Music PC and CA DACMagic

[moserw]

thevortex,

I am setting up a new system and doing a fresh installation of XP for a friend. The mobo has onboard audio, but only the default Realtek. I am going to play around with the cMP player on this system and also follow the instructions/guides to a T to see if I can get it to work. Planning to do this with the onboard audio before putting in an external soundcard. Will keep you posted about the results.

Forgot to update about it...

Well I would hardly call myself a noob when it comes to the PC, been playing with s/w and h/w for years, but yet I just could not get it to work except for on my wife's laptop. Don't know where I was going wrong. Followed all instructions to a T but all it said in the diagnostics were player opened and player exited. Another thing, it was limited to playing only cue files and not FLAC (which is the format I'm ripping in) so I had a limited set of files to play with. Guess need to wait for more updated versions of the s/w. Reminds me of a similar but hard to get to work player like XXHighEnd. Foobar2000 has so many options to customize, but yet works flawlessly. BTW the biggest grouch I had with cMP is its not a background player and needs to be in the foreground and even stop a lot of processes. Just not an option for someone like me who has music playing always in the background when working on the PC. The idea is good though and yeah major improvement in the sound when one can get it to work that is.

If anyone has anything else to share about it please do, much appreciated.

 

[reignofchaos]

cPlay needs ASIO. Does your audio hardware support asio?

 

[moserw]

cPlay needs ASIO. Does your audio hardware support asio?

Yup it does and works well too with Foobar. Anyways am going to rip a few more cue and wav files from my Audio CDs and give it another go.

 

[thevortex]

thevortex,

I am setting up a new system and doing a fresh installation of XP for a friend. The mobo has onboard audio, but only the default Realtek. I am going to play around with the cMP player on this system and also follow the instructions/guides to a T to see if I can get it to work. Planning to do this with the onboard audio before putting in an external soundcard. Will keep you posted about the results.

Moserw - I have setup my HTPC as per the instructions given at the Audio Asylum site and lo, I have got cMP working. Yes, it is without doubt the best way to experience audio through a PC transport. The latest beta is much better than the earlier version.

How did it go for you?

 

[thevortex]

Just saw your recent posts Moserw - I hear you. I got the same message when I used the previous beta. Please download the latest version. It works flawlessly right out of the box.

It does work with FLAC now. But I guess the best way through this player is to use the CUE files.

Also the latest version does not kill Explorer - although it offers to do that as an option. This is better in my opinion.

 

[moserw]

Just saw your recent posts Moserw - I hear you. I got the same message when I used the previous beta. Please download the latest version. It works flawlessly right out of the box.

It does work with FLAC now. But I guess the best way through this player is to use the CUE files.

Also the latest version does not kill Explorer - although it offers to do that as an option. This is better in my opinion.

Thanks for the update. I was using the previous version, yeah the one that wanted to kill Windows Explorer and a lot of other processes and did not play FLAC. Will d/l the latest version and check it out pronto. Thanks once again for the update.

 

[psychotropic]

curious to see how these experiments work out....also have gopi and the others managed to compare the DACmagic and Beresford with the asus xonar essence?

 

[spirovious]

curious to see how these experiments work out....also have gopi and the others managed to compare the DACmagic and Beresford with the asus xonar essence?

Xanor has some issues with nvidia chipset boards.

 

[thevortex]

Spiro and others interested in the Asus Xonar sound cards (D2X or Essence), the biggest problem with these cards as you ostensibly know is regarding their drivers.

To get cPlay working the soundcard needs 32 bit ASIO drivers which the ASUS cards dont have. Or to my best knowledge the D2X does not have. The Essence owners need to double check and confirm this point. I am disappointed with Asus' lackadaisical approach towards releasing new drivers.

End result - for everybody who wants to get true ASIO out of their ASUS sound cards I heartily recommend ASIO4ALL v 2. Its a fantastic solution to get the most out of your hardware - no matter what driver you use. I have never heard my music sound better than with ASIO4ALL and cPlay.

 

[reignofchaos]

Spiro and others interested in the Asus Xonar sound cards (D2X or Essence), the biggest problem with these cards as you ostensibly know is regarding their drivers.

To get cPlay working the soundcard needs 32 bit ASIO drivers which the ASUS cards dont have. Or to my best knowledge the D2X does not have. The Essence owners need to double check and confirm this point. I am disappointed with Asus' lackadaisical approach towards releasing new drivers.

End result - for everybody who wants to get true ASIO out of their ASUS sound cards I heartily recommend ASIO4ALL v 2. Its a fantastic solution to get the most out of your hardware - no matter what driver you use. I have never heard my music sound better than with ASIO4ALL and cPlay.

CPlay works fine both on my Essence STX and EMU 1212M. However I do not notice any difference betweeen it and foobar with ASIO as I do not resample on my main rig. I believe the biggest difference in CPlay is because of a high quality SSRC resampling algorithm.

On the secondary machine with the Essence, the setup is not revealing enough to make me appreciate the difference.

 

[moserw]

Works great. SQ is very good, certainly betters Foobar too. BTW I've already been using ASIO4ALL so I guess that made it easy.

