Interesting post at Audioasylum

There's an interesting post at Audioasylum.

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/13131.html

The sound quality seems a function of how ASIO plugin is compiled.

Chauncy

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Hi Chauncy,

There's an interesting post at Audioasylum.

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/13131.html

The sound quality seems a function of how ASIO plugin is compiled.

Thanks for the link. I did try to use the ASIO EXE files on my laptop but I never managed to get these working...

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Bert,

My understanding of the post is that he has the source code and that he used the MS Visual Studio to compile it. He heard difference in sound with various compiler settings. His experience tells me that sound quality depends on how the program code is compiled and even what compiler is used. Interesting!

The EXE file never worked for me either.

Chauncy

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Hi,

Correct.
I am in kind of direct communication with him;

Note though, that he is able to hear things, say, directly, which most probably "you" and anyway me are not able to hear other than "hmm ... is this better or ?". This is all about jitter.

Differences exist in compiling with optimzed code and without, and more crazy stuff you wouldn't think of in first place. Also, knowing what "choices" are in playing technically, there is a *lot* to improve playing music from a PC.
Currently I am working on a player myself, which will be as "high-end" as possible and for that market only.

Besides this, I received a DLL version from him which does work (one of the compilations only), and probably today I'll receive the other compilation versions in DLL as well.
The most interesting would be the SSE3 version (for those who have a processor supporting that), which would be a hardware optimized version eliminating jitter largely.
If I may speak through his mouth : this should be more detailed, but also more flat sounding.

The latter is a phenomenon by itself, to my findings incurred by a good source (the player) with less good elements further down the chain.
For me things came together with the non-oversampling (Twin)DAC where my Audio Note from then couldn't cope. I can kind of scientifically prove the why, although I'm not really knowledged in this area.

Peter

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Hi Peter,

If I may speak through his mouth : this should be more detailed, but also more flat sounding.

I had a quick listen yesterday (SSE3 v0.48) and that is precisely what I am hearing...

The new foobar v9.02 sounds more dynamic and open to my ears and is more crispy at the top though. I don't know which one I'll keep for my system.... more tracks should be heard first, perhaps version 47a SSE2 would be a nice in between driver?

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hi Chauncy,

The EXE file never worked for me either.

It never did here too until yesterday....

I installed the old version again Foobar V0.8.3 (in parallel with the new version) just to be able to compare them directly. The ASIO dll driver that I used in the new version didn't work in the old version so I tried the exe again. I copied both files in the components directory and guess what, it worked... :confused:

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hello Chauncy, Bert and others,

Again the confusion increases with me. I changed Foobar 9 back to V8.03, the last one sounds a little bit better. The difference of harddisk vs RAMdisk is certainly larger. The RAMdisk gives more improvement on my main loudspeaker system than it did on the laptop/headphone. So I will add some memory soon, 1 GB for only 100 Euro! Than I will be shure that I can load every CD at once in WAV format.

This reminds me of a question that I wanted to raise already for some time: how do people on this forum rate lossless compression such as FLAC??

Now the ASIO matters are puzzeling me. First I tried to install ASIO4ALL on the laptop that sends the data to the Twindac, but I have no idea wether or not I succeeded. The next question is which version is now considered the best sounding? The German one to be bought at 55 Euro or one of the specially compiled ones?

To finish I have a musical tip: "We shall overcome" by Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band, life recorded in the house of Bruce Springsteen. Very nice versions of old numbers and a very good recording! During my recent trials I found out that the Soundmax audio device used in my headphone system supports kernel streaming (besides direct sound and wave out). KS definitely sounds the best. This shows that a really high end sound system can be obtained at 1000 Euro if you fancy headphone sound. However, also here I still have a question: does the hardware of the Twindac support KS?

Kind regards,
Eddie

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Hi Eddie.

