Playback from "Ram Disk" - improved SQ from software player?

Posted by: Rosewind on 17 December 2010

Hi there.

This may sound like a bad joke from my Mac days in 1989-1992 (Mac Plus without hard drive, that is), but ... earlier today I read that computer playback from a software player placed on a virtual "Ram Disk" sounds better than if simply installed on the "real" hard drive.

I know from experience that the software player JRiver Media Center sounds crisper when the memory playback option is ticked, and the reason for improved playback SQ from a virtual Ram Disk may be explained in a similar manner, I suppose.

Has anyone heard of this option, and if the trick will improve the JRiver SQ even more?

Best wishes,
Peter

Posted on: 17 December 2010 by garyi

I don't know what a jriver is, but ayrewave puts an entire track to ram before playing. I don't know if this is the reason for its stunning playback quality but well worth the price (free)

Posted on: 18 December 2010 by Rosewind

HI Gary.

J River Media Center is a Windows software music player (and a lot more) that will do just about the same things that your Ayrewave does.

I think that I will install Media Monkey on a "Ram Disk" to see if playback quality is improved. If it is, then I suppose that all software players - that do not have the option to playback from memory - will be upgradeable by "Ram Disk".

Best wishes,
Peter

Posted on: 18 December 2010 by js

How is the ram disk connected to the PC? How many usb in an outs before you get to SPdif and what happens to asynchronous? I don't think taking the player further away from the sound card/interface should be a good thing or at best a trade off. How about a very small PCI buss connected SSD for the player or at least eSATA if removable.

Posted on: 18 December 2010 by Briz Vegas

Pure Music calls it memory play.

Posted on: 18 December 2010 by David Dever

quote:
How is the ram disk connected to the PC? How many usb in an outs before you get to SPdif and what happens to asynchronous? I don't think taking the player further away from the sound card/interface should be a good thing or at best a trade off. How about a very small PCI buss connected SSD for the player or at least eSATA if removable.

No physical connection–simply a reserved section of system memory, assigned as a storage volume.

Of course, the limiting factor is filesystem efficiency.

Posted on: 18 December 2010 by Graham Russell

quote:
Originally posted by David Dever:
quote:
How is the ram disk connected to the PC? How many usb in an outs before you get to SPdif and what happens to asynchronous? I don't think taking the player further away from the sound card/interface should be a good thing or at best a trade off. How about a very small PCI buss connected SSD for the player or at least eSATA if removable.

No physical connection–simply a reserved section of system memory, assigned as a storage volume.

Of course, the limiting factor is filesystem efficiency.

Not sure what you mean by filesystem efficiency being the limiting factor. I guess you're referring to read bandwidth.

I don't believe memory playback systems such as JRiver load an entire track or album into memory before playing, they simply load a large buffer which is then played out. This keeps the delay from a user hitting the play button to music starting to a minimum. The benefit is that the playback system is simply reading from local memory rather than disk so latency, bandwidth and contention are much better.

Posted on: 19 December 2010 by David Dever

File system overhead can reduce memory bandwidth, especially for journalled HFS+ volumes under Mac OS X. (I used to track to RAM disk within Pro Tools in the old Mac OS 9 days-far more intensive an application for reads and writes than two-channel music streaming.)

Posted on: 19 December 2010 by Rosewind

Thanks for all the input.

Some programmes such as Media Monkey don't have the ability to play music from memory (unless they do so natively), so perhaps one could get SQ improvements from them by creating a virtual "ram disk" from which the programme is then run. I will test this out.

Best wishes,
Peter

Posted on: 19 December 2010 by js

I don't think of memory play as a large buffer but as an entire track stored before play and also not what this thread is about. All these programs have buffers and some can be adjusted to quite large. I do understand a virtual ram disk as part of an existing system ram for files but I don't really see that as a player unless that ram is a seperate drive in the system where the program is installed. We're not talking temporary executable programs here. Of course I could be missing somthing as I'm recovering from our Xmas party

. Sorry you couldn't make it Dave. Was a good one this year. Happy Christmas to all!

Posted on: 19 December 2010 by Guido Fawkes

I use a Ram Disk on my Amiga - one of the reasons it is so much more responsive and nicer to use that a modern PC.

The MacBook Air is very nice too.

No idea if it makes music playback better, but no hard disks is something that I see as very positive. Hard disks move and are noisy.

My Amiga is silent and boots in a couple seconds - not 10 minutes like my work PC.