Right now I'm using older versions of Squeezeplug (before it became part of Max2Play) and it is okay. Getting a streaming service to work reliably has been a bit hit or miss. And I do wonder whether I really need the overhead of a dedicate server component (the LMS) vs. just having a network share with my music on it.
So I thought to start looking at some of the player distributions out there.
One component that I need is an equalizer, to tame the bass. I have the alsaequal running on Squeezeplug and it has been great.
Yesterday I tried Volumio and while I did have some initial success in getting the alsaequal loaded, I had some problems w/ volume adjustment after installing it. And it became clear that changes made via Volumio's "control panel" wiped-out configuration changes I was making to get the equalizer running. It does seem like that could become frustrating in the future, if updates, etc., knocked the EQ out and I had to intervene.
I looked at Rune and also Moode but it seems like these are all forks of the same projects. It doesn't seem like the latest version of any of the three (Volumio, Rune, or Moode) have any built-in EQ capability. It is interesting that others are looking to enable EQ on all three (this is apparent via Google), but it doesn't seem like a forthcoming feature.
I looked at Pi Musicbox but again, it seems like there is no built-in support for EQ. I can find how-to discussions, but nervous (again) that changes made by the underlying player software may revert my EQ changes.
Have I covered them all, though? When I first started my quest, I saw Volumio and Rune and Moode and Pi Musicbox and figured I had lots of them to try and the features would be quite varied. That was before learning that three of them evolved from the same project.
Any suggestions?
I could get a small external equalizer but that can introduce phase and noise issues, so I'd rather do this in the digital domain (where I suppose there can still be phase issues but I somehow trust the alsa developers more than a $50 external EQ).
So I thought to start looking at some of the player distributions out there.
One component that I need is an equalizer, to tame the bass. I have the alsaequal running on Squeezeplug and it has been great.
Yesterday I tried Volumio and while I did have some initial success in getting the alsaequal loaded, I had some problems w/ volume adjustment after installing it. And it became clear that changes made via Volumio's "control panel" wiped-out configuration changes I was making to get the equalizer running. It does seem like that could become frustrating in the future, if updates, etc., knocked the EQ out and I had to intervene.
I looked at Rune and also Moode but it seems like these are all forks of the same projects. It doesn't seem like the latest version of any of the three (Volumio, Rune, or Moode) have any built-in EQ capability. It is interesting that others are looking to enable EQ on all three (this is apparent via Google), but it doesn't seem like a forthcoming feature.
I looked at Pi Musicbox but again, it seems like there is no built-in support for EQ. I can find how-to discussions, but nervous (again) that changes made by the underlying player software may revert my EQ changes.
Have I covered them all, though? When I first started my quest, I saw Volumio and Rune and Moode and Pi Musicbox and figured I had lots of them to try and the features would be quite varied. That was before learning that three of them evolved from the same project.
Any suggestions?
I could get a small external equalizer but that can introduce phase and noise issues, so I'd rather do this in the digital domain (where I suppose there can still be phase issues but I somehow trust the alsa developers more than a $50 external EQ).
Just yesterday into a bit of an ongoing controversy, Moode developer announced that the next version of the software will have an EQ.
If you are not looking for 'bit-perfect' solutions, you could just go with a normal distro and install MPD yourself? Much more hassle, but could do the trick.
Still new at this, but the last thing I want is an EQ in front of the perfectly-balanced studio-equalized recordings. Minor room corrections, maybe, but if I found that I need to 'tame the bass' I probably would look into my speaker setup?
At least for the 'reference' recordings, it makes little sense to re-equalize them, IMHO.
Good luck on your search! And please report back your findings.
Rafa.
If you are not looking for 'bit-perfect' solutions, you could just go with a normal distro and install MPD yourself? Much more hassle, but could do the trick.
Still new at this, but the last thing I want is an EQ in front of the perfectly-balanced studio-equalized recordings. Minor room corrections, maybe, but if I found that I need to 'tame the bass' I probably would look into my speaker setup?
At least for the 'reference' recordings, it makes little sense to re-equalize them, IMHO.
Good luck on your search! And please report back your findings.
Rafa.
I hear ya, and to be fair I would hope the EQ could be defeated. I haven't looked at alsaequal a ton, but enabling/bypassing sure shouldn't be difficult at all. The key is to keep it under the control of the player software (Moode, in this case), IMHO, then people can have the best of both worlds.
In terms of taming things through placement of speakers, etc., not always possible. That is why I think so many people are looking for this feature.
Hi Greg, thanks for responding.
I may end-up w/ puCorePlayer but was hoping to find something that didn't require the LMS app running on a Windows box. I'd sorta prefer just something accessing my files via a share.
OTOH, if the other player options don't pan-out, I might switch to piCorePlayer (from Squeezeplug) or at least give it a try to see how I like it.
Right now I'm trying Moode. Although, I didn't realize there is no Spotify support so I'm going to immediately switch to Pi MusicBox.
