Music Player Applications for Windows 10
Posted by: Patu on 06 November 2016
For us who haven't moved to streaming world yet, we need a player software on our computer to control our music libraries and play music. I use USB to transfer the signal from PC to my Naim. My audio chain goes like this:
Win 10 + Player - USB Isolator - USB Bridge - Naim DAC - Naim SN2 + HCDR - ATC SCM40 v2.
I did some research about different player software for Windows. I've been using foobar2000 for over ten years now and thought that maybe there's finally something better out there. I've tried JRiver Media Center few times but didn't take enough time with it to make it look and feel like I wanted. I also tried Roon recently and file it has awesome interface, the price is high and it didn't work as well on desktop PC as it did on iPad. I mean it was quite laggy on PC. I need a proper interface on PC also since I play a lot of music while surfing internet, forums etc.
Well I ended up giving a JRMC a try once again. It's in version 22 now and there was some audio improvements done to the latest version. Last time I tried JRiver (version 21) was with NDX when I used its Media Server option. Back then I also tried it as a player software and preferred foobar2000's sound quality to it. I really didn't expect any sound quality differences between player software which all should output a bitperfect signal. Maybe I'm going crazy but there really is a clear audible difference between JRMC and foobar2000, both using WASAPI output. Now after adding Intona to the mix, JRMC suddenly sounds clearly better. It's smoother and more analog sounding but at the same time digs more detail and gives better separation than foobar2000. Also the bass sounds more real with JRMC while with foobar it suddenly sounds artificial and one note. foobar also sounds harsher and slightly grainier and with some lesser quality tracks can even cause listening fatigue while there's no such problems with JRMC.
I know JRMC does dithering when foobar2000 doesn't. JRMC outputs bitperfect signal according to its own Audio Path tool and to my knowledge, so does foobar2000 but there's no tool for showing that. But clearly the software audio engine does something since these two sound so different.
Another interesting new software I found after little bit of googling is Hysolid. It's free (registration needed) audiophile player software developed in Japan. It works as a service in Windows and you control it with iOS or Android app. It has a good looking interface for iOS and on PC there's only a service running background. I did some comparison between foobar2000, JRMC and Hysolid. The last two are clearly better sounding than foobar2000. It's difficult to choose between JRMC and Hysolid. They are both very good but little bit different. Hysolid is slightly more neutral sounding with extremely good resolution. JRMC adds some punch to the low end and sounds ever so slightly warmer. Difficult choice between the two but I think I'll go for JRMC for now since I need a PC application also and I like to scrobble my music to last.fm. Since Hysolid is free, there's nor harm keeping it around also.
If I get new trial period for Roon, I'll give it another go also.
There are many other software also like HQPlayer, MediaMonkey etc. but I don't have any experience with them.