Bug Head Player

There are many audiophiles player in the market...but this bughead is something special...i could hear this player with headphones and compared it with Foobar and Jriver and it is quiet something that I can not explain...really worth trying despite shitty interface....

earlier i have tried CPLAY,musicbee and what not, to compare it with foobar but Bughead is Sushi:) among others..
 
There are many audiophiles player in the market...but this bughead is something special...i could hear this player with headphones and compared it with Foobar and Jriver and it is quiet something that I can not explain...really worth trying despite shitty interface....

earlier i have tried CPLAY,musicbee and what not, to compare it with foobar but Bughead is Sushi:) among others..
Please try Cplay which is clean warm with low noise player.
 
I have Cplay. BHE will mop the floor with Cplay.

Cplay is a basic memory player which was a big thing some time back.
Today it's a standard feature and almost all players have some sort of memory play function.
Anyway BHE will run circles around Cplay - should not even be in the same discussion. Period.
 
Song starts playing after 7 secs.

7 secs is fast!

What are your settings?

I'd suggest you try basic upsampling of x2 (because upsampling seems to be the forte of this player) say, level 3 for starters, and try 4 lines of Self Sound Optimizer, choose super Galaxy, try mmx+ third level, Bug level 3, and Kitty level 3. Enable >1 thread if available on your processor. Pre-play processing with above settings on my computer is about 1 and half to 2 minutes with 10 to 14 tracks loaded on the playlist.

I have been experimenting and I like x4 upsampling a lot. The tonality becomes more organic, resolution goes up, sound staging improves. It just sounds more relaxed and more musical. And less hifi;)

Also, when I try higher levels in Command Line mode, I don't really like the sound. A moderate level like Level 3 to 4 somehow sounds better in my setup, perhaps because I have just 4 GB of memory and a very modest Dual Core processor with no hyperthreading running at 1.8 GHz clock speed. I kill all unneeded background processes so as to make maximum resources available to The Bug.
 
v.5.24 of BHE lets me select the JMC Asio driver and higher versions of BHE disable it.

Does this mean BHE is routing the audio signal to JMC? I've read about lots of people mentioning that they're using JPlay or JMC or foobar ASIO drivers. Since I can't select JMC in my setup screen (though it shows up, but greyed out), I have been wondering how it works.

Also, does WASAPI show up for you with ver 5.24?

PS: I'm rediscovering female vocals...... what sweet midrange IB SQ has!
 
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Found out something new about BHE over the past couple of days.

"All Cores Any Cures" - This is a script that optimizes the multiprocessor cores for playback. Have been recommended to run the script 2-3 times before choosing the "Repeat every 34 min" option. This then need not be touched again until OS is restarted.

ReWrite Data - This is a pre-processing script that lets you do some of the pre-processing ahead of playback. I'm still getting to understand this feature but it appears that you can ReWrite your music data and Audio processes (like BHE itself under Software option) into RAM. Read that you can also ReWrite your DAC drivers (JPlay under Driver option) so it does some sort of optimization which I presume is stuffing into memory for easy access.

These two features would some under playback optimization - so if you are trying BHE for the first time - just ignore them and revisit the subject later on. BHE sounds pretty good all on it's own without these optimizations.

Does it make a difference? Yup most definitely. Just don't ask how and why.
 
Does this mean BHE is routing the audio signal to JMC? I've read about lots of people mentioning that they're using JPlay or JMC or foobar ASIO drivers. Since I can't select JMC in my setup screen (though it shows up, but greyed out), I have been wondering how it works.

Also, does WASAPI show up for you with ver 5.24?

PS: I'm rediscovering female vocals...... what sweet midrange IB SQ has!
Yes. it routes the audio to JMC. JMC loads up runs while music is playing. See attached screen shot - this is the message I get when I try to "locate" what is playing from within JMC.

No, WASAPI does not show up for me to select. It has a lot of quirks.

Edit: IMO what it is doing is just plain old DSP. Advanced stuff but still it's DSP. Even though it does sound good, it goes against my grain to use it - if I don't like using any DSP in JMC/F2K etc. there's no reason for me to like this. Stoopid me!
 

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Edit: IMO what it is doing is just plain old DSP. Advanced stuff but still it's DSP.
I think I spoke [posted] too soon. I will validate this with NO processing and then post again.

Edit: I set JMC to output what is played, to a file.

Played a song via BE with NO optimization selected [SQ degradation = 100%] - file written was 83.3 MB
Same song played via JMC - file written was 29.5 MB

BE outputs more than double information from old JMC. This is not just memory optimization/rewriting or whatever he's calling it.​
 
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Tried it at last today.