Good to see that you run the RAMdisk setup. I think that's the way to go.
You're as close to the processor as you can.
I just learned that mainly all PROs run their PCs with 2GB RAM.
All Mastering applications are running mainly from RAM.
What a pity that foobar is not supporting that kind of play-mode.
Anyhow, this still doesnt't prevent from lower soundquality caused
by bad coding of the involved drivers and applications.

Would be good if PeterST would consider such a RAMDISK mode in
his High_End-Player project.

When it comes to ASIO:

My choice goes definetly to the ASIO driver of USB-AUDIO.com
Give it (the test version- comes with a beep!)a try it is far
superior than the ASIO4ALL or Kernel Streaming setup.

From my limiting understanding, the specially compiled fb2kASIO plugins (sse3) are just the FB2K plugin compilations, which only provide the interface to ASIO4ALL or USB-AUDIO.com drivers.
Just another routine which negatively impacts the traffic!
But I think more important,as I wrote in the other post, ASIO4ALL is using the Microsoft-USB Audio driver. USB-Audio.com has rewritten that one.
This makes a real big difference.

Unfortunatly my Pentium M doesn't support sse3. sse2 on the fb2k 0.83
is defnitely worse than my 0.92 setup.
sse2 compilation loses a lot of details. It sounds very soft,
cutting of the edges

My ultimate choice (for now):
fb2k 0.92, 0.9 ASIO plugin, plus USB-Audio.com ASIO driver, plus RAMDISK.

As soon as I have a new computer I'll check out the sse3 compilation.

I'll soon do a FLAC comparison I'll let you know. Data wise it's the same
content in there, it is just compressed as a zip-file as far as I understood. I read that the decoding should work very quick with FLAC. Again i believe that the sounddifferences, if there are any, pretty much depend on the flac driver decoding the files.

Cheers
Klaus

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Hi Klaus,

My ultimate choice (for now): fb2k 0.92, 0.9 ASIO plugin, plus USB-Audio.com ASIO driver, plus RAMDISK.

I recently discovered that Foobar 0.92 does not buffer the tracks into memory (even if set to do so!) in combination with the USB-AUDIO.DE driver

I'll soon do a FLAC comparison I'll let you know. Data wise it's the same content in there, it is just compressed as a zip-file as far as I understood.

I have tried lossless compression a while ago and it didn't improve things. It sounded different but if it was worse is something I can't back-up.

The processor has to work harder if you use it though, the compressed file has to be unpacked before it can play.

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hi Bert.

Good to see that you're still running the USB-Audio driver? :good: Still happy? :grin:

The buffering thing is strange to me as well.
I had a feeling it never worked on 0.9x versions, even without the
USB-Audio driver installed.
0.83 is at least loading the full track into RAM, which is definetly not done
with 0.9x. Perhaps they introduced a different buffering procedure.
Would like to know what 0.9x is doing.

Perhaps we should check with the guys at Hydrogen.
Or Perhaps somebody else (PeterST!?!)did already?

Let's keep dreaming of a nice jitter-free high-end RAM-Disk Player. :sleepy:

Cheers
Klaus

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I have tried lossless compression a while ago and it didn't improve
things. It sounded different but if it was worse is something I can't
back-up.

Hi Bert,

Be careful with your dutch here, because you could mean "het werd er niet beter op" i.e. it got worse for sure. Not consistent with the second sentence I think, but OTOH you wouldn't mean in your first sentence that it can be expected that it can get *better* with a compressed file ?

I normally use FLAC for the CDs I got physically at home (the borrowed etc. are stored as WAV), and I too think it sounds different. I'd call it "shorter", making the highs somewhat more profound. I never thought it sounds worse BUT in this case I'd say it just caNot be better that the normal uncompressed WAV. How could it ?

IMO there's one option only : because there's less I/O from disk, that again encouraging for the RAM disk. I never tried to find the difference in FLAC files being played from disk vs. ramdisk yet.
Anyway, it could be an indication that playing from memory indeed is better than from disk.

