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1
Support - (fb2k) / Foobar2000 v2.* playback sound quality lower than v1.X
Last post by Globares -
The sound quality of Foobar2000 2.X is lower than version 1.X.

Right now I'm comparing versions 1.6.16 and 2.1.4, but in the past I downloaded one of the early versions of Foobar2000 2.X for evaluation and the noticed the same problem.
I've checked both 32 and 64 bit versions of f2k 2.X. Both play worse than v1.6.

Problem is easily hearable while using the ASIO drivers (and plugin), for "standard" drivers v1.6 probably still keeps an edge, but I'm not  really sure about it, since general sound quality with non-ASIO drivers is lower, what makes comparison more difficult, anyway I'd rather blame the f2k 2.X core than the asio plugin.

All tests were done using Windows 10, 64 bit. I used 2 DACs with their proprietary ASIO drivers, The results were consistent.
The most noticeable difference is the soundstage degradation, so jitter would be my primary suspect.

I'd be grateful for a fix, since only v2.X is available in 64 bits, what is required for PGGB-RT plugin, and PGGB-RT upsampling is really good.
3
General - (fb2k) / Re: UPnP MediaRenderer output | discussion
Last post by Acell -
Thank you for your explanation.

I don't know very well Minimserver. I well know Audirvana and for example, about the tag "genre" is not managed by the same way.
I tag my albums with "genre",  including sub-genre as"Jazz" or "Jazz-Big Band" or "Jazz-Be-bop" ... Same for other music as Classical one.

1) With Foobar, I can sort all the albums by genre CONTAINING the word "Jazz" and NOT ONLY the single word "Jazz" => in Foobar (on PC, and after settings) , a sort by genre with the word "Jazz" will address all the albums with genre : "Jazz", "Jazz-Big Band", ... With Audirvana, I will get only albums with "Jazz" genre (not sub-genre). And it is the same with all Controller Apps on smartphone I know. Reason why I prefer using Foobar on PC.

2) With Foobar (on PC), once you get your albums sorted by genre, you can also set ac clear "sub-sorting" by artist, with clear display separation artist by artist.
.. And I can describe more advantages. But for sure I am developping my Foobar version for many years and it is not obvious.

In summary, Foobar2000 on PC is much more comfortable for managing a very large music collection (10,000 albums).
4
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: Library Tree Discussion
Last post by ouafouaf -
Hi,
I recently switched from the old facets to library tree. I'm getting used to it, trying to recreate my old setup with this new tool. 
I use several library tree panels as facets, linked together as explained in the help. It's working as intended.
One thing I miss, is being able to reorder my views by number of sub-items. 
For example, I use a lot of different Genre tags, and sometimes I want to browse my facet panel alphabetically, sometimes I want to order by the number of albums in that genre. There is no such option in the "sort selected view" submenu. Is there some tweak to make it possible? 

X

Thank you for your help, and thanks to the amazing work you're all doing!
5
Lossless / Other Codecs / Re: Tested: Lossless decoding speed, multithreaded - and fast verification
Last post by bryant -
Quote from: Porcus on
Decoding speeds again. Tested more multithreading.
TL;DR: wvunpack --threads=<N> beats ffmpeg -threads <N> at decoding - with one exception where block size was forced to maximum.
So a couple things about this. First, I guess you’re using --threads because you have 8-thread hardware. In WavPack’s case the performance continues to improve even when the requested number of threads exceeds the physical threads. I just did an experiment on my 8-thread machine and got a 10% speed improvement (but 10% more total processor time) going from --threads=7 to --threads=12. Of course with thermal throttling and other factors, actual mileage may vary.

FFmpeg does not behave this way, and seems to detect the number of physical threads and ignores specification beyond that.

Interesting about the reduced performance with extra long frames, but it has a simple explanation. To achieve the temporal multithreading, sufficiently large buffers must be provided to libwavpack, and the command-line programs calculate these based on the requested number of threads and the normal frame lengths. This is done because unfortunately there’s no API provided to determine the actual frame length (this is abstracted away from the library client, and can change from frame to frame), so the best we can do is guess. I would strongly recommend that extra long frames are not used to achieve better compression!  :)
10
Opus / Re: Opus decoding complexity
Last post by btc -
Decoding speeds:
FLAC  - 1090x
uncompressed WAV - 40000x

FLAC is 40x times slower than uncompressed WAV. "FLAC is not hero"

All smartphones with SOC on 28nm or better have the same battery life for playback of MP3, AAC, HE-AAC, Opus, Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC or uncompressed WAV. 
During audio playback CPU consumes only tiny fraction of complete system consumption (CPU, I/O, RAM, storage, DAC and  audio amplifier).

Decoding speed of audio decoder is not an indicator of battery life.
Complexity of decoder isn't an important subject by itself, rather its influence on usability indicators as battery life of devices.