MP3 Audio

It's a Terratec Aureon. Nothing special, but a definate step up from in built and the Creative it replaced. I find it interesting it's soundcard dependant.

Thanks for that Paul, I really must check out the Foobar forum more often.

 

Right. Now that I am home, I can give some advice. I will give advice on Foobar, but if you require help with Winamp I can give that too, let me know.

OK, you should have the latest version installed. Make sure you install ALL optional components, otherwise there may be parts missing here.

I will assume that neither card resamples internally and that the sample rate is either the default 44.1KHz or a specified sample rate.

Click the Foobar 2000 menu in Foobar and select Preferences.

Go down to the Output option on the left hand side, from the drop down menu on the right hand side, choose Kernel Streaming. This bypasses Windows KMixer for improved sound quality.

Click Playback on the left hand side. The usual setting for this is 16-bit fixed point in the output section. If 16-bit is selected you can also tick the box Dither with strong ATH noise shaping selected.

You can also try 24-bit output though. To do this WITHOUT your system crashing, click on the tick box that says "Show all options". It will pop up a warning. You need to click "Show all options" again to select it. Then from the drop down box, change 16-bit fixed point up to 24-bit fixed point padded to 32-bit. Theoretically, dithering should not be used on higher than 16-bit, but you may wish to try it anyway as some people report slightly improved quality.

Finally, you may wish to play around over/up sampling. To do this, click DSP manager in the left hand side. In the list of available DSP's, double click Resampler (SSRC) to add it. Just below DSP manager in the left hand side should be an option Resampler (SSRC). In the right hand side when you have clicked Resampler, choose a sample rate that is relevant to your card (the TerraTec probably supports up to 96 KHz, the Audigy 2 may go higher).

Have a play around. You may find that it sounds at its best plain and simple 16-bit 44.1 KHz, or you may find you like 24-bit, 96KHz best. The Kernel Streaming should make a difference, but your mileage may vary.

 

Thanks, I'll have a play.

 

Apparently the Audigy 2 DOES resample to 48 KHz internally.

So therefore, there should definitely be gains to be had by doing this in software.... follow the instructions for resampling but use a 48 KHz sample rate. It will take more processing power, but it should do a better job.

HTHs

 

Hi Paul,

Have tried out the tweaks you mention and things definately sound a bit more open and airy. Great stuff - thanks for that!

I actually prefer WinAmp, so could you perhaps outline the steps I need to take there?

I can then do a direct comparison and see which sounds better to my cloth ears

On the MP3 front, the MSI seems to work fine, although the software is a bit pants.

How do you guys store your ripped music? Do you go on the method of Artist/Album/Tracks folder structure or do you use the ID tags and simply store everything in one folder, so the file name would be in the format of Artist - Album - Track.mp3?

 

i use a folder for the artist name and then one inside that for the album name. not sure what i'll do with compilations though perhaps put them in a compilation folder with an album name folder inside that and then cd1 / cd 2 / etc. inside that guess i'll cross that bridge when i come to it.
oh btw. mp3's are officially gay according to an advert for a new quiz show on sky one. so there you go....
cheers


julian

 

I'm going to quantify, what I said earlier in the thread, the sound from the first option (192kps 44.1) was little more than a £100 special, the latter was far superior in the £400 cdp bracket (512kps/44.1).
It was unfair of me to compare it to my reference, as Merlin has stated the better the dac/connection the more improved the sound quality, sorry for any confusion, hope this helps. Wm

 

Nsherin, the Winamp setup is a little more complicated. I wonder if your Audigy 2 supports ASIO. There is a Kernel Streaming driver for Winamp, but I've had no luck with it. ASIO is another way you can bypass Kmixer, and also the ASIO driver has a very high quality upsampling mode.

You can get the ASIO plugin here....
http://www3.cypress.ne.jp/otachan/out_asio(exe)_044.zip

You MUST have Winamp 5. You need to extract 2 files into the C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins\ folder.

Those two files are called out_asio(exe).exe and out_asio(exe).dll

There are several versions... normal, SSE2 and SSE3. The normal one will definitely work, but others may give slightly less CPU usage, you need to experiment here. All of the other files in the zip are source files, and you dont need those.

Once you've extracted the correct files, open Winamp, go to preferences, select output, select the ASIO plugin and choose configure. You can experiment with upsampling and quality levels here. I use the TOP quality setting, and find it slightly better than Foobar to these ears and on my PC.

Good luck,,,,

 

Speaking personally, I set my ripping software to create an M3U playlist file for each album. However, especially if you deal with CD albums without gaps between tracks, then you may wish to rip the whole CD as a single file, and use a cue file to use seperate tracks. However, I dont know how your portable device will handle cue files, indeed, if it does at all. I have some saved searches on my desktop that search for playlists, and large MP3 files (which represent albums, usually). I normally store my music in the "My Music" folder on Windows XP.

Although it lacks the elegance of the itunes system, its still a pretty usable system to all intents and purposes.

 

Thanks Paul - have downloaded the ASIO plug-in. The Audigy 2 does support ASIO. It's sounding pretty good as I type - the rig is a 128kbps MP3 --> SB Audigy 2 --> Thor 3.5mm to 2xRCA Interconnect --> Yamaha HTR-5540RDS AV receiver --> Sony MDR-CD480 cans. Sound seems to be on par with my Pioneer DV350S DVD player. A doddle to configure too, thanks to your useful instructions.

Regarding file organisation, I've opted to rip everything into a 'Music' directory on a seperate disk partition. Each file is in the Artist - Album - 0x-Track Title.mp3 format. This makes it much much easier when searching for tracks, as it's very, very time consuming having to go through directories. It's also a damn sight easier when doing a backup, as you can simply tell up to which file you've got up to.

My portable doesn't support .CUE files. Also, with the software with it being hideous, by using my filenaming convention, I can easily use it as a removable USB disk and copy files over in a pre-sorted track order for an album.

Piccy of my ASIO settings in WinAmp for those interested (apologies for quaility of image, but I had to reduce the colour depth to get the filesize down:

 

Nsherin, that looks alright mate. You may want to enable gapless mode however, it will make the best of a bad job when it comes to albums without gaps between the tracks - MP3 is not a gapless format, but it will help minimize the effects.

 

Thanks mate. Will give that a go when I get in from work tonight.

 

Nsherin, I've been told that the Audigy 2 will allow the use of higher sample rates than 48KHz. Apparently, it resample all audio at 44.1 KHz or below up to 48KHz, but beyond that, it can use higher sample rates.

Might be worth giving 88.2 or 96 KHz a try (but it will increase CPU usage as well).

 

Paul - thanks. It does go up to 96Khz, but only by using the SP/DIF out, so that's not possible, unfortunately.

Gapless is now enabled as well. Thanks for all your help with that, mate. Apologies for the late reply - I had to go and take a look at a mate's PC tonight, so am not long back in.