FFSoX Player 0.1 Initial Release Options

[banan]

• Allow for more DSP effects offered by SoX, e.g. the contrast, compand and mcompand effects (cf. http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html).

Would be nice to have something as simple and powerful as a user defined SoX command line. E.g. something like:

sox -p -p rate -h 96k

where "rate -h 96k" can be any SoX effect chain.

[pbelkner]

• Allow for more DSP effects offered by SoX, e.g. the contrast, compand and mcompand effects (cf. http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html).

Would be nice to have something as simple and powerful as a user defined SoX command line. E.g. something like:

sox -p -p rate -h 96k

where "rate -h 96k" can be any SoX effect chain.

This would be of great value to the plugin because it would allow users to have full access to SoX, and that's why I like the idea very much. Unfortunately there's no "out of the box" parser for the SoX command line, and I have write one at least for the effects chain syntax.

Currently I have the following plans for the FFSoX player plugin:

1. Merge the code bases from FFSoX player and R128GAIN.
2. Integrate the R128GAIN loudness scanner into FFSoX player.
3. Because R128GAIN alreaday writes tags, use this functionality for making it possible to write tags with the FFSoX player plugin.

I'm considering to add your idea to the list. But I have to admit that currently I'm in a process of re-writing R128GAIN which is a prerequisite to step 1.

[banan]

I see... not as easy as I thought. Anyway, thanks for considering. :-)

[chi]

This would be of great value to the plugin because it would allow users to have full access to SoX, and that's why I like the idea very much. Unfortunately there's no "out of the box" parser for the SoX command line, and I have write one at least for the effects chain syntax.

You’d only need to split the line wherever the name of an effect appears. All other parsing is done by the effects themselves.

[elge]

Thanks for this great plugin. To me, it sounds better than the default Winamp5lite FLAC decoder. But I may be mistaken as the Foobar2000 FAQ says that there's no difference between almost all the modern music players (http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#other_questions /sound better). Anyway, I just use the default FFSox configuration and I'm happy with it for now. I just really hope that some day, the seek forward/backward (according to player's song progress button) feature will be available. I've used SoX on Linux too and as far as I can remember it's not able to seek while playing FLAC files. It would be really great if one could do that. Please basically explain to me why this feature isn't built-in the SoX player and why it's not possible - or recommended - to enable it. MPlayer, which is also a great FLAC decoder, is able to seek backward and forward. On Windows, though, I prefer to use Winamp for plugins.

Thanks.

This post has been edited by elge: Sep 28 2012, 11:00

[pbelkner]

Thanks for this great plugin. To me, it sounds better than the default Winamp5lite FLAC decoder.

Thank you

Edit: Of course, this is not due to the FLAC decoder but to the processing chain delivering the decoded audio to your sound card. Each FLAC decoder will produce the same audio stream because FLAC is a lossless format.

But I may be mistaken as the Foobar2000 FAQ says that there's no difference between almost all the modern music players (http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#other_questions /sound better).

Cf. my motto below and trust your ears. I've figured this out wasting about ten years unsuccessfully following other people's advise.

Please basically explain to me why this feature isn't built-in the SoX player and why it's not possible - or recommended - to enable it.

Please double check whether you have enabled seeking:

That you have to manually enable seeking dates back to the times when seeking was not reliable implemented in FFmpeg. Meanwhile seeking in FFmpeg can be considered stable and I should remove the option with the next release.

You should also double check whether you have enabled "prefer float". This option means that the 32 bit float decoders are chosen for lossy codecs instead of 16 bit integer.

This post has been edited by pbelkner: Sep 28 2012, 18:04

[greynol]

But I may be mistaken as the Foobar2000 FAQ says that there's no difference between almost all the modern music players (http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#other_questions /sound better).

Cf. my motto below and trust your ears. I've figured this out wasting about ten years unsuccessfully following other people's advise.

Elge's post is subject to TOS #8 and will not get a pass.

That you've piled on in the way that you did is pretty disconcerting, especially since you've never once provided any evidence to back TOS8 violations of your own and apparently continue to think you are somehow immune to expectation bias, despite insisting that you only listen with your "ears" (which is the true historical basis for the defiant "motto" in your signature).

This post has been edited by greynol: Sep 28 2012, 19:18

[pbelkner]

Version 0.4.9-2 released:

Home: http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.4/

What's new?

