What is your favourite player under Snakeoil?

[koko6969koki]

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!

Same here!  

 

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 have also learnt this while playing with Squeezelite buffers:

​​​​​​https://soundcheck-audio.blogspot.com/20...art-2.html

4. Buffer size settings

These Buffer settings shouldn't be mixed up with the Alsa buffer settings.
Squeezelite offers two buffers:
The stream buffer
The output buffer (output from squeezelite to Alsa!)

How it works.
Squeezelite puts the received audio data stream into the stream buffer first.
The internal processing stages e.g. flac-pcm conversion, resampling or 
volume control will then be executed. 
The result - the almost fully processed data get stored in the output buffer.
The data will be stored at 32bit in that output buffer - always 32bit.
The two things that'll still happen after the data leaving the output buffer is: 

the SW volume control
bit-depth adjustments

If I understand this correctly, with large enough buffers, a FLAC file is loaded to the RAM "stream" buffer in its entirety, then it is converted to PCM data.
After the conversion is completed, the whole song (now in PCM format) is transferred to the "output" buffer, from which the playback is executed?

If this buffer thing works like this, maybe converting all FLACs to WAV is not necessary, since the songs are fully converted to PCM data and stored in the output buffer at the beginning of the playback? 

I have monitored it with nmon, and the whole process takes only a second or two at the beginning of each audio file.

Some people seem to be very enthusiastic about the whole thing:
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic.../page/445/
 

Comparing squeezelite case 4 (4GB buffers) with Roon, the SQ difference is quite obvious! squeezelite sounds so much better!

1. Yet another jump in dynamics, but also
   
2. it feels like the noise floor dropped even more
   • bigger and deeper image
     
   • better instrument separation
     

I was stunned. But what about stepping back from the precipice (very little free memory), and reducing the buffer size? With each step from 4GB (option 4) to 3GB (option 3) to 2GB (option 2), there were drops in SQ, although they were small. The final step - going from 2GB buffer (option 2) to default buffer - was the biggest drop in SQ.
 
Here's the kicker - running with the default buffer size (i.e. no -b parameter set), the SQ of Roon and squeezelite were indistinguishable. In other words, the SQ benefit from squeezelite comes from setting (and presumably pinning) large buffers.

 

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

I have tried Squeezelite 1.6.4 yesterday, I don't know if it is a placebo or I was in the especially good mood for listening, but I felt that it sounded better than Ralph.
The stereo image seemed to be wider, and I thought that I could "see" further into the mix.
There was some magic in the air and I didn't feel at any point that I should switch to MPD for some additional audiophile goodness.

PS I have read somewhere that this method of buffer setting is not working with Squeezelite R2. So maybe differences like this are causing different sound from different Sgueezelite versions?