J River's position on memory playback

[hydra]

I came across this just now, on the J River Wiki. It is related to the improvements in memory playback in the upcoming Version 19.

Benefits
The theoretical benefits of memory playback are that no disk or network I/O occurs while playing and that CPU load during playback could be reduced.

Note the use of "theoretical".

Sound Quality
JRiver is unaware of any test that shows a sound quality advantage to memory playback.

The option was added due to popular demand.

Source (with full details): NEW: Improved memory playback

It's nice to see them take a solid position on memory playback.

 

[sidvee]

I am using 18 and plan to upgrade to 19 when it becomes more mature. I have tried 18 with memory playback on and off, and I could not tell any difference on my music PC. So now I just leave it off. Will try the same option on 19 when I get it, but based on jriver's statement perhaps will not hear any difference either.
Cheers,
Sid

 

[IndianEars]

I find J River adds an unacceptable warmth ( muddiness ? ) when compared to Foobar. Both run on (my) the same Win XP PC.

Jplay & Foobar when running on a Win8 SSD Laptop bettered by far the J River ( On WinXP). In fact Foobar and Jplay on the Win8 m/c were Very close, but I found a less well defined Central image via JPlay .... almost like only the central Image was out of phase ....

I know this is Weird, but I stand by my comments.

I suspect that JPaly is in some way introducing a phase error.

To me this effect seemed Much More adverse on a 2 PC JPlay playout...

Hence for me, as of now, Foobar reigns supreme amongst PC Playback programs !

Any serious discussions on this most welcome.....

 

[hydra]

Indianears, I experienced the exact opposite when I tried JRMC.

I was a Foobar user (and fan boy) for quite a long time. I'd tried JRMC a couple of times initially, but found no difference, and stuck to Foobar. But when I tried JRMC 17, I felt that the bass response in Foobar to be very loose and muddy in comparison. JRMC seemed to give very tight and defined bass where it needed to be defined (mid bass region), and in the case of the lower bass, it was just there, without it's presence being made felt overtly.

I found the biggest and marked difference with Jennifer Warnes's "Way Down Deep" (from 'The Hunter'). There is a very strong bass line in the track. With Foobar, it was very loose and all over the place, with a very uncomfortable reverberation. With JRMC, it was quite defined, (but did not perhaps go as low). I have a few cupboards in my room, and with Foobar, the doors reverberate quite badly while playing this track. But they don't reverberate while playing the same track with JRMC.

There's also a marked difference in the definition of the bass plucks in her "Ballad of the runaway horse" (from 'Famous Blue Raincoat', 50th Anniversary Edition). I mean that JRMC sounds much better.

I've not yet tried JPlay.

I too would love to hear from the others about their experiences with these players.

EDIT: I'm now running JRMC v18 on Win 7 Home Basic (32 bit) on a dedicated Music PC (AMD E350, 64GB SSD, 3GB RAM, 3TB Green HDD).

 

[hydra]

Sidvee, good to know you couldn't make out any difference with memory play. You have equipment that should catch any difference well enough! I couldn't see any difference either.

I think I'll wait and watch with the upgrade to v19.

 

[mowgli80]

I have not used any of the players mentioned but based on experiences above, different sounds by different players, I can only infer some that media players favoured by audiophiles are trying to equalize the sound, which unfortunately means that they are not true a) to the source and b) to their target customers, most of whom looking for a). Nice to see the 'theoretical' stand by jriver on memory playback, but do any of these players make an ethical claim to equalize?

 

[sidvee]

I concur with Hydra. I was using foobar till I got the JRMC 17. I felt that the JRMC had significantly higher resolution than foobar, better soundstaging and extended frequency both higher and lower. To my ears the sound was more analog sounding than harsh digital. In fact that is when I realized that computer based sources with the right DAC can outperform CD players. OTOH I have not been able to tell much difference between 17 and 18 though (though there are other features on the video side that I don't use that may be better). I will upgrade to 19 once it is stable.
Cheers,
Sid

 

[IndianEars]

Interesting feedback, guys.

