

Nothing to see here,really.
 

ZolaIII

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Actually disabling additional C and S states (on hardware) lowers the latency in general (and makes power efficiency worse because you basically disable sleap and additional propagation) and micro ops latency which is what is important for something like music processing. This is on hardware level and OS agnostic.
 

theREALdotnet

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Actually disabling additional C and S states (on hardware) lowers the latency in general (and makes power efficiency worse because you basically disable sleap and additional propagation) and micro ops latency which is what is important for something like music processing. This is on hardware level and OS agnostic.

When is audio ever processed in real-time on a computer? Isn’t it always in batches, whenever the audio software is allocated a sliver of compute time? Read from a buffer, do some processing, write to another buffer. An occasional allotment of CPU time is sufficient to keep the input buffer from overflowing and the output buffer from running dry.
 

ZolaIII

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When is audio ever processed in real-time on a computer? Isn’t it always in batches, whenever the audio software is allocated a sliver of compute time? Read from a buffer, do some processing, write to another buffer. An occasional allotment of CPU time is sufficient to keep the input buffer from overflowing and the output buffer from running dry.
Yes and if you add to much of it you get shattering/sync problems one way or other (even both). Neither Windows or Linux are RTOS but Linux can become (near) one with lo latency kernel, combining that with Jack you get near real time for complex audio processing (multiple DAW's and lot of effects). I told you how to minimise them regarding CPU and that is enough for place like this. We can discuss modern programming techniques like flag fast load/store registers in semaphore complex loops but I don't see the point doing so hire.
 

theREALdotnet

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We can discuss modern programming techniques like flag fast load/store registers in semaphore complex loops but I don't see the point doing so hire.

Especially since there is no time criticality here. After all, we’re talking about audio playback, not music production with hundreds of tracks. My Mac mini runs at about 90% idle when playing music with Audirvana and doing Dirac Live + Bass Control for room EQ.

I used to do real-time programming in VAXeln and OS9 back in the 90s, but this sort of stuff simply doesn’t apply here, and on today’s CPUs.
 

ZolaIII

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Mnyb

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Oh dear not this again who resurected this horse from the glue factory..... . It infested the squeezebox forums for years with some crackpot with the handle soundcheck was at this all the time he and others with optimized windows optimized Linux and and stuff . Even hacking the players with optimized firmware :/
What a load of cr*p.

There are even funnier types running very optimised os's without any gui (or usefulness ) :)

Follow this guy and build a extreme lite Windows... Linux, Fidelizer/ Audiophile Optimizer and Process Lasso are absolutely bullshit... Keep it in your mind: lower OS processing = greater sound quality.

I think Archimago eventually did a demo where he loaded a PC to almost 100% with tons of tasks while using the USB output to a DAC .
There where never any differences at the analog output of the DAC until it was to much and it broke down . it simply works until its does not. There is no gradual scale .

This is a false claim "lower OS processing = greater sound quality." please stop or provide unrefutably evidence ( which no other of these hacks have ever done btw ).

I had a hunch this tread was going to get to this eventually :D
 

kysa

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Meh he alludes to power menagement and high utilisation possibly bringing EMI but he doesn't really know how low it really is for processing something like audio this day's nor how power menagement isn't all that great regarding hardware so it doesn't really make a big difference.
On the other hand I believe most of you never heard of Jack (https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki) or lo latency Linux Kernels before.
AFAIK pipewire can be faster than JACK, but I'd love to hear about your experience.
 

theREALdotnet

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