computer music player

[Stephen Cherry]

OK, here's a topic for a woodworking forum. I want to move all my cd's onto a computer and play them over my stereo. I've played an ipod over the stereo years ago, and have not done it since. I am looking for cd quality sound, not compression.

I am thinking about an external dac, and some software. Can Windows media player do this? What is a good dac.

I have a NAD integrated amp, and b & w speakers. Nothing esoteric, but solid performance.

[Maurice Hood]

Stephen, I have a BD (Blue-ray disk) player with a 250 gig hard drive in it so I just loaded all my music (CDs and iTunes) on to that BD player and listen from it.

[Stephen Cherry]

Stephen, I have a BD (Blue-ray disk) player with a 250 gig hard drive in it so I just loaded all my music (CDs and iTunes) on to that BD player and listen from it.

Thanks Maurice- I didn't know that was possible.

[Graham Wintersgill]

Stephen

another option is a Raspberry Pi, a very small 40 dollar computer. Ours is plugged into the network and HDMI connection to TV. There is an audio jack out as well as the ability to extract audio from HDMI. We installed XBMC on the Pi painlessly and after about 10 minutes setting up ip addresses it was of collecting album info.

There are various smartphone aps that can then control XBMC, Yatze being one.

Regards

Graham

[Dan Hintz]

Not sure I'm getting what you're after, Steve... you say you're "looking for cd quality sound, not compression." What does that mean? You also mention an external DAC... are you saying you want to transmit a PCM stream to an amplifier elsewhere in the house?

If you want no compression, you could go with something like a WAV or WMA file format, but frankly there's no way you could tell the difference between those and an MP3 using VBR at the best quality level (I do that to all of my music, each song ends up around 5-7MB, depending upon length and dynamic range). If you use a common format like MP3, no special software is needed as a player comes preloaded on every Windows PC.

[Bill Huber]

I agree with Dan, I don't think you can tell the difference in an MP3 and not compressed song.

I ripped my CDs a few years ago, you can pick the songs you want and not rip the ones you don't like. To do the ripping I use a little free program that is fast and does a great job, it is Audiograbber. http://www.audiograbber.org/

I use a little audio/video wireless transmitter to send it to the stereo in the living room. I have a little over 4000 MP3s and can do a random play with Winamp and it works great. I am sure there are better transmitters out there now that are better but the little cheap one I have from Radio Shack works just fine for me.

[Eric DeSilva]

I agree with Dan, I don't think you can tell the difference in an MP3 and not compressed song.

I'll disagree with that. In a blind test on my stereo, my wife--who has significant hearing loss--could reliably peg a lossless rip from a VBR mp3 encoded using the "alt preset extreme" settings. I certainly can. But, that is using a very high end stereo. On the other hand, I can also tell an track encoded in Apple Lossless versus AAC on my car stereo, a stock BMW with upgraded speakers. And besides, disk space is cheap, so why even both with lossy compression? I can get 2000 tracks on my iPhone in Lossless. Not really sure why I'd want more than that.

I've ripped my entire library to Apple Lossless, which is over 20K tracks. It is compressed, but it is lossless compression, unlike the MP3 or AAC encoding schemes that are lossy. You get, if I recall right, about 2:1 over WAV or AIFF using Apple Lossless. I actually Squeezebox devices for playback in my house--the tracks are stored on a large RAID NAS (a 6TB ReadyNAS Pro), which is smart enough to run the backend server software for the Squeezebox devices, a program called SqueezeCenter. Squeezebox had some really nice players--including the Transporter, which is the only device I've seen that supported dual AES/EBU digital outputs and word clock sync with an external clock. Unfortunately, they got acquired by Logitech, and the line has pretty much been killed. This setup is much better than some of the other things I've tried, including Turtle Beach's old audiotrons and the CD30 gear.

The other distribution hardware I've seen that people seem to like is the Sonos devices. The other alternative is just getting a computer and using either a USB audio device or USB DAC that will output PCM (I actually use something called a MusicStreamer II in my office, and have used a range of other USB > PCM devices) or putting in a soundcard--the old computer in my home study used to have an EMU 4040 card in it and was connected to a nice Theta DAC. You can get really high quality audio out of a computer or out of one of these network devices if you work at it a little.