Now for others interested.

The link at cMP (cics Memory Player) points to SourceForge.net: cMP: Files which is the older version and does not work. You will need to d/l from SourceForge.net: cPlay: Files which is the latest version and even handles FLAC files. This fired up instantly and played without any issues whatsoever. SQ is definitely an improvement compared to Foobar with ASIO and KS. Now I've to check it in Vista and see if it works. Will keep ya posted.

For ASIO4ALL go here.

Only cons - The GUI is not the easiest or even the best looking, but I always listen to my media player and don't really look at it so no issues for me. In fact that's one reason I like XMPlay though a lot of people have issues with how it looks never mind how it sounds. Other than that this just plays right out of the box and is good to go with the default settings. Give it a try.

 

[moserw]

@thevortex & @reignofchaos - Thanks guys!

 

[thevortex]

CPlay works fine both on my Essence STX and EMU 1212M. However I do not notice any difference betweeen it and foobar with ASIO as I do not resample on my main rig. I believe the biggest difference in CPlay is because of a high quality SSRC resampling algorithm.

On the secondary machine with the Essence, the setup is not revealing enough to make me appreciate the difference.

So the Essence card does have 32 bit ASIO drivers, you mean? That is good. Although I am disappointed that they have not included that with the D2X. That apart I still stand by the statement that ASUS can do far better than what they are doing vis a vis drivers for their sound cards.

About the difference between cPlay and Foobar (I am using Foobar with Secret Rabbit Code Resampler) I tend to attribute to the fact that it is loading the song to RAM and playing it from there. There could be other factors but what I like is that there is a difference and that is something I would not have believed until I heard it myself

 

[thevortex]

One thing I would like to confirm - ROC and/or Moserw - have you guys experienced any lag or disturbance or crackle in music when you are working on something else when you are using cPlay? For me, if I even type a post on HiFivision, there is the odd lag or crackle when playing through the ASIO4All drivers. This is regardless of whether I use Foobar or cPlay.

If cPlay could only have the conveniences of the modern playlist and queueing and all those sort of features - maybe I am asking for heaven and the earth here considering the sound quality on offer. Lets see....

 

[moserw]

None whatsoever. No crackle and no lag either.

One thing I would like to confirm - ROC and/or Moserw - have you guys experienced any lag or disturbance or crackle in music when you are working on something else when you are using cPlay? For me, if I even type a post on HiFivision, there is the odd lag or crackle when playing through the ASIO4All drivers. This is regardless of whether I use Foobar or cPlay.

If cPlay could only have the conveniences of the modern playlist and queueing and all those sort of features - maybe I am asking for heaven and the earth here considering the sound quality on offer. Lets see....

 

[thevortex]

None whatsoever. No crackle and no lag either.

Hmm...thats interesting. Maybe I will do a reinstall of the Xonar's drivers and retest this whole thing. For now I am fine because I dont need to do much typing on my HTPC. Thanks Moserw.

 

[reignofchaos]

No problems here either. Looks like its a problem with ASIO4ALL.

 

[thevortex]

No problems here either. Looks like its a problem with ASIO4ALL.

I was figuring that it was more of a problem with the soundcard but you are right I did not have these issues with ASUS' ASIO drivers. So, this has to be something related to ASIO4ALL with my sound card. Let me try searching the internet to see what gives.

Thanks ROC.

 

[moserw]

If cPlay could only have the conveniences of the modern playlist and queueing and all those sort of features - maybe I am asking for heaven and the earth here considering the sound quality on offer. Lets see....

I'm wondering if cPlay is the default player on your system? The sound is heavenly, quite an improvement in fact. But no playlist, no queuing of files, so how are you managing? Gotta check Google for how others are using it too. But man the sound rocks, just rocks.

 

[thevortex]

I'm wondering if cPlay is the default player on your system? The sound is heavenly, quite an improvement in fact. But no playlist, no queuing of files, so how are you managing? Gotta check Google for how others are using it too. But man the sound rocks, just rocks.

Actually no player gets selected as the default player in my system! I like the convenience of choosing my player and then picking songs using its interface or dragging and dropping from explorer.

cPlay is to be heard to be believed. In fact I am feeling jaunty and stupid enough to feel that it will need CD Players costing upwards of 50K at the least to get near the sound quality that I am experiencing right now. Who knows?

I have tried replacing the CUE player (cicsPlay by default) with Foobar/Winamp. But basically it either plays a CUE which is an album. In file mode (WAV or FLAC) you basically only get to play a single song, which is, frankly quite irritating. I guess it is only imitating a typical CD player's behaviour in that it will play only one CD.

Looking at it from another viewpoint maybe since the application uses the RAM to load the songs, there is an inherent limitation as to how many songs can be loaded at one go? Just guessing...

I would love it if cPlay can play every audio file (including the lossy ones; yes I still have many GBs worth MP3 files) and give me playlist management and such. But for the audio quality that it gives me, I am not complaining too much right now. Maybe after a month or two I would get used to this and then start griping about the lack of this or that. Lets see what happens. I will be watching Audio Asylum very closely, thats for sure.