I need advice on a media player. Three "must haves" are as follows:

1. native ASIO support
2. FLAC support
3. superior fidelity.

I also need education as to what renders one media player "better" sounding than another. AlbumPlayer is one jukebox that has captured my attention and I am curious if anyone here has first-hand experience with it.

1. Some but not all. You need a soundcard that provides real Asio support as well as a media player that outputs through the Asio interface. ASIO4All isn't the real thing but it may be OK for some soundcards.

2. There are lots of players that support Flac. iTunes and Windows media Player don't but most other players do.

3. Are you going to control volume from the media player? Do you want to use DSP to shape frequency response? How about up-sampling? If so, differences can be real since the player is changing the bits. If you try to preserve the original music bit stream, then competent players should be pretty similar in sound. Of course, audiophiles hear HUGE differences between players.

For a start, Foobar2000 and J.River media Center (I'm not sure whether the free version (Media Jukebox) supports ASIO) are possibilities.


Once the player starts playing a music file, it needs to keep the DAC from running out of bits. It needs to read the music file from disk, decode it and pass it to the soundcard interface. This isn't a question of audiophile tweaking, it is software engineering. Decoding Flac or MP3 isn't a question of "better sounding" or not either. It is just computer s/w that should be thoroughly tested to be sure that it produces the expected stream of bits.

There are hundreds of music player programs for Windows alone. They don't all have the same feature set so you need to think about the features you want.

Most players are not adequately documented so the best way to learn about your choices and to develop your own preferences is to try a few out. Most are either free or have a free trial.

I listen to 60% classical music. Using Composer and other tags in addition to Album and Artist tags is essential. That narrowed my choices once I understood what I needed. My experiemnts also identified features I didn't need (like album art or LastFM.) Your criteria will be different from mine. You may begin to identify more criteria as you try out some players.

Bill

FasterThanEver, thanks for your thorough and informative response. Regarding sound cards I have an outboard PreSonus Firebox Firewire ASIO audio interface/sound card recording system as part of my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) so I certainly need dedicated native ASIO support. J.River reads as having "ASIO playback" and I don't quite know what that means. However you have peaked my curiosity if ASIO4ALL would enhance the fidelity on my 2nd computer, an off-the-shelf HP Compaq tc4400 laptop.

My wife, a choral conductor listens to classical, baroque and medieval almost exclusively. I listen primarily to jazz. Anyway you slice it, tagging composers is important in this household. Which brings me to my next question. If I tag, say in Tag&Rename, couldn't any media-player that plays FLAC read the tag regardless of being able to write the tag? I mean, it's written in Vorbis Comments, a language, correct? Or am I missing something. I have a tablet here on my lap and the thought of having a jukebox where I can just drool and tap the pretty picture of Lenny Bernstein and hear "West Side Story" is somehow appealing to my stupidest and laziest inclinations. Hence, AlbumPlayer ranks right up there.

And finally, do I have too many cooks in the kitchen? I'm ripping in dBpoweramp Reference, managing (likely) in Helium Music Manager, tagging with Tag&Rename and jukeing via AlbumPlayer or, perhaps, J.River. You are the third person to have mentioned J.River as a competent jukebox. Should I just call it a day and buy Roxio's Easy Media Creator 10? I'm beginning to worry about software conflicts.

Anyhow, I create music on my computer (DAW) and enjoy music with my computer. My needs run at cross purposes on occasion. Any other suggestions or random thoughts on a Jukebox/Media-Player would be most appreciated.

ASIO is an interface specification. The music player has to be able to output the audio data stream through that interface. J. River Media center can. (The free Media Jukebox version can too.) On the other side of the interface, you need a driver that accepts data through the ASIO interface and se3nds it to your audio output hardware. You already have audio hardware with an ASIO driver.


> However you have peaked my curiosity if ASIO4ALL would enhance the fidelity on my 2nd computer,
> an off-the-shelf HP Compaq tc4400 laptop.

It may avoid having the Windows KMixer component mangle the audio stream. However, The onboard soundcard in most laptops won't provide very high quality sound whatever you do.

> My needs run at cross purposes on occasion.