I have a powerful rig, an i7, a powerful NVIDIA GPU with 16 GB RAM plus the usual frills like SSD, etc. I'm a gamer and HTPC geek who rides on madVR to projector @upscaled 4K for even Blu-rays. I even upscale YT videos... just saying I understand all of this trouble to make music sound better.

Setup was easy, did not understand most of the options. Had to install ASIO4All and then had to configure it.

The sound will simply blow you away. Its that good and that's saying something on my mid-fi audio speaker system.

Pretty much everything else is a pain in the wrong place. Even to skip a track one needs to rewrite again. No simply skipping or jumping to a particular track.

But the sound is worth it... guess that's the same as saying I upscale everything to 4K on my HTPC because the PQ blows everything away.

Tove Lo never sounded better as she does on the Bug.
 
Edit: IMO what it is doing is just plain old DSP. Advanced stuff but still it's DSP. Even though it does sound good, it goes against my grain to use it - if I don't like using any DSP in JMC/F2K etc. there's no reason for me to like this. Stoopid me!

I think I spoke [posted] too soon. I will validate this with NO processing and then post again.

Edit: I set JMC to output what is played, to a file.

Played a song via BE with NO optimization selected [SQ degradation = 100%] - file written was 83.3 MB
Same song played via JMC - file written was 29.5 MB

BE outputs more than double information. This is not just memory optimization/rewriting or whatever he's calling it.​

In a way that's an accurate assessment. The purist "audiophile" will want nothing to do with processing. I'm all for it, the sound is definitely improved over anything I've tried.
 
OT, but there's a DSP - Stereo Tool that has tons of options and if set well, really makes music sound wonderful. Maybe people might want to take a look at that too.
 
There's DSP. Tons and tons of it. But unlike other players, the DSPs actually seem to do something very nice. I like it. A lot. In fact I'm seriously planning to upgrade my PC so that I can run these DSPs more effectively.

I once was a purist who thought nothing of equalisation or tone controls. But I've come around to accepting that recordings are far from perfect and needs some equalisation to sound better. I even have some EQs in foobar which, to my ears, improve the sound over a flat curve. Each to his own, I guess:)

BTW, anyone's tried more settings? What settings work for you in Bug Head? Let's share ideas.
 
Changing most settings in BE [from the default] make a subtle difference to my ears. But nothing so radical [from the default] as to justify the extra processing or the lead time it takes to start playing.

There is an executable in the BE folder - RewriteData.exe. I read some incredible and whacky explanations for what this does. One explanation that came from the developer and was translated to say it is to "improve magnetisation of electronic bits". Following that it is said - "the effect is maximum just after this program has been applied, and becomes weaker as time goes by.". Seems to be a case of something being lost in translation. It also seems that the re-write effect goes away if the files are moved from the folder that it was re-written in. ;)

So, I made a copy of some songs in a folder and ran that "rewrite" stuff on those files. It appears to do something because the status against each file listed on the "rewrite" application said "Finished". Also the icon of each file in the folder flickered as it was processed. Some temporary files are also created during the process which are cleaned up once all processing is done. The date/time stamp of the file was unchanged. I played the original "non" re-written file and the supposedly re-written file through JMC and through BE. No difference that I could detect. Bit comparing both files detected no differences. Maybe you guys will have better luck.
 
I like BHE so much I got my AudioPC RAM upgraded to 32GB.

Ran Infinity Blade SQ
Clicked Setup to go into Bug Head mode Setup

Ratcheted up the options in Select Options <1>
1. Correct Clear Sound
2. Memory Envalid
6. z Tune
7. Setup Memory DIMM (8Gb:8Gb:8GB:8GB)
8. Double Sided Memory
9. Shape Clear Sound
10. ReWrite Wall Paper

Select Mode <2>
Mode: High Class Professional (comes on with settings in <1>
1. Normal only

Left player settings at default to Galaxy 35; mmx+; PCM
(will play around with other settings later on ...)

So decided to use something non-audiophile to see what BHE is capable of.
Cued up "Beauty Behind the Madness" by The Weeknd
I suspect there's not a lot of real instruments in the recording.


Holy Mollie ...

Synth pads and electronic transients are emanating from the free space in front of me.
The presence of Weeknd's voice is startling.
BHE in High Class Professional is holographic and throws up heck of a sound stage.
Just enjoyed listening to the entire album almost. What a trip!

BHE is one heck of a player. It's not the first to aggressively manipulate the signal.
It deserves the attention of anyone out there looking for great sound.

Bits are most definitely not bits or whatever the cliche is!
If these are magnetized bits I'll have more of them please anytime of the day.
 
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