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Topic: WavPack support in hardware devices? (Read 7499 times) previous topic - next topic
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WavPack support in hardware devices?

I think it would be nice to have a thread dedicated to the hardware support of WavPack. Virtually everything plays FLAC, and I've seen $30 devices that play APE, but finding WavPack in a list of formats is like winning the lottery, and you generally have to have won the lottery to afford the player!

If anyone has first-hand experience with a device doing WavPack playback or recording, please share a short review here. I'll start with two devices I have purchased in the last year or so that provide really great WavPack support.

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #1
Cowon Plenue R 128GB High Resolution Audio Player

Cowon has been providing WavPack support in products for a long time, going back to 2008 with their A3 and O2 Portable Media Players, both of which also played video and were rather large. Today Cowon provides WavPack support in the more expensive offerings of their Plenue line of “high-end” portable audio players, starting with the Cowon Plenue R, which I will describe here.

I gotta say that the WavPack support in the Plenue R is pretty amazing. It plays all the PCM formats and bit depths (including float), plays any standard sample rate (I tried up to 384 kHz), handles downmixing from 5.1 channels, and even handles the correction file for hybrid lossless playback! The only files from the WavPack test suite that it had trouble with were the DSD file and the non-standard sampling rate test (36 kHz).

Additionally, it handles embedded cuesheets (automatically opening them as a new folder) and displays all the embedded artwork I tried. And even without cuesheets, the playback is perfectly gapless and seeking is instantaneous.

The biggest disappointment is the lack of WavPack DSD support, especially since it plays uncompressed DSD and I think they're using native libwavpack which includes DSD decoding basically for free. I know there's plenty of CPU power for this, based on what it can easily decode.
 
More generally, the player is nicely featured. It's got 128 GB of internal storage (plus a MicroSD slot) and it features Cowon's JetEffect 7 with BBE+ which is a collection of EQ and other enhancement tools including headphone 3D effects. The headphone amp drove even my Sennheiser HD580s to a good volume, and there's never any hiss audible with my IEMs. It's also got a balanced output (which I've ordered a cable for my HD580s to try out) and an optical S/PDIF output which is handy for hooking up to a home stereo (although it's always resampled to 44.1 kHz and is unfortunately never bit-perfect).

Finally, it has Bluetooth output with aptX which works great with my Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones at home, but I found that when I had the Plenue in my pants pocket I got dropouts when walking outside. I don't have enough experience with Bluetooth to know whether that's typical, but hopefully that's something that Cowon has fixed with the newer R2 replacement.

With smartphones offering a lot of this by simply running an app it's not obvious where exactly a product like this fits into a busy lifestyle, but I enjoy having dedicated devices for certain things (I also use a dedicated GPS in the car) and with its brushed metal case, solid feel, and bright 3.7” AMOLED touch screen, the Plenue R just comes across as a luxury product that's a joy to use.


Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #2
Lotoo PAW Pico 32GB Portable Audio Player

The Lotoo PAW Pico is a very tiny music player designed for sports. It has no provision for external storage and it doesn't have a display so you have to navigate by listening (folder and track) but it does have a real rotating volume control and it has a motion sensor and GPS for keeping track of your steps and distance. The thing I like is that it's so small and light (< 1 oz!) that you can run with it in your shirt packet without even feeling it, and if you prefer no pockets it also comes with a clip and arm band setup. There is Bluetooth (BLE), but it's not for audio so you do have to use wired phones, which is okay because it has amazing output power for its tiny size.

It's actually a little weird that the PAW Pico supports WavPack at all because none of Lotoo's earlier (and larger) models did and I was a little worried that I would get it and find out that something just got mistranslated. But no, it does support it and does a really good job! It's not as complete as the Plenue (as in no correction file or cuesheet support), and it also doesn't play WavPack DSD (although it does play uncompressed DSD formats), but it does play all reasonable files I tried, up to 32/192. When I tried a multichannel file it hung and needed to be reset, and I found that files over about 800 MB just played silence, but obviously these are both easy situations to avoid (and may have been fixed in later firmware releases).