Most of the music players on the market follow the same Album/Artist framework and offer little support for browsing or searching by other tags. Even if you tag your files they way you want them, most players simply don't use anything but the basic set of tags. Define your essential needs and find a player that satisfies those needs. It is possible.

You might want to use a separate program for recording. I use Audacity for getting LP content into digital files.



1. I looked at many, many players, rippers and tag editors before settling on my choices. I ripped a subset of my CD collection, tagged it and tried to organize the players to work the way I wanted. I'd recommend that you do some experiments too.

2. You need to make decisions about the tags you will use and how you will represent values before you start ripping your entire CD collection. Consistency is important. Things can be fixed later but it is much easier to get the tags right the first time. I chose to use last names only when possible for Composers and Performers. For a symphony, the Performer is listed as Composer_Orchestra. (For example, Szell_Cleveland Orchestra.) You need to see how the interface works and how you will use it to make the right decisions.

3. I've tried EAC, CDex, dBpoweramp (R12 reference), iTunes and J. River MC for ripping. All claim to provide secure ripping.

- CDex uses an older low level foundation (cdparanoia) that doesn't compensate for the cacheing in many modern CD/DVD drives.
- EAC doesn't allow me to tag files (and name them) using the Composer tag. It is awkward to use.

- J. River MC lets me gets the tagging and file nanmes right when I ripo CDs. I compared results between MC and EAC and found no difference on any CD. Same ripping speed as EAC (test&Copy, secure mode.)

- dBPoweramp can use C2 error info to catch errors and AccurateRip to compare the ripped files to what other people got. With the right DVD drive, it rips CDs much faster than EAC or MC. However, the tag info is never right and isn't even useful for naming files. (If the file name generated by a rule such as Composer_Album_Artist_Track name is too long, it silently truncates it, causing conflicts between file names. Ugly!) The AMG online datbase for tag info is bettewr than the FreeDB database but it is still necessary to re-do almost everything.

Since I have to enter almost all the tagging info, I use MC for most tagging since it makes the data entry so much easier. I sometimes use dBpoweramp for speed but I find it annoying.

4. Life is much easier if you have one piece of s/w for ripping, tagging and playback. I use MC for everything. I have used the MP3tag standalone tagging program and find it to be pretty useful. However, I haven't used it for months. MC does everything I want without pain.

5. MC lets you have different view schemes for different uses. I have a scheme for classical music with panes listing distinct sub-genre, composer, work, artist and version values. For Jazz, I use Artist, Album and Track name panes. I don't use album art or other pictures but MC supports that. I like using s/w that I can easily configure rather than having to conform to the limited understanding of the s/w author.

6. Portable players are ever worse than Windows music players in limiting you to the Artist/Album framework. However, iPods provide just enough flexibility to work for classical music. I use MC to convert files and download them to my iPod. I haven't had to use iTunes to control my iPod.

7. MC has lots of features so you will need to poke around and ask questions on the J. River forums.

8. Many people on this forum recommend Foobar2000. I tried it several times over several years. I might be able to tailor it to my needs but it would far more work than using MC. If you don't like MC, try Foobar next.

9. I would not consider Roxio's Easy Media Creator 10 to be a good candidate for an all-in one music player.

Good luck!

Bill

FasterThanEver, again thank you for your advice. I apologize for not responding - my notifications found it fit to reset themselve to "ignore the guy".

I have been using MC12 for a week and have one problem that the board and developers over yonder cannot seem to wrangle. I persistently get duplicates of album tracks in my action pane and I can't get rid of them. They arent reflections of duplicated files, they are MC pointing twice to the same place. I'm not asking for help: I have the whole MC world trying to unravel it. It is merely annoying and I cannot fix it. Aside from that I have been happy with the software.

I fear that I will not be able to use MC because of this. Could anyone suggest a plan B for a media player?

You might like R13 which uses 2 commercial database and Musicbrainz all tied into something called PerfectMeta.



In this instance we would trim back the track name (in the filename) until the file was legal. Many programs might just give a generic 'cannot write file' then you would have to count the characters and scale back manually (once you have figured out it is too long, most people would never guess this). There is no ideal solution IMHO.