Music formats, players and rippers...

[aud19]

Planning on reformatting our desktop over the Christmas break and I'm wondering what the current cream of the crop for software is?

-My current library is 99.9% FLAC audio (on a NAS) files that I currently play back via Winamp.
-I'm looking to switch to Ogg Vorbis for my phone (portable) listening.
-Ideally I'd like to stay with free or inexpensive software.

Should I simply continue using Winamp? Is there anything better (I've been reading lots of positive comments on Foobar)? Anything that can play back my flac files and automatically sync and convert to OGG when I connect my phone?

MediaMonkey seems to do the "on the fly" conversion while syncing but just on the paid version $25 is a manageable cost though. Anybody use it? Thoughts? Any free/cheaper alternatives?

http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/

[impala454]

I used MediaMonkey back in the day to reorganize my collection and it was awesome. The ability to rebuild the entire folder structure on a whim (assuming your music is all tagged properly) was awesome. I did not use it much for playback though so I can't speak to that.

[Finleyville]

I still use MediaMonkey. It is a great program for tagging and organizing. I use it for playback as well through Winamp. However, I am about to try other programs for playback. We shall see.

[PewterTA]

JRiver is one of the best hands down.

I can give you my setup of Foobar2000 (which is very well customized) and works well, though it does have a few quarks to it that aren't necessarily the most user friendly. But even a curmudgeon like WKHanna has figured it out pretty well and actually favors it now. With some of the tweaks I've done (in the software and on our computers) it's given us about the best presentation we've found. And this is with comparing Amarra+, Audivarna, and a few others on both PC and MAC that people say are the best.

As far as the convert/syncing, that won't happen with Foobar2000 (not that it can't be done, it could be), it's just not supported much anymore and the automation features are really what's lacking. My question would really be, why would you want to go to Ogg? You can easily get Android or iPhone phones to use flac (well iPhone is a little harder, but not much)... To me it seems like a lot of extra work to keep converting everything all the time. Foobar2000 will convert, but it's a manual process to tell it to do it.

To me it really sounds like you're wanting more of an iTunes solution that will keep everything in sync with your phone and home collection.

My Foobar2000 looks like this, which is far from it's default setup, screen is on the right and the tablet/remote is on the left (though the tablet has been updated and looks/responds better than it is in the picture).

Image not available

[aud19]

I still use MediaMonkey. It is a great program for tagging and organizing. I use it for playback as well through Winamp. However, I am about to try other programs for playback. We shall see.

Can I ask why use use more than one program for playback? Is MediaMonkey lacking there (I like the sound of the DJ feature...sounds similar to Pandora but with your own music collection)? What's the other program you're looking at trying?

JRiver is one of the best hands down.

As far as the convert/syncing, that won't happen with Foobar2000 (not that it can't be done, it could be), it's just not supported much anymore and the automation features are really what's lacking. My question would really be, why would you want to go to Ogg? You can easily get Android or iPhone phones to use flac (well iPhone is a little harder, but not much)... To me it seems like a lot of extra work to keep converting everything all the time. Foobar2000 will convert, but it's a manual process to tell it to do it.

I looked at JRiver and it didn't seem to do anything much different than MediaMonkey and for twice the $. Am I missing something there? I want to do OGG on my phone as my FLAC collection is ~250GB and my phone is 32GB...simple math dictates there's going to need to be some compression and lossy formats involved there. (My phone natively supports FLAC FWIW.) And I'm ok with that as my portable music is listened to primarily in the car, or doing yard work etc where background noise means fidelity takes a bit of a back seat to disk space...quantity over quality. And OGG seems to offer the best quality of the lossy/moderate bit rate formats (phone also natively supports OGG).

To me it really sounds like you're wanting more of an iTunes solution that will keep everything in sync with your phone and home collection.

Don't say that dirty i-word! :lol: But seriously though, I also want to make it fairly user friendly for my wife to use and MediaMonkey looks to be fairly straight forward, especially once tweaked (by me).

[Finleyville]

Can I ask why use use more than one program for playback? Is MediaMonkey lacking there (I like the sound of the DJ feature...sounds similar to Pandora but with your own music collection)? What's the other program you're looking at trying?