Since it has no display it can't show the battery charge state, so there's a button you press to have it “tell” you the battery percentage remaining. When I got the unit this worked fine (i.e., English), but at one point I deleted some music folders and put on some new ones, and suddenly it was only speaking Chinese. I searched everywhere and tried everything, including restoring all those deleted folders, but could never figure out how to get English back. So I found a website where I could learn Chinese but decided that was going to take weeks and now I simply don't use that feature. Fortunately, the unit warns when there's 10% left and that leaves well over an hour of playback, so I've never run out of battery on my runs.

I tried the Sport feature and once the GPS had locked onto my location it informed me every few minutes via voice prompts how many kilometers I had traveled and steps taken. Since I go the same path every day, and since elevation change is not reported and is the most significant part of my workout, I didn't feel the need to try this feature again, but some might like it. Of course, that feature also changed to Chinese during my mishap, so it's even less useful now, but again no big deal for me.

The Lotoo PAW Pico is a unique player. It's so small that you can take it anywhere and not even notice it's there, and yet holds up to 32 GB of audio files and play them at decent volume even into difficult headphones. It's got some quirks and you're pretty much on your own if something goes wrong, but it's fun to own and use, and it's the least expensive device I know of that natively plays WavPack. Hopefully Lotoo will include WavPack in all its future products.


Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #3
The Cowon product is actually interesting, thank you.
WavPack 5.6.0 -b384hx6cmv / qaac64 2.80 -V 100

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #4
The Cowon product is actually interesting, thank you.
Yeah, it's a nice solid unit.

I got a second-hand one on eBay for under $300 and the only flaw is that tiny scratch visible just to the right of PLENUE. Funny though, it was listed as "open box" but had about 100GB of music on it.

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #5
Bryant,

As much as I find 'best of' lists hateful, I wonder if you came across this one in particular, by What Hi-fi? (I know), which, if anything, is a useful starting point for search results due to its relative "freshness", as of July 2020.

I mean "starting point" because from there, a search on each brands' specific website (apart from Cowon's) comes up empty-handed in terms of Wavpack support (I can't believe some even support floating point APE - didn't even know that existed) but not our beloved format!

Anyway, I'm glad that's exactly the opposite of what goes on in the Android software front.  :)

Edit: It goes without saying they're all premium DAPs requiring the aforementioned winning lottery ticket to avoid you running into trouble with your bank account manager/wife in order to buy one!
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #6
Maybe @saratoga can give future second hand-unity buyers some hope that Rockbox will come to their rescue in the long term?  :D
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #7
Yes, it's very frustrating, to say the least. Cowon is the only consistent player here, and the “cheaper” ones like the D2 mentioned in that list don't support WavPack either. I just noticed that the Luxury & Precision L5 seems to have been discontinued, and the other players they make don't list WavPack support (and I never verified that the L5 actually had it), so I should probably take that off my website. The only other one I've found is the QLS QA361 which is too pricey for me to try.

The frustrating part is that in many of these cases, adding WavPack support should be trivial. It comes standard in FFmpeg and Gstreamer which are likely candidates for how many of these players handle decoding. In fact, some devices will play WavPack files if you change their extension to .MP3 or .FLAC, which could only work if the WavPack decoder was there (it couldn't happen by accident). So all they probably would have to do is add WavPack's extension to a table somewhere and support would be done!

BTW, a friend has a Tesla Model 3 and we verified that this method works on its audio system, although the tag reading and seeking are a little broken. And, no, there's no such thing as Monkey's Audio floating-point...  :)

I plan to do mini reviews of the three Rockbox'd players I own: the Sansa Fuse, the iRiver iHP-120 (which I upgraded to 80 GB), and the Apple iPod Classic 4th Gen (which I'm thinking of upgrading to an SD card). These are obviously the cheap way to go, but it does mean buying second-hand on eBay and possibly futzing around with new batteries, etc.

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #8
The frustrating part is that in many of these cases, adding WavPack support should be trivial. It comes standard in FFmpeg and Gstreamer which are likely candidates for how many of these players handle decoding.
 
Could libavcodec also be another probable culprit?

