ASIO Music Player Plugin

[Symphy]

Hi everyone!

Because MP's builtin music player did not completely fullfill my needs, i created a replacement plugin. I believe it might also be usefull to others that have been struggling with bitperfect playback, either just for soundquality or for playback of DTS encoded material into their receiver over SP/DIF.

It's major benefits over the existing player are:

• True gapless playback (yep, sample-perfect)
• Customizable ASIO channelmapping, this makes it easier to drive SP/DIF outputs on for example M-Audio delta cards.
• This player does not contain anything that might alter the datastream, to make bitperfect playback easier.

You can find it here: http://www.team-mediaportal.com/file...cPlayerPlugin/

Let me know what you think of it.

Sieds

[darklord]

Hi,

i must say i love this plugin!!!!!!!! The sound quality is so mutch better than mp's original. If your in to hifi or hiend you know what im talking about. Big thanx !!! Dont forget to update this in coming versions

big tanx

[patricon]

It sounds great, but how this plugin works? I must enable it in external players and then how can i select the player for use it when playing my music?

[Symphy]

1. Make sure the plugin is enabled in external players
2. All other external player plugins must be disabled
3. Select your ASIO device in the plugin's configuration

That's it. MP will now use the plugin for all file extensions that are listed in the plugin's configuration.

Regards
Sieds

[robyf]

Sound quality is really great, with standard MP asio plugin I get distortion on guitar, for instance, with this plugin is perfect.

If you're going to implement visualizations it will be perfect!!

Roby

[patricon]

I'm also using MPlayer plugin and FLV Player must i disable those plugins also?? How can i be sure that MP is using your ASIO plugin?? There is any log or something?

regards,

[AberDino]

Thanks a lot Symphy, it seems to work very well! I didn't pick up this post until this evening, but as it happened I was experimenting with bitperfect playback in MP yesterday. I installed ASIO4ALL 2.8 beta 2 and fine-tuned it as described here. I made sure all OS volume levels were set to 100% and checked that all Realtek processing options were turned off. Then configured MP Music to use the BASS engine, no crossfading, no gapless playback, volume set to 100% and ASIO4ALL selected as the ASIO device. I made sure I had a Dolby Digital Surround wav file ready to check that I had real bitperfect playback. Alas, all I could hear was noise so it was time to dig deeper.

There is a plugin which allows you to use an ASIO device in Winamp. I installed it and tried the same file in Winamp, but still the same problem. So, at that stage it looked like MP wasn't too blame. I still had an old kernel streaming plugin for Winamp so decided to give that a try, and it worked! The next step was to uninstall the ASIO4ALL beta release and install the latest official version 2.7, and that worked as well! At that stage I was hopeful I would have bitperfect playback in MP... but no, still only noise.

Back to the MP forums, I decided to do a search for ASIO, and your post came up at the top. Installed your plugin as per your instructions and voila, bitperfect playback in MP! I agree it is not for everybody, but if you have a decent HiFi system it makes a world of difference. Thanks again!

[anvandarnamn]

at last bitperfect audio!!! keep up the good work!

[Symphy]

Originally Posted by robyf

Sound quality is really great, with standard MP asio plugin I get distortion on guitar, for instance, with this plugin is perfect.

If you're going to implement visualizations it will be perfect!!

Roby

I have no plans to implement visualizations in this plugin. But i have been sharing my code with the MP team, so maybe my code will become merged into standard MP in a future release.

Regards,
Sieds

Originally Posted by patricon

I'm also using MPlayer plugin and FLV Player must i disable those plugins also?? How can i be sure that MP is using your ASIO plugin?? There is any log or something?

regards,

First of all, this plugin is only used when playing from the My Music module.

If MP uses my plugin, you should find at least the following message in you MediaPortal.log:

[Info.][MPMain]: PureAudio: Initializing player ...

as well as a whole lot of other messages starting with "PureAudio:" when logging level is set to debug.

If more then one external players are enabled in MP, it will check the extension of the file you want to play against the list of supported extensions of each player and choose one, probably the first one that matches. So you may have to configure those lists on both players to make sure the right file is played with the right player.

Regards
Sieds

Originally Posted by AberDino

....... and voila, bitperfect playback in MP! ....

AberDino, because i don't have any decoding equipment available, could you do a little test for me? In the configuration applet for the plugin you will find a checkbox named "Use floating-point streams" on the "Advanced" tab. If you enable that, do you still get bitperfect playback? You can simply disable it again afterwards. I'm really curious if that will make a difference.

Thanx in advance,
Sieds

[AberDino]

Sieds, no bitperfect playback with that box ticked. In both cases the resulting log looks the same.

Going through 'mediaportal.log', I did spot the following errors, not related to the 'floating point stream' tick box:

2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Info.][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading audio decoder add-ins...
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\basscd.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\basscd.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bassflac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bassflac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\basswma.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\basswma.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_aac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_aac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_ac3.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_ac3.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_alac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_alac.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_ape.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_ape.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_mpc.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_mpc.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Loading: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_wv.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Debug][MPMain]: PureAudio: Unable to load: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders\bass_wv.dll
2007-09-22 13:55:04.007137 [Info.][MPMain]: PureAudio: No audio decoders were loaded. Confirm decoders are present in \musicplayer\plugins\audio decoders folder.

I've checked, and the decoders are present in the folder 'C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\MusicPlayer\Plugins\Audio Decoders', so it should work?

Let me know if you would like me to try anything else.