You won't here me say that the higher load on the processor influences sound for the worse. At least it is not my experience that with the processor at 100% because of other tasks during playing music, the sound degrades (all processes in the audio chain set to real time service !).

Peter

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Hi Eddy,

Thanks for sharing your experiments. The TwinDAC+ does not "support" Kernel Streaming. I did try that several times but it simply does not work...

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hello Bert,

Now I have something else that doesn't work. I installed the ASIO driver from Germany. This worked because I got the beep every 30 secs. Then I started Foobar as usual, loaded a few files from the RAM disk, pressed start and: no music! The counter stayed at 0:00 and the ruler did not move. I checked all settings, nothing suspicious. One thing that I do not understand is that the manual of the ASIO driver says: "Enter the control panel via the button in your applications ASIO settings." I caNot find anything in Foobar on ASIO settings.

After that I completely reinstalled Foobar, I changed from V8.02 to V8.03, but with the same result. The console of Foobar gives the message "direct sound initialized succesfully", so that does not help very much.

So then I uninstalled the ASIO driver, at least I tried. After removing some files I got the message "... please reboot and try again". So I did and got the same message again and again and .... The beep dissappeared meanwhile but Foobar still refuses to get going. Any idea what went wrong and what to do to get again music out of my system?

Kind regards,
Eddie

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Hi Eddy,

In foobar (all versions) you need to have the ASIO dll driver in Foobar's components directory present to be able to select it within foobar as output. If you have selected it then you can change a few settings (buffer 0-63), priority and such.

The USB-AUDIO driver does not have direct access (no panel), that is done through the player where Foobar is very limited. If ASIO dll (or exe with dll) is not present then you do not have access at all.

If you update foobar then it might be that the dll is now missing.

I would install the USB driver again (just to be sure its there), remove (replace) all Foobar files or rename the directory and do a new install.

Don't forget the foobar ASIO drivers!

With some luck you will then be able to select the usb driver as output...

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hi Eddy,

In foobar (all versions) you need to have the ASIO dll driver in Foobar's
components directory present to be able to select it within foobar as
output.

Hello Bert,

In the components directory I see 22 files all starting with foo_ and ending with .dll. None of them have anything like ASIO in the name. Is that my problem? If so, where do I find the necessary dll?

I found a nice book in our library called "Principles of Digital Audio", written in 2003, 740 pages long, the author is Ken C. Pohlmann. I already saw some interesting remarks on jitter and RAM disks. I plan to make a short list of the most important remarks (for me) during the coming holiday. I will put it on my webpage and on this forum if you want.

Kind regards,
Eddie

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Hi Eddie,

In the components directory I see 22 files all starting with foo_ and
ending with .dll. None of them have anything like ASIO in the name. Is
that my problem? If so, where do I find the necessary dll?

Yep, that is the problem. Another "problem" is that you have 22 dll's there! I only have 4 dll's including the ASIO one. The only ones needed to play your tracks and thus minimal configured.

In version 0.8.3:

foo_console.dll
foo_input_std.dll
foo_ui_std.dll
foo_output_asio(dll).dll

If you want to play CD's direct through the player then you also need foo_cdda.dll in the components directory.

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Yep, that is the problem. Another "problem" is that you have 22 dll's
there! I only have 4 dll's including the ASIO one. The only ones needed to
play your tracks and thus minimal configured.

In version 0.8.3:

foo_console.dll
foo_input_std.dll
foo_ui_std.dll
foo_output_asio(dll).dll

Hello Bert,

Sorry to bother you again, but I now have the list of dll's exactly as shown above, the ASIO-dll is the 047a as indicated. When I start Foobar I can select under Preferences/Playback/Output the options: ASIO (dll version) and ASIO (exe version). However in both cases I only get an error message in the console:

dll version:
INFO (CORE) : opening file for playback :
INFO (CORE) : location: "file://I:1 - Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water.wav" (0)
INFO (foo_output_asio(dll)) : open : 44100 Hz, LINEAR PCM, 16 bits, 2 channels
ERROR (foo_output_asio(dll)) : failed in initialization of ASIO driver.

exe version - line 4 is replaced by:
ERROR (foo_output_asio(exe)) : failed in initialization of ASIO driver.