But man, such a silly impediment to WP playback on so many DAPs/car stereos definitely sucks big time, as it handicaps people's usage or even adoption of such versatile a format.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

 

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #9
Although it is not a hardware component but it is a software I wanted to let you know that VLC in version 3.0.11.1 (on Ubuntu 20.04 lts) has changed something about dsd in wavpack, while before the duration of the file was always wrong now the duration is right but nothing is heard ..... maybe in the next release there will be support for dsd in wavpack?

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #10
Hello everybody) First of all, I would like to thank David for developing the most advanced lossless codec out there:)
Just wanted to put in my two cents regarding the WavPack hardware support. As far as I know, the full WavPack support is enabled in the Neutron software player only (I mean playing back not only PCM but losslessly compressed dsf/dff files and correctly recognizing the DSD content of a WavPack file), which can be installed on literally any portable device (DAPs, smartphones) with Android-based firmware. Some DAP models (by Cayin, Shanling, FiiO, and HiBy themselves) with HiBy software-based firmware on their DAPs can play WavPack files too. However, I'm not sure if they can retrieve DSD content from the WavPack container and hardware decode it as DSD without converting to PCM.
UPDATE: checked several recent DAPs by these manufacturers - they have no WavPack mentioned in the supported formats list. Still no WavPack support via their preinstalled audio playback applications((  

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #11
Hello everybody) First of all, I would like to thank David for developing the most advanced lossless codec out there:)
Just wanted to put in my two cents regarding the WavPack hardware support. As far as I know, the full WavPack support is enabled in the Neutron software player only (I mean playing back not only PCM but losslessly compressed dsf/dff files and correctly recognizing the DSD content of a WavPack file), which can be installed on literally any portable device (DAPs, smartphones) with Android-based firmware. Some DAP models (by Cayin, Shanling, FiiO, and HiBy themselves) with HiBy software-based firmware on their DAPs can play WavPack files too. However, I'm not sure if they can retrieve DSD content from the WavPack container and hardware decode it as DSD without converting to PCM.
UPDATE: checked several recent DAPs by these manufacturers - they have no WavPack mentioned in the supported formats list. Still no WavPack support via their preinstalled audio playback applications((  

This is good news. I have a FiiO M6 and M3 Pro. I would love to know how to play WavPack files on these devices.

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #12
Actually, I see that only QLS 361 and Lotoo Paw Gold Touch and one another model from their line has WavPack support in their native software players. Maybe, a couple of Astell&Kern models too, which is scarce. Many manufacturers just follow the marketing hype of some MQA formats or something similar instead of implementing open-source formats, I guess.

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #13

 
 I've just realised: have we finally got to see a picture of Bryant's (erm, hand)?

These humble audio codec developers and their inherent shyness!  :D

So much so, that I'm automatically reminded of the fuss raised by some at the prospect of seeing snapshots taken at the delivery of that HA-funded PC to Musepack's Frank Klemm, back in the day. ;)




Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #14
I just noticed that those pictures don't show up in Chrome (at least the Linux version I'm running) and there's no indication there's even anything missing. Show up fine in a very old Firefox. Weird.

I may not be as shy as some because I have my picture on my GitHub page, but yes those are my hands. I was considering using my friend George to do the shots because he's a hand model, but just did it myself...   :)

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #15
I just noticed that those pictures don't show up in Chrome (at least the Linux version I'm running) and there's no indication there's even anything missing. Show up fine in a very old Firefox. Weird.
 
 Strangely enough, I noticed the same thing on my Linux browser (Firefox methinks) but not on Chrome for Linux - either on Mint or Deepin.

Quote
I may not be as shy as some because I have my picture on my GitHub page, but yes those are my hands. I was considering using my friend George to do the shots because he's a hand model, but just did it myself...  :)
 
 Glad to give the most daring hybrid audio encoder a face! :D


Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: WavPack support in hardware devices?

Reply #16
I may not be as shy as some because I have my picture on my GitHub page, but yes those are my hands. I was considering using my friend George to do the shots because he's a hand model, but just did it myself...   :)
A picture of a great guy indeed. 8)
WavPack 5.6.0 -b384hx6cmv / qaac64 2.80 -V 100