Thanks for the feedback guys, this is a pretty handy forum with lots of helpful people.
So Volumio was out because I found it too difficult to implement an EQ.
Moode is out for now because there is no direct support for Spotify.
Both of those are sort of out because I'm not a fan of the volume controls. They're slow to respond and kinda jumpy and imprecise.
I will maybe come back to Moode as it does appear an EQ will be added.
I tried Pi MusicBox and thought it was okay, and it even looked like adding an EQ that sticks would be doable. Spotify is broken and requires an edit to the card to fix it. Not too complicated and I would have delved in but...
In comparing to what I have now (LMS with Pi-based player), I feel like I'd be giving-up too much.
So I downloaded PiCorePlayer and I like that quite a bit. Very simply to setup even compared to Squeezeplug. PiCorePlayer supports alsaequal and does a lot of stuff right.
And it has a LMS built-in, although I don't know if I give-up any functionality over the Windows based LMS. Still have to look into that.
So in the end, I guess I'm going to stick w/ the LMS/Pi-based player setup.
I guess I now need to find some dollars to support them.
Moode is out for now because there is no direct support for Spotify.
Both of those are sort of out because I'm not a fan of the volume controls. They're slow to respond and kinda jumpy and imprecise.
I will maybe come back to Moode as it does appear an EQ will be added.
I tried Pi MusicBox and thought it was okay, and it even looked like adding an EQ that sticks would be doable. Spotify is broken and requires an edit to the card to fix it. Not too complicated and I would have delved in but...
In comparing to what I have now (LMS with Pi-based player), I feel like I'd be giving-up too much.
So I downloaded PiCorePlayer and I like that quite a bit. Very simply to setup even compared to Squeezeplug. PiCorePlayer supports alsaequal and does a lot of stuff right.
And it has a LMS built-in, although I don't know if I give-up any functionality over the Windows based LMS. Still have to look into that.
So in the end, I guess I'm going to stick w/ the LMS/Pi-based player setup.
I guess I now need to find some dollars to support them.
As a programmer, my thought was all these players are doing is decompressing a file/stream and sending it to the sound driver.
I can only imagine differences arrising from the app doing something incorrectly, and in that case I'd think the sound differences would be rather dramatic, not subtle at all.
I've seen your comment in another thread that Moode was the best sounding (I think that was your feeling, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
How do you feel that is possible? What do you think the different players could be doing differently to contribute to differences in sound quality?
I am programmer myself!
I completely agree with you about the fact that if only the original audio file was being sent, the audio should be identical!
There are a couple of things that could be 'in the middle'.
1. If audio format cannot be handled by the DAC (for instance an incompatible sampling rate) there will be resampling. Here several algorithms of different qualities could be used. I tested this as well, but I will leave this option till the end assuming always bit-perfect audio on supported rates.
2. EQ or per-track volume normalizing or leveling. I disabled all of this, to the best of my knowledge.
3. Software/Hardware volume! This is where my money is regarding the differences I heard. On Moode I was able to completely disable local volume in favor of preventing any more tweaking of the audio (changing volume involves for certain changing something within the audio!). On Volumio I was not able to do this (perhaps missed it?), but setting the volume to 100% rendered the volume a little lower than my other input that was playing the same track via an Airport Express.
So, while it was, of course, my opinion, my approach was as 'objective' as I could given my available equipment. I played the track from Spotify on Extreme Quality at 100% volume through an Airport Express and quickly changed inputs to the RPi3. That way, I was able to do an a-c b-c comparison between Volumio and Moode.
With Moode, the volume was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same. And perhaps was able to hear more brights into the sound (percussion and sss where clearer), making it a bit more spatious to me. This last point is subjective, and can be certainly debated and refuted. The volume point is not.
With Volumio the volume (even if set at 100) was lower than the Spotify output. Also, perhaps because of the lower volume, brights were considerably hindered, and the result was a flatter sound to me.
Even if not, the fact that the sound had lesser volume suggested to me that there was some sort of audio processing which I am not able to figure out exactly where, but it was there. Can I prove this? No. Was it beyond a subjective self-delusion, I think it was.
That said, I have some 192Khz files and my DAC can only do 96Khz through USB, so, point 1 is also important for me. On that I can only relate to reviews and math, I cannot a-b compare algorithms. But I don't feel with Moode there is a significant degrade of the audio. With Volumio I felt the audio muffled.
So, some technical more or less objective findings, and some other completely subjective. That's why I was interested in other's point of views.
Best regards,
Rafa.
I completely agree with you about the fact that if only the original audio file was being sent, the audio should be identical!
There are a couple of things that could be 'in the middle'.
1. If audio format cannot be handled by the DAC (for instance an incompatible sampling rate) there will be resampling. Here several algorithms of different qualities could be used. I tested this as well, but I will leave this option till the end assuming always bit-perfect audio on supported rates.