• Made it compatible with the latest FFmpeg version.
• Requires "avutil-52.dll".

[smeekeven]

Monkey's Audio APE files stutter by using FFSoX with Zeranoe ffmpeg (since ffmpeg-20121003-git build)


I use ffmpeg daily builds from Zeranoe in combination with FFSoX Player for Winamp to play all my music files
(AAC;AIF;AIFF;APE;FLAC;M4A;M4P;MP3;MPC;OGG;SHN;WAV;WMA;WV)

Until Zeranoe build ffmpeg-20120927-git-13f0cd6-win32-shared from September 27th
everything worked fine and smooth, including the decoding of Ape files.

Since Zeranoe build ffmpeg-20121003-git-df82454-win32-shared.7z from Oct 3rd
Monkey's Audio APE files give stuttering sound and produce various artificial noice effects.

Later builds didn't resolve the problem. Neither the newest ffsox player version 0.4.9.3, nor the latest Zeranoe build from Nov. 5th
resolved this annoyance.

I started a topic at the Zenaroe FFMPEG forum, see: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=799

the sample.ape from my post there plays correctly with ffplay from the command line in all different ffmpeg builds.

Is it something within the Sox part of FFSoX player?
And can it be resolved please?

Greetings,
Smeekeven[size="4"][/size]

[pbelkner]

Since Zeranoe build ffmpeg-20121003-git-df82454-win32-shared.7z from Oct 3rd
Monkey's Audio APE files give stuttering sound and produce various artificial noice effects.

As is seems they've changed several of the FFmpeg audio decoders to produce planar output instead of interleaved.

Planar audio was not supported by the FFSoX Player so far. The new 0.4.9-4 version should fix this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.4/

[smeekeven]

APE stuttering problems SOLVED in FFSoX Player 0.4.9-4

Many thanks to you pbelkner for amazingly quick response and efficiënt solution to the Monkey's Audio Ape decoding problems.
I really like your FFSoX Player plugin.

Since I use it to decode and upsample all of my audio formats
(AAC;AIF;AIFF;APE;FLAC;M4A;M4P;MP3;MPC;OGG;SHN;WAV;WMA;WV;)
it make all other input plugins in Winamp obsolete*.

(*The only exception to this rule is the Playlist Separator in_text.dll input plugin by DrO
http://www.nunzioweb.com/daz/plsp.html, but that's outside the scope of audio decoding ....)

With every new build of Zeranoe ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win32/shared/?C=M;O=D)
i will update the avCodec-dll, avFormat-.dll, avUtil-.dll, swScale-.dll in the /Winamp/Plugins/in_ffsox directory

By the way what is planar output versus interleaved?

Cheers!
smeekeven

[pbelkner]

Since I use it to decode and upsample all of my audio formats
(AAC;AIF;AIFF;APE;FLAC;M4A;M4P;MP3;MPC;OGG;SHN;WAV;WMA;WV;)
it make all other input plugins in Winamp obsolete*.

You may consider including "FLV;MP4" as well. These are the usual extensions for video clips, e.g. from Youtube. This way you can seamlessly include them into your playlist.

By the way what is planar output versus interleaved?

In FFmpeg the term "planar" refers to how an audio buffer is organized:

• planar: There are separate buffers for each channel in parallel.
• interleaved: There is just one buffer filled with sequences of samples from each channel.

[Polarus]

Hi,
In my first post here I would like to thank you for this excelent project! I've replaced all audio input plugins with FFSoX and full version of ffmpeg.
However, with Zeranoe FFmpeg v20121105, ogg do not play properly (same problem as fixed APE).
Keep your great work!

[pbelkner]

Hi,
In my first post here I would like to thank you for this excelent project! I've replaced all audio input plugins with FFSoX and full version of ffmpeg.
However, with Zeranoe FFmpeg v20121105, ogg do not play properly (same problem as fixed APE).
Keep your great work!

Thank you for the report, and I can reproduce it. Unfortunately I don't have a solution yet. FFmpeg's OGG decoder claims to be AV_SAMPLE_FMT_FLT, i.e. interleaved, the same as e.g. AAC and AC3. Other then OGG, decoded AAC and AC3 work fine.