[Stephen Cherry]

Thanks guys. What I am looking for is what Bill described- lots of songs played with the computer interface. My stereo is "near audiophile quality". Nothing esoteric, but you can't buy it at the local electronics store. Several years ago, I tried itunes on ipod, and the computer, and was not impressed in any way. Side by side, it did not compare with a cd from a cd player. From what I have read, itunes reduces the amount of information in a song by reducing the resolution and number of samples so that lots of songs fit on an ipod. I would prefer the opposite of this- I would like "full cd sound", including the full music information, and good electronics to the amplifier. And I don't want to spend tons of money.

Here is the type of electronics I have been considering:

http://www.audioquest.com/usb_digital_analog_converter/dragonfly-dac
http://www.peachtreeaudio.com/dac-it-digital-to-analog-converter.html
http://www.crutchfield.com/p_745DAC1/NAD-DAC-1.html?tp=59309&awkw=19884656305&awat=pla&awnw=g&awcr=15802862185&awdv=c

And the other part of the equation is the software. Something like itunes, but not tied to a music vendor. Basically, I want to archive my cd's- I don't want to acquire songs in digital only form.

[Stephen Cherry]

The other distribution hardware I've seen that people seem to like is the Sonos devices. The other alternative is just getting a computer and using either a USB audio device or USB DAC that will output PCM (I actually use something called a MusicStreamer II in my office, and have used a range of other USB > PCM devices) or putting in a soundcard--the old computer in my home study used to have an EMU 4040 card in it and was connected to a nice Theta DAC. You can get really high quality audio out of a computer or out of one of these network devices if you work at it a little.

Eric- this is the type thing I am looking for.

[Prashun Patel]

I'm with Bill and Dan. Just beware, there's mp3, and there's mp3. If you're ripping from Youtube, then caveat emptor on the quality, but if you rip and convert them yourself using most Media Players or if you purchase them and download them from a reliable source like Amazon, I certainly can't pick out the difference. I do agree that some poor quality mp3's sound tinny.

I took a digital signal processing course in college that led me to the belief that beyond a certain point, the human ear cannot hear the 'imperfections' caused by sampling and reconstruction process anyway.

[Dan Hintz]

I tried itunes on ipod, and the computer, and was not impressed in any way.
In no way, shape, or form would I consider Apple's downsampling to create a quality recording... certainly not CD-quality. Do NOT use their downsampled audio as proof that MP3 sucks.

I took a digital signal processing course in college that led me to the belief that beyond a certain point, the human ear cannot hear the 'imperfections' caused by sampling and reconstruction process anyway.
My major for both my Bachelors and Masters degree is in digital signal processing, with half of my career's experience in digital signal processing in one form or another. The MP3 algorithm (having implemented it on more than one occasion with the ISO spec books sitting on my shelf) was designed from the beginning to be undetectable by even the most golden of ears when used at the highest quality level for VBR.

FYI... I use Complete YouTube Saver for FireFox to strip audio from he videos. It gives you the option to save as high-quality VBR if the video has a high enough quality audio track associated with it. Typically this is user-uploaded content or hi-def videos, but often times I'll have to click on 30 different versions of a video before I find one with hi-def audio.

[mike holden]

Dan,
I tried add "Complete YouTube Saver for FireFox" to my firefox, but although the basic add-in installed neatly, it said that I also needed an add on to download mp3 files, that add on triggered my anti virus to erase it because it contained a virus.
Just something to be aware of. BTW, "Complete YouTube Saver for FireFox" is fairly useless without the add on.
Mike

[Dan Hintz]

The add-on is safe. False positive with your AV.

[Eric DeSilva]

In no way, shape, or form would I consider Apple's downsampling to create a quality recording... certainly not CD-quality. Do NOT use their downsampled audio as proof that MP3 sucks.