I use Winamp for a couple of reasons. It was the first music player I liked the sound from and I am used to it. When I open MM and choose a song/artist/genre/playlist to play Winamp automatically opens in the background and starts playing. It is set up that way through MM's options. Finally, when I started using an old laptop for a music server, I couldn't get MM's output to come over my Schiit Modi USB dac. There is a plugin for MM to use such a thing but for some reason I couldn't get it working. When I use Winamp there is no problem.

I was going to try JRiver. I would like to have remote control functionality which MM doesn't support. BUT JRiver is going to have to be able to list/sort my whole music collection by Artist and genre. Many programs cannot sort by genre, and I almost exclusively listen to all my music that way.

Below is my MM setup. The top two scrollable blocks are my genres and artists. The rest below is all the music from the selected blocks above. It works for me.



When I rip/download a new album or any music I listen to each track individually and tag each one accordingly. A Miles Davis album would be easy; all the tracks would be labeled as Jazz. However, my many albums of electronic and rock music might have 2 or 3 different genres within the same album. Because of this I do not save my music collection in a dizzying array of sub folders and sub-sub folders. I save everything to one folder and let MM or perhaps a future music player do all the database management.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you why I chose MM in the first place. It is one of the VERY few music players out there that will correctly sync my travel iPod without using iTunes what-so-ever.

[aud19]

Thanks Michael, great info there :T

If I'm being honest, 90% of the time the PC will get used as a music manager as most of our playback is on the main system through our WD Live TV streaming box. Though I should see if I can someday figure out how to "push" content from the PC to the WD as I'd love to utilize MM's playlists/DJ mode and have the two music systems synced up and playing the same content for say parties etc. The WDTV works great for playing selected artists, albums etc but it's far too cumbersome to make playlists and the like.

So I guess largely I need the software for organization and for syncing/converting with our mobile devices until I have time to sort out the "push" thing (if it's even possible). And even then MM seems like it will work for both purposes (pending a response from Pewter re: JRiver anyway )

[Hdale85]

Winamp, Media Monkey, Jriver, and Foobar2000 are all fantastic options IMO. For ripping I always use DBPowerAmp as it's incredibly powerful and also very flexible with formats. I was using MediaMonkey exclusively for a long time but now that I have HTPC's all over the house I've been using XBMC which also does a pretty dang good job for playback with their new AudioEngine. With that said eventually when I have a dedicated 2 channel setup it'll probably be based around something like Foobar2000.

[aud19]

Looks like I can use BubbleUPnP UPnP/DLNA on our tablets and smartphones to control media to the WDTV which is a nice option as well.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp&hl=en

So who knows how to get this all to work together?! :lol:

-MediaMonkey (or Jriver) to manage library and render (push) music via UpnP (as well as playback on local PC).
-Bubble to act as the "remote control" on our tablet/smartphones.

I get the overall concept but when I start to ponder the actual implementation I go a bit....:stupid: Do I need to install anything on my NAS (which also needs rebuilding at some point)?

As an aside...you all seem to be downplaying MM as a player...why is that? Should I not be using it? Is it just the GUI or...?

[PewterTA]

Bubble uPnP is an awesome program. Definitely does a great job throwing stuff to anything DLNA. You will need a media server setup using something like Serviio or Twonky in order to pull the media from. Both of those are great products.

My only issue with MM is you got to do some work to get bit perfect output via asio_output (and for a fact with WinAmp as well). If you don't do this, then you are going through all the windows processing which really degrades the sound coming out of the PC. I know when I was really heavy into winamp (used to help do alpha and beta tests for Justin) I loved everything it did and it was my main media player for the longest time. The one thing as I got further into hi-res music here I realized that WinAmp often made it difficult for getting things to work perfectly with ASIO or WASAPI. That's when I started looking for what I could find that was better. Through spending my money elsewhere, I ended up with Foobar2000 as it was a free solution and through roughly 6 months I've made changes and made it into what I use today. Which for me, I organize my library according to the directory structure so for me I don't need to do a lot of sorting, filtering, searching, so for me it's an easy program to use and does things reliably.

