What is your favourite player under Snakeoil?

[agent_kith]

So most of the time I feel frustrated - when I listen to MPD I admire the technical aspects of the reproduction,
but after some time I get the feeling of swollen and irritated ears, so I switch to LMS+Squeezelite to get an instant ear relief,
...but then I start noticing that many details are missing, so I switch back to MPD, and then I get tired again so I switch back to Squeezelite... and it goes round and round!

Well done!! Your summary echo my personal experiences. I have a short wiki article talking about this, and also linked it back to here.

Always exiciting to hear comments that almost mirrors mine, and we havn't met each other to reach the same observations!

Basically, I use MPD to "show off" to my friends (How good my sound system is), and LMS+Squeezelite when you want a good time (listen to music).

 

If I go back to my old MacMini with Audirvana+ and Amarra players, I can have all the audiophile "details" without listener fatigue,
but I prefer the small headless Snakeoil NUC sitting in my hifi rack just like a regular audio component.

Are you using FLAC (or any other lossless compressed codec?). If yes, switching to WAV may improve your enjoyment when you use LMS+Squeezelite.

When playing back WAV on LMS+Squeezelite, it's less "fuzzy" than FLAC, giving me that extra resolving resolution that is close to (but not quite on par with MPD). This is the compromise I have to make as I simply don't have enough good source materials to play on MPD.

I personally find a good correlation with the Dynamic Range calculator (from Foobar plugin) with this. MPD almost always require DR rating of 12 and above, LMS can get by with DR rating of around 10. Exceptions do apply of course.

Note that are potential problems keeping your music library as WAV (Bigger filesizes, prone to bit rot, tagging problems, higher overheads, etc)

The reason why I use Squeezelite 1.6.4 is I started listening to this from the get go I used computer for playback. I have a playlist of reference tracks I use for evaluation. So sticking to this player is just for consistency sake (reduce number of variables). Eventually I'll move on to a newer version when I have more time to sit down and re-calibrate .