Apple doesn't use the MP3 format, they use a proprietary formats called AAC and Apple Lossless, the latter of which is a non-lossy compression scheme that is generally held to be some variant of FLAC and is very good. AAC, like MP3, uses perceptual audio encoding, not downsampling, to compress the audio. Both MP3 and AAC are lossy, but generally people seem to feel that AAC files are usually higher audio quality than MP3 files of the same size. That said, not all MP3s are created equal--even MP3s that are the same size. There are a host of settings that can be used for MP3 (and other lossy encoders), including whether to use a constant bit rate or a variable bit rate (encoding that varies in compression based on the complexity of the passage). If you are serious about the MP3 format, I'd look at hydrogenaudio's forums--those guys have come up with a series of prepackaged settings--the "alt presets"--that are intended to maximize quality for a given compression target.

What you probably heard, and why you probably didn't like, playback on iTunes or an iPod could be traced to any number of things. First, the encoding could be a factor--listening to a 64 kbps CBR MP3 is a lot different than listening to a VBR MP3. iTunes and iPods will play both of those, as well as other formats. Second, depending upon what you are used to, the playback hardware--both the DAC and the analog audio amplifier--could be impacting quality. The DAC/amp in the iPhone/iPod is pretty good for what it is, but there are obvious compromises that have to be invoked to achieve the form factor that you see. As far as computers go, the idea of doing digital to analog signal processing inside a box with a switching power supply and all sorts of other digital noise doesn't seem ideal.

So, with respect to the first factor--encoding--you can already see this seems to be somewhat of a religious debate. I hear a difference. Other people don't. It could be how your ears are trained and it could be the quality of the playback equipment, or I could be delusional. But, either way, if you are taking the time to rip your CDs and put them on a server, and disk space is cheap, why shortchange yourself? The more complex the encoding, the longer it takes. So ripping a CD to Apple Lossless takes less time than ripping it to some complex VBR scheme. I therefore see zero logic in ripping to some other format. Personally, I'd choose Apple Lossless or FLAC, since both are non-lossy, offer decent compression, and are widely supported. I don't like WAV anyway, since tagging WAV files isn't well standardized, and the ability to tag your music is one of the great benefits of putting your music on a server.

The next part in the playback chain is how you get from a digital file to PCM format (or AES/EBU), with the final part being conversion of the digital stream to analog audio. Let's take a computer first. I have found a very, very significant difference from going from something like the headphone output of a computer to using a USB audio device. If you have a good DAC on your stereo, one of the easiest things to do is just get a USB/PCM converter--something like the M-Audio Transit. I've used devices like the Transit to get pretty good results--you still manage playback through something like iTunes or Windows Media Player, but the audio out gets routed to the USB and emerges as PCM from a coax digital connector. I've also built a purpose specific computer to do audio, and installed a specialized audio card--an EMU 4040, I think--which used digital stereo AES/EBU outputs. If you don't have a DAC already, you can also buy a range of USB DACs that combine the USB/PCM interface and a DAC. I have not used any of those other than the MusicStreamer II in my office, but seem to recall that Apogee makes a nice one. The MusicStreamer II works fine for my office stereo, but that isn't exactly the best setup in the world (McCormack Micro-Line Drive to Micro-Power Drive to NHT SuperZeros). Out of these setups, I've like the sound from the EMU card best, followed by the M-Audio, followed by the MusicStreamer, but that isn't a really fair comparison, given that the EMU was attached to either a dCS or Theta DAC at different times.

The other option is dedicated network devices, like the Sonos. I still like my Squeezebox devices, since they don't require the computer to be on and the only lag is if the NAS was in sleep mode. The Sonos seems interesting, but the devices typically incorporate amps and speakers, which I don't want. My collection of Squeezebox devices require an external stereo, so I'm only paying for components I'm using (although they do have built-in DACs). These devices are also controllable from most smartphones, which can be handy. Right now I've got about a half dozen of various kinds in my house, and they can all access the same music server. I can also use an HTML interface to do things like sync all the players for whole-house audio, and they will also play internet radio. Unfortunately, Logitech seems to have abandoned that line in favor of something that seems a lot more sonically compromised.

[glenn bradley]

In no way, shape, or form would I consider Apple's downsampling to create a quality recording... certainly not CD-quality.