Right now I think the digital realm is really trying to find itself in the "easy and convenience" and getting the best sound one can. Unfortunately, these two differences haven't really formed together except in something like Jriver, which is one of the best sounding players and also does fantastic as a library manager.

Just as an example I just put together a cheap PC and installed Windows Server 2012 r2 on it and I have to say, after throwing my copy of Foobar2000 on it and a few minor tweaks, I'm very impressed with the sound coming out of the computer. Definitely surprised me. I'm just (now) trying to figure out if it's better than all the tweaks I'd done for my Win7 machine or not. Little tough to A/B when you have to swap cables around and what not.

I had to do the work with Foobar2000 to get things set just right, but it was nice that I didn't have to jump through hoops to make it work... it was really designed for outputting at top quality.

[aud19]

Well as I say, most of our listening (and none of the critical variety) isn't done off the PC itself. It's also via the analog PC outputs, not spdif (OLD Pioneer receiver with no digital ins). What "work" exactly needs to get done to get bit perfect sound out of MM? Is it something I only need to be concerned about when/if I "push" to the WDTV? (I assume going analog output I'm a bit at the mercy of Windows/onboard drivers anyway, no?) That may change at some point if I ever upgrade my HT pre/pro and get a digital connection on my PC.

My Qnap NAS has Twonky on it. And when I get around to my custom built NAS I'll likely be using FreeNAS which I believe has built in DLNA and/or a plugin for it. Looks like there's a couple MM apps as well, not sure if they allow you to control and push to a third device meaning I wouldn't need Bubble or just share your media with the Android device. Have to look in to those more...

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=mediamonkey&hl=en

Does JRiver also do the sync/conversion?

Otherwise as far as I can tell JRiver is a better player and has a more attractive GUI but MM appears (to me anyway) to have a bit more functionality with organization/syncing etc your media but as that's predominately what I'd be using it for it seems the "lesser" software might be a better fit for my needs, no?

I'm just not sure I'd get the extra $25 worth out of JRiver if I'm not really using all the media centre/player niceties.

[aud19]

Well you JR supporters might "win" :lol:

It and MM are pretty close but JR's pulling ahead with ability to control the PC/WDTV(pushed) via Tablet/phone with Gizmo and being able to play to multiple "zones" (devices) simultaneously. Though getting them to play in sync is a whole other problem that neither software seems to have an answer to unfortunately....

I'll be updating my current Qnap NAS that I eventually plan to change out to a DIY 4+ drive NAS that I'm still deciding on an OS for (Linux, Openfiler etc). I notice that JR has a Linux version which could go on a Linux run NAS...Having the server run JR via Linux would have the added benefit of not needing the PC on to push media as well but I'm a bit miffed I'd have to buy another full licence (at this point).

[aud19]

Update to that...starting to think it makes more sense to get the Linux version for a rebuilt NAS so that we're not using different remote apps to control media depending on if the PC is off or on. Thinking that would have a low WAF :lol:

Unfortunately that's going to push back getting any of this software until I have time to build the NAS...:rant:. So now WTF do I use for media management in the meantime?!! :lol:

[impala454]

I heard this is the best one out there.



:rofl:

[aud19]

Ummmm no Chuck :lol:

[aud19]

Seems the Linux port of JR leaves something to be desired. So there goes the Linux server running JR idea.

I think I might just go back to MM and use it solely as a PC based music manager and occasional player like I originally intended and let my existing WDTV player/remote app deal with the actual playback. Then figure out the NAS and it's OS etc later.

[PewterTA]

Cool... let us know what you decide to do with your NAS. I was running openfiler for the longest time and then decided I needed more speed and just changed it all back to a windows 2008/2012 set of boxes. Amazing the difference in speed for moving files around (both servers sit with 40TB of space and about 30TB is filled), I like redundancy, so all my data is mirrored between the two boxes. Which is nice that it stays in sync and really can give the network a workout though my 4GB to each server doesn't miss a beat when streaming bluray, audio, and moving data between the server at the same time (LACP is really nice).

Once you start to grow... you definitely want something that can expand with your growth!