[Polarus]

It would be very nice if you can specify decoder libraries e.g. for ogg - libogg / libvorbis, for mp3 - libmad etc. without passing it to ffmpeg. Ffmpeg, for example, don't support MP3 freeformat like 640 kbps whil libmad supports it. But its only a dream now

[pbelkner]

with Zeranoe FFmpeg v20121105, ogg do not play properly (same problem as fixed APE).

It's not exactly the same. For what ever reason the FFmpeg method av_get_bytes_per_sample() nowadays gives unexpected results in case of the OGG codec (at least to me). I've changed in_ffsox in order to avoid this particular method at all and released version 0.4.9-5:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.4/

[pbelkner]

v0.5.0 released

http://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.5/

What's new?

• Allow for applying intermediate replay gain values between album gain (0%) and track gain (100%):
  
  
  
  
  

• It would be very nice if you can specify decoder libraries e.g. for ogg - libogg / libvorbis, for mp3 - libmad etc. without passing it to ffmpeg. Ffmpeg, for example, don't support MP3 freeformat like 640 kbps whil libmad supports it. But its only a dream now

  
  Rewritten and reactivated the FFmpeg adapters for "libmad.dll" and "liba52.dll".
  
  
• Fixed a memory leak.

[pbelkner]

Version 0.6.0 released:

Home: http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.6/

What's new?

• Provided the Secret Rabbit Code (SRC) resampler as an alternative to the SoX resampler.
• Please note that the SRC resampler takes a lot of CPU compared to the SoX resampler:
  
  • SRC (best):
    

    

  • SoX (very high):
    

    
    

  • SRC (medium):
    

    
    

[bandpass]

[*]Please note that the SRC resampler takes a lot of CPU compared to the SoX resampler:

So that's the down-side—is there an up-side?

[pbelkner]

is there an up-side?

Yes, of course! Unfortunately I can't tell you 'cause probably it's subject to TOS #8

[Wombat]

is there an up-side?

Yes, of course! Unfortunately I can't tell you 'cause probably it's subject to TOS #8

Sounds like BS! How can you claim "Of course" and subject to TOS #8 in one sentense? If it is "Of course" it should be simple to demonstrate.

[pbelkner]

I think it's a good idea, thought I think there are too many choices. 25%, 50% and 75% should be adequate, 20% steps will definitely be adequate.

Version 0.6.1 released:

Home: http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/in-ffsox/f...x/in_ffsox-0.6/

What's new?

• Provided a switch to enable the "steep filter" for the SoX resampler.
• Disabled editing all drop down boxes except "replay gain mode" and "phase response" for the SoX resampler.
• Accepted input for the "replay gain mode" is 0..100.
• The RG mode drop down list just contains the values as proposed by greynol:
  
  
• Accepted input for the "phase response" is 0..100.

[smeekeven]

Problems with playback MPC (Musepack) files

Thanks for the steep development of your plugin.
In addition to the problems with APE and OGG playback, some weeks ago (see posts by Polarus and myself),
there is a similar problem with stuttering sound in MPC (musepack) files.
I hope you can resolve this the same way you did to the APE and OGG decoding.
Thanks very much again and keep up the good work.

By the way: do you recommend the use of the steep filter option? and why?

[Willakan]

This is a very impressive piece of TOS-8 skirting: the posts here omit all mentions of sound quality, but the plugin doesn't seem to make much sense unless it's meant to influence SQ...

[pbelkner]

By the way: do you recommend the use of the steep filter option? and why?

This is a very impressive piece of TOS-8 skirting: the posts here omit all mentions of sound quality, but the plugin doesn't seem to make much sense unless it's meant to influence SQ...

Currently I prefer the following set-up:

• Audio input tagged (normalized) according to EBU R128 (if you're located in Northern America you should prefer ATSC A/85 instead) using "r128gain".
• Using a DAC capable of ASIO, 24 bits, and 192 kHz.
• WA configured to allow for 24 bit output:
  
  
  
  
  
• WA output via "out_asio" by Otachan:
  
  
  
  
  
• WA input via the FFSoX Player "in_ffsox" with
  • up-sampling enabled to 192 kHz,
  • using the SoX resampler with "high quality" and "steep filter", and
  • dithering with noise shaping:
  
• FFSoX's "replay gain mode" set to 50%:
  

Edit: Regarding the "steep filter" you may refer to SoX's resampler's "-s" option: http://sox.sourceforge.net/SoX/Resampling.

This post has been edited by pbelkner: Dec 14 2012, 21:04