Agreed. The folks I meet today that have actually heard a high quality audio system so that they would know the difference are few and very far in between. Granted that much of popular music isn't very broad in spectrum or dynamics but, popular music is far from "all" music. Thank goodness there are well recorded and well delivered versions of many forms and styles available. Don't get me wrong; my tastes run from Bach to Rob Zombie with only twangy country, German opera and rap offering the least selections that I enjoy. Faithful reproduction of full orchestra, Pine Top Smith or Queensryche is a joy to experience.

[Graham Wintersgill]

Stephen

XBMC software is available on many platforms and will act as your front end. It is free so if you do not like it just delete it.

Regards

Graham

[Dan Hintz]

Sorry, Eric... replace the word "MP3" with "compression" in my statement.

I will not get into an audio quality debate with anyone who claims to have golden ears, because the debate always boils down to them saying they can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable. As I said, my educational background is in digital signal processing (audio and video), particularly as it pertained to imperceptible watermarking (both audio and video) and half of my career was spent working in that field. I'm well aware of how compression affects quality from a perceptible viewpoint. That's all I'll say on the matter.

[Stephen Cherry]

Stephen

XBMC software is available on many platforms and will act as your front end. It is free so if you do not like it just delete it.

Regards

Graham

Got it Graham, I'll check it out. THanks

[Stephen Cherry]

I will not get into an audio quality debate with anyone who claims to have golden ears, because the debate always boils down to them saying they can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable. .

Dan- I wanted to have a discussion with you about speaker cables. Which do you think sound the best. :D

[Stephen Cherry]

The next part in the playback chain is how you get from a digital file to PCM format (or AES/EBU), with the final part being conversion of the digital stream to analog audio. Let's take a computer first. I have found a very, very significant difference from going from something like the headphone output of a computer to using a USB audio device. If you have a good DAC on your stereo, one of the easiest things to do is just get a USB/PCM converter--something like the M-Audio Transit. I've used devices like the Transit to get pretty good results--you still manage playback through something like iTunes or Windows Media Player, but the audio out gets routed to the USB and emerges as PCM from a coax digital connector. I've also built a purpose specific computer to do audio, and installed a specialized audio card--an EMU 4040, I think--which used digital stereo AES/EBU outputs. If you don't have a DAC already, you can also buy a range of USB DACs that combine the USB/PCM interface and a DAC. I have not used any of those other than the MusicStreamer II in my office, but seem to recall that Apogee makes a nice one. The MusicStreamer II works fine for my office stereo, but that isn't exactly the best setup in the world (McCormack Micro-Line Drive to Micro-Power Drive to NHT SuperZeros). Out of these setups, I've like the sound from the EMU card best, followed by the M-Audio, followed by the MusicStreamer, but that isn't a really fair comparison, given that the EMU was attached to either a dCS or Theta DAC at different times.
.

Eric, my amplifier is DACless. It's a NAD C370- a pretty solid amp, which sounds great to me, but it has nothing exotic. I would be looking for a box to go from the computer to the analog inputs of the amp. Plus, thanks for the detailed response, I am trying to decipher it.

[Eric DeSilva]

Sorry, Dan, stating that you aren't going to debate something and then throwing down a strawman that positions my argument as "saying [I] can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable" is rhetorical sleight of hand.

MP3s can be widely varying quality, and it isn't just the sampling rate that impacts the perceived quality. You have said that there is no "difference between [a WAV] and an MP3 using VBR at the best quality level." There is also virtually no compression running, say, LAME at a V0 quality setting. So I'd argue there isn't much point in doing the encoding. There is, presumably, no debate that "compression affects quality"--the only question is at what point the quality becomes perceptible. But when the difference is a filesize of 7-8 MB versus 30-40 MB, why even have the debate? I can easily buy 2TB drives for under $100--so we're talking less than a penny per song.

[Ryan Mooney]

So regardless of the quality issue or lack thereof I would argue against storing your primary backup in a compressed format anyway. The problem is that if you ever want to convert them to another format or downsample again (for space like say you want to store 128b VBR for a portable device where quality is less critical) the compression errors compound.