[Finleyville]

MM does have a couple of plug-ins so it can be controlled through a tablet or smartphone. I haven't played with them yet. I have no idea if it can "push" its output anywhere. That functionality may be found in the plug in section as well.

@Pewter

I didn't know about MM using windows' processing. I guess we will have to set up my new-to-me Dell mini notebook I just bought when we bring over my speakers later. Or I can bite the bullet and purchase JRiver after I spend $40 on MM gold. Hmmmm..... OR I can use Foobar......more hmmmm......

[PewterTA]

We will have to answer all the 'hmmmmmmmmmmmm's for you soon here Michael!

[aud19]

Actually managed time to format the PC and install W8 on Saturday. Got MM installed but I haven't had any time to really fiddle with it yet.

[PewterTA]

We were playing with Michael's server (Finleyville) and he through the trial of JRiver on his computer. He was pleasantly surprised by the sound difference, especially once I changed the sound over to Kernel Streaming and got exclusive mode to work for his Schiit Modi DAC.

Which I have to say that Schiit Modi Dac might be my favorite for under $500 and at $99 is a STEAL.

I might just pick one up to take around with me to have.... it's that good!

[JonMarsh]

We were playing with Michael's server (Finleyville) and he through the trial of JRiver on his computer. He was pleasantly surprised by the sound difference, especially once I changed the sound over to Kernel Streaming and got exclusive mode to work for his Schiit Modi DAC.

Which I have to say that Schiit Modi Dac might be my favorite for under $500 and at $99 is a STEAL.

I might just pick one up to take around with me to have.... it's that good!

Interesting comments! Now that there's a possibility that in Q1 this coming year I'll go back to a more normal work role, I've been thinking more about portable music...

[PewterTA]

John, that Schiit Modi is in the exact same realm as the BiFrost (WkHanna didn't have his BiFrost but brought his Gungnir). It's a very musical sounding DAC and the differences were far less than the similarities to the Gungnir. The biggest surprise was how much bass information it outputted, most DACs I've heard it's about the $1k range to get the good low end and the Modi had about 95% of that type of bass.

I would've liked to try my iFI USB power to the DAC just to see what it would've done but I thought I had lost my power supply to it, so I never got to hook it up (found it in between the seat and the Center Consol in the car once I had gotten home). I bet powering the DAC with better power than what the PC was giving off would've been a little bump up in performance.

To me, the Modi is THE DAC to tell someone to get who is entering the computer Audio realm, it is truly a great little DAC (little bit bigger than 2 decks of cards) that is very simplistic for anyone to use (though is limited to 24/96K).

[Finleyville]

I was happy that I could not tell a difference between my Modi and Wkhanna's Gungnir. To be quiet honest I do not know if I would be able to hear any difference if the iFI USB power was used in my Modi. As much as I love picking up the little details and hearing nuances in well recorded music, I love NOT hearing some sonic differences that others may hear. Why you ask? Because then I can save my money not buying equipment upgrades! haha!

[PewterTA]

Michael... that just means you need to buy more expensive equipment so you CAN hear the differences and then suffer like the rest of us! HA HA HA.

[JonMarsh]

michael... That just means you need to buy more expensive equipment so you can hear the differences and then suffer like the rest of us! Ha ha ha.

+1 :w

[jim1961]

Personally, I never like to take a step back. So I am in no hurry to hear the M51 for instance until I can afford one.

Its good to be King :P

That is to say I know of no system that sounds better than mine. That is also to say there are only two other people I know that make an attempt at high end audio whose system ive heard. And neither of those have much (in one case, none in the other) in the way of room treatment (which gives me the upper hand :T

There is a case to be made that hearing better sound makes you want better sound. I am not very good at wanting and not having ops:

[JonMarsh]

There is a case to be made that hearing better sound makes you want better sound. I am not very good at wanting and not having ops:

I would adopt this as my new signature this coming year... but you've already pre-empted it! I think my GF might say your last phrase describes me very well! :W

[jim1961]

I would adopt this as my new signature this coming year... but you've already pre-empted it! I think my GF might say your last phrase describes me very well! :W

If you like it. Use it.