When I add more dll's and select Direct Sound or Kernel Streaming I do get music. (I am doing this test on my IBM laptop with headphone for convenience). Any more hints on this?

Did you already come to a conclusion about the usb-asio.de driver?

Kind regards,
Eddie

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Hi Eddie,

Sorry to bother you again, but I now have the list of dll's exactly as
shown above, the ASIO-dll is the 047a as indicated. When I start Foobar I
can select under Preferences/Playback/Output the options: ASIO (dll
version) and ASIO (exe version). However in both cases I only get an error
message in the console:

This is the reason why you should have removed (or renamed) the whole directory and do a new install with foobar, just to prevent that there are "old" drivers present which should not be there to mix things up.

If you use ASIO4ALL then you do not need any asio.dll drivers. Just select directsound (with the proper output.dll in the components directory).

Read the ASIO4ALL manual, it is mentioned in there.

If you use USB-AUDIO.DE as driver (properly installed) and when you have the asio.dll present in the components directory then you should be able to select this specific driver (usb.audio.de) from foobar in Foobar's playback-asio submenu.

When you have selected ASIO as playback device then it still needs to be configured (hit the settings button) where you can add the real ASIO driver to use if present.

In the components directory you should either use the normal asio.dll (single file) or the exe combined with its own specific asio.dll driver (2 files). If you unpack the downloaded asio file you want to use then make sure that these drivers are in the componenets directory. Also, do not forget to restart Foobar if you have changed files.

Note: All the asio.dll files have the same name but they are all different!

Did you already come to a conclusion about the usb-asio.de driver?

Yes, see my last post... :smile:

Question:

What do you want to use:

USB-AUDIO.DE, ASIO4ALL or the "standard" Foobar output options? Foobar 0.83 or 0.92?

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Here is a link to the dll's to choose from...too many options at this moment but if you feel like testing... :smile:

http://personales.ya.com/angel49/foobar2000_otachan/

I would download and start with this version:

foo_output_asio(dll)_047a_noflink_loop_1byte.zip

There is a thread on Audio Asylum where this is discussed.

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/13208.html

Ciao,

Bert

--
BD-Design - Only the Best!

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Hi Eddy.

The USB driver needs a host application, like Cubase, to get it properly
configured. It is a plugin on its own. Mainly all of the professional equipment suppliers, are able to run this driver.

Foobar does not have "this Button" meaning you can not access the driver
via foobar, the plugin is just not integrated. But that doesn't matter.
As I wrote in the other post - Its default setting is 44,1 16bit.
That's why we do not have to change anything. It is just running in the background as soon as Windows starts up.

As Bert wrote just select the driver from the foobar ASIO plugin in the Output menu. Here we go.

ASIO4ALL will not work anymore. If you try to start to play a file, it won't
play. The old MS driver needs to be restored by removing the USB-Audio.de
driver.

No need to reinstall foobar. :wink:

Cheers
Klaus

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Hi Eddy,

Thanks for sharing your experiments. The TwinDAC+ does not "support"
Kernel Streaming. I did try that several times but it simply does not
work...

Ciao,

Bert

I am running the twindac usb input with kernel streaming for a couple of years now, works perfect. Strange thing however is that the kernel streaming function only works on my main pc wich is running windows 2000 professional with service pack 4. On my other pc and on three laptops I have tried wich where all running windows XP I never got it work. It did work a little bit with lots of stuttering on a laptop wich had only the basic win xp installed, no service packs etc. When I installed windows 2000 on my laptop everything just works fine.

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Interesting post at Audioasylum (Off Topic)