Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2017 19:45:27 GMT
I got my first PC in 2000. It was a Windows XP machine & I loved it. I loved it even more once I discovered it could help me discover music I'd never heard before. I use various players at the time but I finally settled on a player called QMP. It did everything I thought I wanted (and needed) in a computer. all I had to do was open the player & open a window to my Music folder & I was good to go. Unfortunately the developers (the Quinn Brothers - 'Quinnware') had the apparently irresistable desire to add 'features'. I hated features and they eventually went tits-up, the forum experience no doubt contributing to the demise immeasurably.
I was left with a problem. The standard Windows player was out of the question for so many reasons that most of you here are probably well aware of. So what's a man to do? Well, on a Windows machine there's really only Foobar 2000. I used that for nearly 8 years. Sure, it's a complex beast but, once set up right, I don't think there's a better Windows player.
In 2012 I switched to the Mac experience, sadly just around the time Apple switched to the Windows experience. Macs used to have proven software. It worked, and it worked every time. Not any more. I'm essentially a Beta tester for Apple. Anyway, iTunes was out of the question since it didn't support FLAC, (I'd built up a considerable library in Foobar using FLAC as my preferred file format) and the others which did support FLAC all cost money. I hated them all. It wasn't even a sound quality issue. Since I'd built up my music collection over time and I'm a pedant for structure I got really annoyed that none of the big players supported something as simple as navigation by folder tree. That is preposterous! the program itself HAS TO navigate by folder tree; it's how ALL computers work. But no, I had to navigate by tags. Sadly, a lot of my music had inaccurate tagging so that was virtually impossible.
I found JRiver Music Center (JRMC). It did allow navigation by folder tree ( although, even then, only once I'd set up a custom view to do that). So I did and I was happy. The downside was that JRMC on Mac was nothing more than a Windows port, and not a particularly good one at that. I persevered though ad my music collection grew & grew. Then JRMC broke. Turns out they don't build-in backwards compatibility. So I fixed it een although it took 3 days to get it back to where I had it before.
Last week it broke again. I went to the forums to find a fix and the best suggestions I got was to upgrade (with actual money) to the latest version. Aye right! It wasn't broken before. I didn't break it so I'd be damned if I shelled out any more money for it in the certain knowledge the same would happen again in the not too distant future. So what to do?
Well, while using JRMC since 2012 I've always kept Cog on my machine. It's nothing fancy but it does at least work. I'd also tried out Vox on a couple of occasions and really enjoyed it's simplicity. Unfortunately I'd got used to using Sonarworks (as a VST plug-in, which JRMC supports). A few days ago I discovered that, whilst Vox doesn't support VST ( why would it, since VST is a Windows workstation format & I'm on a Mac) but it DOES support Audio Units. My Sonarworks plug-in does come with an AU equivalent. It was a breeze to set it up too. I am itting here now listening to the best audio I've ever heard, on headphones at least. It allows me to drag & drop too, although it does have a cool built-in 'add files' function too. I'm pretty much right back to where I started.
To sum up, Vox plays all formats (including DSD, although i've no DSD files to test for myself), it's lightweight, the interface is lovely, it supports AU plug-ins, it has built-in Crossfeed options (Default, Jan Meier, Chu Moy) & it's free!
I was left with a problem. The standard Windows player was out of the question for so many reasons that most of you here are probably well aware of. So what's a man to do? Well, on a Windows machine there's really only Foobar 2000. I used that for nearly 8 years. Sure, it's a complex beast but, once set up right, I don't think there's a better Windows player.
In 2012 I switched to the Mac experience, sadly just around the time Apple switched to the Windows experience. Macs used to have proven software. It worked, and it worked every time. Not any more. I'm essentially a Beta tester for Apple. Anyway, iTunes was out of the question since it didn't support FLAC, (I'd built up a considerable library in Foobar using FLAC as my preferred file format) and the others which did support FLAC all cost money. I hated them all. It wasn't even a sound quality issue. Since I'd built up my music collection over time and I'm a pedant for structure I got really annoyed that none of the big players supported something as simple as navigation by folder tree. That is preposterous! the program itself HAS TO navigate by folder tree; it's how ALL computers work. But no, I had to navigate by tags. Sadly, a lot of my music had inaccurate tagging so that was virtually impossible.
I found JRiver Music Center (JRMC). It did allow navigation by folder tree ( although, even then, only once I'd set up a custom view to do that). So I did and I was happy. The downside was that JRMC on Mac was nothing more than a Windows port, and not a particularly good one at that. I persevered though ad my music collection grew & grew. Then JRMC broke. Turns out they don't build-in backwards compatibility. So I fixed it een although it took 3 days to get it back to where I had it before.
Last week it broke again. I went to the forums to find a fix and the best suggestions I got was to upgrade (with actual money) to the latest version. Aye right! It wasn't broken before. I didn't break it so I'd be damned if I shelled out any more money for it in the certain knowledge the same would happen again in the not too distant future. So what to do?
Well, while using JRMC since 2012 I've always kept Cog on my machine. It's nothing fancy but it does at least work. I'd also tried out Vox on a couple of occasions and really enjoyed it's simplicity. Unfortunately I'd got used to using Sonarworks (as a VST plug-in, which JRMC supports). A few days ago I discovered that, whilst Vox doesn't support VST ( why would it, since VST is a Windows workstation format & I'm on a Mac) but it DOES support Audio Units. My Sonarworks plug-in does come with an AU equivalent. It was a breeze to set it up too. I am itting here now listening to the best audio I've ever heard, on headphones at least. It allows me to drag & drop too, although it does have a cool built-in 'add files' function too. I'm pretty much right back to where I started.
To sum up, Vox plays all formats (including DSD, although i've no DSD files to test for myself), it's lightweight, the interface is lovely, it supports AU plug-ins, it has built-in Crossfeed options (Default, Jan Meier, Chu Moy) & it's free!