JRiver Media Center 18 Or Foobar2000?

No contest.

I used Foobar for years and years.  Media Center KILLS it in so many ways.

-p

I have used foobar and J River. Absolutely no comparison;  for me J River is way ahead; different ball park and then some. So much easier to use, and so much more powerful for organising, displaying and browsing my music. Add JRemote on an iPad and you have a superb media player and control point. Nothing in Twonkyland comes close. I am sure foobar and JRMC both deliver bit perfect audio though, so I would be worried if one sounded different to the other. If they sounded different I would worry that my DAC wasn't very good.

JRiver ist much more comfortable from the user point of view.

Have testedit and it is very easy to add additional metadata fields and, from my point of view, it is possible to use it and multiple dlna/upnp server.

So you can creat a upnp/dlna for classical music, one for jazz and maybe one for the rest.

Each one with total different views.

It's pretty cool. Because from my point of the I need different informations for classical. E.g opus!

Richard

JPlay, even when combined with JRiver, slaugters them both :-) 

Check out review on audiostream dot com

JRiver does NOT require anything additional.

Not in my experience. I thought JPlay was an overhyped waste of time and money. JRiver is fine on its own. If you think variable buffering and memory playback make a difference, JRiver has them all, and consumes a tiny amount of computer resources when playing music, especially if you run it as a server.

also, JPlay doesn't do anything you can't do on your own with your OS settings.

-p

Both not true, but most people don't bother to think beyond the bits-are-bits dogma.

those who really tried know better.

Really???  Are you saying JPlay has an "inside in" on enabling and disabling aspects of the OS?  ONLY Jplay can do it?

NO.  ANYTHING Jplay can do, I can do as well.  Whether i know what JPlay is allegedly doing is another thing.  Whether it means anything SQ-wise is quite another.

Your argument may be "you cant understand and dont have the skills to do what JPlay does."  If so I concede.  Give me a list of exactly what JPlay "does" and I will replicate it easily. 

Although I dont think it is needed.  JRiver takes care of all of the audio path for me.  I have ZERO interest in tweaking my PC to optimize audio more than what I have already done in the same spirit as Jplay.

-p

Hmmm - I'm trying JRiver for the second time but still don't really get on with it - Jremote may be good but Gizmo - the Android JRiver control point is rubbish - keeps losing the connection and can't do much when it is working. There is a much better Android control point for Foobar (Foobarcon) which works perfectly as a remote unlike Gizmo. Now I've got an Android tablet I don't want to use the TV monitor to view the interface.

However for streaming I'm sticking with with BubbleUPNP controlling Asset until Naim come up with Nstream for Android or I buy another idevice after skating over the frozen wastes of hell - which will probably happen first.

JPlay couldn't do gapless playback until a couple of weeks ago, so it was utterly useless to me in any case.

JRiver give you a full featured trial for 30 days, which is generous and makes it easy to evaluate.

JPlay offer a trial version that intermittently interrupts the output, so it's harder to evaluate.

I 'really tried' to hear the point of an expensive parasite that sits on top of JRMC and adds no value, but failed.

You could try BubbleUPnP with JRiver in 'media server' mode - it's a UPnP server too, if you enable it. Then you would have the advantage of JRivers superb custom browse trees, but with a control point you like and have the hardware for.

Not directly since it is a playback engine that plays into a KS, WASAPI or ASIO-driver. You can front it with any ASIO-capable software player and it will replace the playback engine of that software.

what you can do is use JRiver or foobar as a dlna/upnp client and have that upnp-client play into the JPlay ASIO-driver which is the interface into the JPlay playback engines.

upnp-server ---> JRiver upnp-client --ASIO--> JPlay ---> DAC

You'll be using JRiver or foobar as the music management tool only

JPlay as playback engine is far superior to JRiver's.

-

Aleg

Try it again, I use it daily with no issues on gapless playback whatsoever.

Just make sure your LAN is up to speed if you playback highres music from a NAS.

Patrick

you seem to think JPlay is only changing some OS-settings?

there is much more going on.

when I get back from work I'll try and see if I can find some examples that are clear enough to communicate and understand.

My mistake, gapless playback was introduced a year ago.

But the demo version still puts gaps in the music, so makes it hard to evaluate.

I can't hear any difference in my system when my laptop is running flat out, or at its normal 3% CPU, sfail don't think it's pursuing reducing processing any further. 

Okay,

fine, but the key function for me is the dlna/upnp server as long as I think about a streamer.

More than the playback engine...

As I said, whatever it is doing, it isn't doing anything we cant learn to do on own own through optimizing the PC for audio playback.  That is all JPlay is doing.  It doesn't have exclusive access to the OS that is unavailable to us.

-p

So you think it is all about settings and not about processing?

Aleg,

Thanks for the info re JPlay. Will give it a whirl, combined with new SSD in my computer. Already having heard the differences in SQ produced by different codecs I know that processing has a huge impact on playback capability.

Andy

It seems that the preference here is for JRiver Media Center. I concur. The interface of JRMC is so much better than Foobar2000 and when I use the JRemote app on my iPad, it makes the whole experience of using 'computer audio' (For want of a better expression) a much more satisfying experience. Thank you Patrick for being the first to reply to my post. You may recall that I was pestering you on a very regular basis when I first set up my digital front end and DAC and we were both using Foobar2000.

The digression of the post into the merits of JPlay were very interesting. I had not tried it before as the lack of gapless playback was an unacceptable compromise. Now that this shortcoming has been addressed, I thought it was time to try the trial version. I have tried comparing JPlay with the WASAPI (Event Style) output of JRiver. I have used varying musical genres and both reference recordings and those that have disappointed.

I think that JPlay is doing something for the good ... Perhaps this is the way to go?

I had some DSP settings applied in the software that accounted for the difference between JRMC and Foobar2000. When I had levelled the playing field they both sounded identical.

Thank you everyone for your replies

Hot Rats .. can I make a suggestion?

I believe that the new Naim V1 DAC has a BitPerfect test built in - you play a test file to it, and it will tell you if it is being output from your pc unmolested. Can you compare JRiver with and without JPlay through the bit perfect test? Are they both bit perfect according to Naims test?  If they both are then what can JPlay bring to the table? If one isn't bit perfect then you know which one to go for, or which might not be set up right. Some time ago I got hold of an MDAC which had a similar bit perfect test and reassured myself that JRiver on my laptop did indeed produce bit perfect output.

Ooh watch it, the bits-are-bits brigade is out.

Still so much to learn ....

having bit-perfect playback is the easiest thing there is, shove all bit coming in out through the backdoor.

Teach me then Aleg, you evidently know so much more about it than I do. Teach me first how, if you have a decent DAC with a decent asynchronous USB input, that two bit identical sources can sound different. If they do, then I would say the DAC in question would be crap rather than one player being better than the other. Or are you saying that JPlay changes the bits for the better?