|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
75.215.172.1
In Reply to: This is the first thing one should do... posted by Presto on April 21, 2007 at 13:52:21:
"1) No internet connection"Makes it difficult to listen to YouTube videos this way.... [-;
If I ever get back home permanently, I might retire this laptop and make it a music controller.
For I think the ideal setup for PC-based music is a laptop with a slower, low-power-consumption processor (less RFI), the internal hard drive with all the applications running from it, and an external hard drive dedicated for music storage. And only for music storage. (Western Digital "My Book" is a good external drive.) Feeding a good USB DAC. (I still like the Fubar.)
The apps:
For music acquisition: Alcohol 120%. Rip the audio to the PC's local drive. Then run UltraISO to convert the Alcohol image files to .wav files and store on the external drive. (A 500 GB drive should store music from about 750 CDs in non-compressed .wav format. And if you run out of space, just swap it out for another one. The Alcohol files are initially stored to the local drive because the conversion won't "multitask" the external drive, possibly injecting jitter into the data.) The data is bit perfect (identical to file ripped directly from EAC or dBPowerAmp), and produces superior fidelity.
For playback, the latest Winamp. The best audio codec I've found, is from a company called "DScaler". (Comes with the Zoom audio player.) Very close to the best CD playback.
The PC is set up with Windows Kernel Streaming and/or ASIO, with the Windows processing bypassed (unless you need software based volume control).
Follow Ups:
For music acquisition: Alcohol 120%. Rip the audio to the PC's local drive. Then run UltraISO to convert the Alcohol image files to .wav files and store on the external drive. (A 500 GB drive should store music from about 750 CDs in non-compressed .wav format. And if you run out of space, just swap it out for another one. The Alcohol files are initially stored to the local drive because the conversion won't "multitask" the external drive, possibly injecting jitter into the data.) The data is bit perfect (identical to file ripped directly from EAC or dBPowerAmp), and produces superior fidelity.Todd, this is really confusing. Why the need for all these steps? Why not just use eac?
Also, how can bit perfect identical files produce superior fidelity?
Todd,What version of Dscaler are you running? I'm going to try some the reducing services tricks listed in this thread. I'm running an E-Mu 1616M off a Sony VGC-LS1 sourcing Hd drive WAV files and Internet radio.
"What version of Dscaler are you running?"The one that came with Zoom player, which I tried from a recommendation a couple weeks ago. When I went back to Winamp, I noticed Winamp's sound improved relative to before I installed Zoom player, and I found out the "DScaler" audio codec nudged out the FFDSHOW audio codec. Kind of "discovery by accident," if you will. (Zoom sounds very similar to Foobar, and may be preferred on PCs with a lot of horsepower. More-forgiving, but not as resolute.)
I did switch back to the FFDSHOW codec, to make sure what I was hearing was due to the unexpected changeover, and indeed it was.
Hey Todd:Is that Dscaler codec for cdda (playing right from CD drive) or for playing wav files from HD?
Thanks.
I'll tell you what I know....It's Dscaler 5. It came as part of the Zoom Player install. It consists of an MPEG video decoder and an audio decoder of unspecified type. The "Help" section is an empty shell.
The only thing I do know is the audio decoder is extremely good. I no longer use the audio decoder from FFDSHOW. (DScaler is an option with FFDSHOW on the video side.)
nt
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: