Pure Player

You can compare a flac with a wav playback and see for yourself, it's very interesting...


Track ripped from a decent telarc CD, ubuntu, played by sox (alias play) directly to the sound card (equvalent of windows asio). Track converted to flac with sox (size dropped to half).

Code:
AUDIODEV=plughw:0 play -V track.wav
Sox took about 0.5% of ancient AMD Sempron 2600 running at 1800MHz.

Code:
AUDIODEV=plughw:0 play -V track.flac
Sox took about 1% of the CPU.

One PC: Infrasonic Quartet to headphones AKM K55

Another PC: Audiotrak Prodigy 192 - 6-channels input of HK AVR 430 modded for front speakers bi-amping - bi-amped KEF Q7

My gear is definitely no highend, but I really do not hear any difference :)
 
That observation will win you no friends.

:) I think I can live with it :)

People generally agree that the only factor causing the difference can be different level of noise. Timing is controlled by the card and samples are identical. 44.1/16 flac decoding to wav takes less than 1% of my ancient CPU. There is no reason foobar should behave differently. If it does, it is a bug, not feature.

On my idle ubuntu sox playing flac never got to the top of processes listed by their one-second-average CPU consumption (command "top"). Browser (no flash running) consumed more, just as Xorg (the graphical server), the VGA card interrupt service thread of the kernel - all these consumed significantly more CPU (i.e. single % figures each). I do not believe the fraction of % CPU load the flac decoding requires can have any effect on the level of noise on modern desktops running tons of processes. Plus it is highly likely the list of processes available through Windows XP/7 API is far from being complete.
 
Sorry forgot to say that this is from flac files.
Glitches is maybe wrong word, but small cracks, pops.
My pc is quite a workhorse. A HP z600 with Intel neehalem Xeon quad core cpu.
SSD disk and another 2TB disk. NAS with 12TB, Asus Essence stx soundcard - using only spdif out to Audio Note dac.

Maybe this has to do with spdif out and wasapi.
Between tracks, when I make a move from one song to another in foobar (with wasapi) I got quite loud pops/cracks. This is a well known driver (or hardware) issue with the Asus Essence soundcards.
With pureplayer it seems as these pops are there the whole time. (aprox 1. sec between every pop) but not as loud as the foobar pops.

Sincerely.
 
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Well it got some flaws.
It sounds (maybe a tad better than foobar. A tiny bit more naturalness). However the strangest thing happen.
After playing for a while. Testing 24/96 material which it wont play.
I get some "hiss" between tracks. The second I am waiting for the music to start the loudspeakers put out some "hiss".

This phenomena also suddenly happen with foobar. And the sound quality decreases. (with both players)

When I think of it this happened earlier also (former version) and I just did not what had happen with my setup.
At that time I also had reclock innstalled and I thouht it perhaps was that that caused the problem.
I also had to remove the soundcard drivers completely. (with drive scrubber). Took a registry cleanup, uninstalled reclock, reboot and reinstalled the soundcard drivers.

Then the hiss was gone again and the good sound quality was back. (with foobar).

Now this happened 30 minutes ago and it is strange.

Did a registry cleanup again and alot of errors with MS .net framework (in which pureplayers uses I think) are present.

Cleaned the errors and rebootet.

Now it is back to normal again.

I don't think I will try pureplayer again until this is fixed. To bad because it has alot of potential.

I cannot find any logical explanation for this beaviour really, just that the fact that pureplayer causes it in my system.
 
Thanks for your reply. No it happened before also. With the former version without wasapi.
I really don't think it is the player itself but .net framework that causes this in some way or the other. I work as an IT professional and come across many strange things but this one is hard to describe.

Win7 64bit enterprise with sp1.
Asus essence stx using spdif out to dac. So the "hiss" is coming out from the spdif in some way or the other.

Perhaps the .net registry flaws is causing something in the essence stx drivers?

As I said. I don't think it is the pureplayer itself that is causing this.

Sincerely
 
Well I am unable now. I am 5 minutes away from taking a bit holiday :)
The motorcycle is ready..... just waiting for my friend and we will ride together.

Will try it on Sunday or Monday..

I am also pretty certain it har to do with .NET and the stx drivers. (which alot of people complain about).

So until then..

Sincerely and greetings from Norway :)