2. EQ or per-track volume normalizing or leveling. I disabled all of this, to the best of my knowledge.
3. Software/Hardware volume! This is where my money is regarding the differences I heard. On Moode I was able to completely disable local volume in favor of preventing any more tweaking of the audio (changing volume involves for certain changing something within the audio!). On Volumio I was not able to do this (perhaps missed it?), but setting the volume to 100% rendered the volume a little lower than my other input that was playing the same track via an Airport Express.
So, while it was, of course, my opinion, my approach was as 'objective' as I could given my available equipment. I played the track from Spotify on Extreme Quality at 100% volume through an Airport Express and quickly changed inputs to the RPi3. That way, I was able to do an a-c b-c comparison between Volumio and Moode.
With Moode, the volume was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same. And perhaps was able to hear more brights into the sound (percussion and sss where clearer), making it a bit more spatious to me. This last point is subjective, and can be certainly debated and refuted. The volume point is not.
With Volumio the volume (even if set at 100) was lower than the Spotify output. Also, perhaps because of the lower volume, brights were considerably hindered, and the result was a flatter sound to me.
Even if not, the fact that the sound had lesser volume suggested to me that there was some sort of audio processing which I am not able to figure out exactly where, but it was there. Can I prove this? No. Was it beyond a subjective self-delusion, I think it was.
That said, I have some 192Khz files and my DAC can only do 96Khz through USB, so, point 1 is also important for me. On that I can only relate to reviews and math, I cannot a-b compare algorithms. But I don't feel with Moode there is a significant degrade of the audio. With Volumio I felt the audio muffled.
So, some technical more or less objective findings, and some other completely subjective. That's why I was interested in other's point of views.
Best regards,
Rafa.
First of all, I'll just toss out there that I've never coded anything audio-wise. I had assumed, though, that most of these sorts of apps relied on a library or at the very least some fairly well-known code to perform those sorts of manipulations. Obviously, I could be wrong.
What little I know is that the output level/volume is sent with the data, that it doesn't require any manipulation of the data itself. Could obviously be wrong.
I think your observations have merit. My take when it comes to this stuff (like I said above) is that there is room for error in how the libraries and code are employed, especially by people that might be new to the art. You may have found just such an instance.
Beyond that it becomes a bit of game to determine not only which you prefer, but which is actually more accurate.
I didn't bother with any of the players I tried because I got too hung up on functionality.
I consider myself a bit of a reformed audiophile. While I once had rather grand systems, routinely trying-out whole-paycheck gear, I had a bit of an epiphany a few years ago which led to me challenging everything I thought I knew about audio.
Well said!
I aspire to this myself trying to sort out the 'voodoo' from what really makes a difference to the sound and trying to learn the 'why's.
If I al transferring a file via USB, the file la either there, it is corrupt and can't be read or it isn't there. There isn't a cable that can make my word file look 'nicer'. I can't find out why with audio it would be so!
Still, I keep an open mind if there is science behind an idea.
But I find it that, particularly in audio, there's just so much BS that it gets hard to filter out the really useful and valid points.
Rafa.
Any volume control in digital domain manipulates the data. This may be done by the OS/host, or the converter. 16 bits works out to 16 levels of amplitude (2^16) and the only way to lower the amplitude is to quite literally lop off bits.
Pro sound cards have used hardware mixers to reduce the volume for decades now, internally upsampling the data to 32 bits (or more). Windows simply takes garden shears to it. MPD (off which Moode and Volumio are based) uses an internal 32-bit double FP mixer apparently, but it doesn't sound very good.
Then there's DAC units with analog volume control like the ESS9023, in both this case and that of DACs with software control the host simply passes on the amplitude level data to the downstream device. This applies only to PCM data. Of course there's also DSD, which is a different kettle of fish.
Again, this is not my area of expertise. But when it comes to playback, I imagine the output level can (is) adjusted by the device under Alsa's control in the analog domain, once the conversion has already taken place.
No?
Only for DAC units that have an analog volume controller, and allow for hardware control by the host.
99% of units do not have the former. Most do allow the latter to access their internal (digital) volume control over the I2C bus, but some simple USB controllers do not implement the feature.
99% of units do not have the former. Most do allow the latter to access their internal (digital) volume control over the I2C bus, but some simple USB controllers do not implement the feature.
You may consider as an option what 'audio' proffesionals are using, the likes of:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-...words=Behringer+DEQ2496+Ultra+Curve+Processor
and/or:
https://www.amazon.com/Behringer-DC...8-1&keywords=Behringer+DCX2496+Ultradrive+Pro
Didn't you end up trailing all the different options?
Did you make it to max2play?
I'd like to make a raspberry pi audio streaming box and I think I'm trying to decide between max2play and piMusicBox, although until your review volumio seemed pretty good.
Any more info you have on these OSes would be appreciated
Did you make it to max2play?
I'd like to make a raspberry pi audio streaming box and I think I'm trying to decide between max2play and piMusicBox, although until your review volumio seemed pretty good.
Any more info you have on these OSes would be appreciated
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