The big three lossless formats at this point are WAV, SHRTN and FLAC. I'd personally recommend FLAC, it compresses better than WAV (still lossless) and is widely supported and the decoding cost (cpu performance) is relatively low compared to WAV. Having said that you can convert between any of the three with any decent en/decoding software with zero loss in quality and down sample if you want for portable use. The only real reason to use WAV is if you're doing a lot of editing as most of the editors use it natively (but many now support the other formats as well).

For playback even pretty low end junky computers nowadays have digital output - if your receiver can accept it that's the way to go. Personally I'm a big fan of the small devices like the ROKU or Google TV (I think there are some raspberrypie ones as well - haven't looked in a ~year so completely out of date :rolleyes:) that don't have any moving parts for in the living room next to the receiver for a couple of reasons:


They are quiet. Nothing like a disk drive or computer fan whirring away to ruin my enjoyment :D
They are small so don't take up any media center space to speak of

We have a tower style case with a computer and a handful of drives in it in the office and I ran a couple of Cat-6 cables up to the media center area. The computer in the back exports the music and the front end pulls it over the wire and shoves it into the receiver. For just music you can also easily do that over wireless - you can get wireless "game adapters" that work pretty ok that you can just plug into the roku/whatever (and I think some may? come with wireless now). Simpler (and likely cheaper) than the computer as a backend would be a "Lan Storage Device" which is essentially a hard drive (or several) in a very small case with a network port on the back. Most of them support exporting media in ways that the various front end devices can access easily. We wanted to do more nefarious things with the computer so it added some value for us but for most users I wouldn't probably bother at this point.

For examples of network storage see: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=network%20storage
I haven't researched any recently enough to actually recommend any at this point.

we have the Roku 2HD that has: mini-jack to left/right/composite video RCA and Digital over HDMI (5.1 surround sound pass-through and stereo) - we've only ever used the HDMI output - I'm pretty sure it was a fiber HDMI port. We used to have the Google TV the Roku is much nicer. Granted this does a whole lot more than just music :D

If you search for "raspberry pi media center" you can see how people have made their own - although I would argue that if you're asking this question you probably don't want to go there :D

Looks like Eric S has some good advice on some other playback devices as well.

[Dan Hintz]

Dan- I wanted to have a discussion with you about speaker cables. Which do you think sound the best. :D
Well, the pink ones, obviously, Steve... electrons travel faster in pink (for fear of getting beat up!).


Sorry, Dan, stating that you aren't going to debate something and then throwing down a strawman that positions my argument as "saying [I] can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable" is rhetorical sleight of hand.

MP3s can be widely varying quality, and it isn't just the sampling rate that impacts the perceived quality. You have said that there is no "difference between [a WAV] and an MP3 using VBR at the best quality level." There is also virtually no compression running, say, LAME at a V0 quality setting. So I'd argue there isn't much point in doing the encoding. There is, presumably, no debate that "compression affects quality"--the only question is at what point the quality becomes perceptible. But when the difference is a filesize of 7-8 MB versus 30-40 MB, why even have the debate? I can easily buy 2TB drives for under $100--so we're talking less than a penny per song.

No amount of debate will make you change your mind, Eric, so I will not waste my breath trying to. Enjoy your music.

[Jim Matthews]

I bought an Asus Eee box to run JRiver, and there's a new version out so v18 will likely be discounted soon.
You can interface with your Smart phone as a remote, and that's handy.

I've got a new NAD M51 preamp/DAC that I quite like, but my old preamp had recently failed (again) so you may not need to spend such long green.
I quite like the NuForce (http://amazon.nuforce-icon.com/category/32584710181/2/DAC-Headphone-Amp.htm)line, which handles computer audio without hiccups, and isn't hideously expensive.

For me, the nice thing is to have the files stored elsewhere. If you have a large storage that can be searched by the Oppo BDP-103 (http://www.oppodigital.com/blu-ray-bdp-103/), you may not need another DAC.
If the Oppo player can search your computer memory, and playback the files it's an effective music server controller.

I attached a small monitor to mine, so I can see what it's searching as the stock display is illegible from my listening position.