Yes, I too consider "The Hunter" ... Way Down Deep to have REALLY deep bass. It remains one of my test tracks for Bass.

1. Do you guys have a large library of HDD music ? I have more than 2000 LPs on external USB Drives. Using this with J River slows down my (WinXP) PC to a crawl. Even loading J River takes a while.

Foobar is up and playing in a jiffy ...

2. Also have you guys compared playing the SAME music from an external USB drive vs from the local HDD ( say stored on the Desktop ) ?

Thanks for sharing

 

[hydra]

Indianears, I keep only about 400GB of music on the hard disk (in the computer) currently. With this much, there is absolutely no lag in starting or in playback. I have had close to 2TB of music on this disk earlier and even then there was no lag whatsoever.

But I must agree that Foobar does feel faster. Foobar definitely updates the library much faster than JRMC. New tracks take 20-30 seconds to show up in JRMC, while it used to take just 3-5 seconds in Foobar.

I generally don't use external disks to play music, except when there are friends visiting and want to play something they have on their external disks. Even this is very rare, as I don't have antivirus running on my Music PC, and I avoid plugging in disks other than ones I'm 100% sure of (= my own).

I've not done an external disk vs. internal disk comparison as yet. For reasons that I can't quite explain logically (not because of audiophilia, but because of paranoia and previous experience related to hardware failure and data loss), I use external disks only to backup and transfer data from machine to machine. I don't hook them up to a machine and work on data in them, or play music/movies off them.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

When I wonder about such things, I reflect that a PC can play music from that astoundingly slow, by comparison, device... a CD drive!

My use of external HDDs is much the same as hydra's. The only thing is that, being NTFS, the music collection is available to Windows on those rare occasions that I boot it --- but then, comparison is irrelevant, being different OS, different software.

Anyway, my collection is relatively small and I avoid library managers, much preferring to navigate by simple directory structure.

Whilst I don't believe it is necessary anyway, currently I do have some problems with an occasional drop-out, and I know this is something to do with Linux memory management. It is disappointing and shouldn't happen at all, but, currently it does and I'd dread trying to buffer as much as a Gb of music data into memory . My Aqualung player doesn't do it anyway: I don't know if any Linux player does?

 

[hydra]

Mowgli80, you're right about the differences in the way different software make music sound.

Foobar does not actually claim to do nothing to the music in their FAQ, but they certainly imply that.

Does foobar2000 sound better than other players?
No. Most of sound quality differences people hear are placebo effect (at least with real music), as actual differences in produced sound data are below their noise floor (1 or 2 last bits in 16bit samples). foobar2000 has sound processing features such as software resampling or 24bit output on new high-end soundcards, but most of the other mainstream players are capable of doing the same by now.

J River claims to not alter the music in any way.

Why JRiver?
For the purist
Because the sound engineered into the CD is the sound you will hear when you play the audio. No changes are made to it by JRiver. Nothing will come between you and the recording. The promise we deliver is fidelity and ease of use.

Regardless of what Foobar says (and well, regardless of whether JRMC is messing with the sound digitally or not), I prefer the JRMC sound.

I've also had occasion to listen to music through Amarra (full blown version) off a Mac Mini in my setup, and to my ears, Amarra sounded superior to JRMC: But not superior enough to me to shift to a Mac Mini based setup (expenses, plus it's from Apple!)

 

[manniraj]

Even I liked JRMC over Foobar (albeit slightly for the bass) but the andriod/iphone app of JRMC is so horrible to use when compared to Foobar. Foobar app is so nice to use over andriod hence removed JRMC as my music-pc is a mini-pc (64gb SSD for OS with Win 7) and headless with a 1TB external portable HDD. The playback is super smooth with the high priority setting for Foobar using the task manager.

 

[IndianEars]

Thanks for the inputs, everyone.

I've also had occasion to listen to music through Amarra (full blown version) off a Mac Mini in my setup, and to my ears, Amarra sounded superior to JRMC: But not superior enough to me to shift to a Mac Mini based setup (expenses, plus it's from Apple!)

Incidentally, my Music PC is infact an iMAC with Bootcamp, making it Dual Boot into Mac (Leopard) or Windows XP. Yes its about 4 years old and that reflects in both the Operating Systems....

I have in the past played out the same music files from the same Machine, booting as a Mac ( Amarra ) and Foobar. To my ears Amarra beat JRiver but Foobar was just that touch extra less muddy with slightly darker background silence than Amarra.

This was done approx 1 year ago. I have since changed my DAC so I need to re-listen..

 

[Staxxx]

I am in the process (this week) of getting my music server/player updated. They switched from Foobar to JRiver as the core player only because the interface is much slicker apparently. I have not yet seen the difference as I am yet to be shipped the SSD. However both Foobar and JRiver will be installed and I should be able to play through either - so if some FMs want to have a listening session to determine if indeed there is a difference (and my system is remarkably transparent I believe) - they are welcome. The guys who designed the server don't believe there is a sonic difference between the two by the way. I must say that personally I was very happy and impressed by the playback through Foobar which was the set up previously.

Note that the files do undergo some proprietary jitter reduction and also the DAC is external fed by S/PDIF.

 

[IndianEars]

I agree that the JRiver interface is visually superb and Streets ahead of Foobar. I particularly like its 3D view. I am sure you will be delighted Visually.

Looking forward to your feedback on ;

1. The Immprovement ( if any ) with the Use of an SSD. I suspect it will be a significant upgrade.

2. Your views on Foobar Sound Quality vs JRiver

What Operating System are you using ? Which Processor ? SATA internal HDD to store the music ?

 

[Staxxx]

I agree that the JRiver interface is visually superb and Streets ahead of Foobar. I particularly like its 3D view. I am sure you will be delighted Visually.

Looking forward to your feedback on ;

1. The Immprovement ( if any ) with the Use of an SSD. I suspect it will be a significant upgrade.

2. Your views on Foobar Sound Quality vs JRiver

What Operating System are you using ? Which Processor ? SATA internal HDD to store the music ?

The system I use already has an SSD on which Foobar was installed along with some other proprietary jitter reduction software etc. The playback is also via the SSD which takes place after the files are copied over from the internal/external drives. I use two 2TB WD greens internally and six 3 TB drives externally (WD My Book and Samsung D3 Stations) of which four are plugged in at any one time. I back up the music on WD red internal drives within another PC. Haswell on the PC and not sure which one in the music server. Regards.

 

[manniraj]

I agree that the JRiver interface is visually superb and Streets ahead of Foobar. I particularly like its 3D view. I am sure you will be delighted Visually.

Looking forward to your feedback on ;

1. The Immprovement ( if any ) with the Use of an SSD. I suspect it will be a significant upgrade.

2. Your views on Foobar Sound Quality vs JRiver

What Operating System are you using ? Which Processor ? SATA internal HDD to store the music ?

I think there are many plugins available for the skin setups in Foobar which might be on par with JRMC skins. Mine is a headless PC hence I was not bothered for the look but the Foobar app on andriod was the deal breaker over the JRMC app.

 

[matbhuvi]

My ranking would be JPlay > JMC > cPlay > Foobar

JPlay seemed to be tad smoother than JRiver.
cPlay is wonderful player, but bit brighter.
Foobar excels in everything except the bass is muddy.
JRiver with memory playback is close to JPlay. But, it wins hands down on convenience. Right now, it is my go to player for both music and movies.

 

[IndianEars]

Thats a Great set up you have, Staxxx !

 

[arj]

Thats a Great set up you have, Staxxx !

it sounds even better