WinAmp 5 plug-ins

[Jammrock]

I've been playing with media players and winamp plug-ins with my new cans and have come across some good ones.

dZeus pointed me out to this site. It's in Japanese, but the links are in english.

http://www3.cypress.ne.jp/otachan/

Shibatch mpg123 is a WinAmp MPEG decoder (replaces MAD plug-in or the Nullsoft MPEG decoder) that is fantastic! Lots of options, and great sounding.

The ASIO plug-in in gapless mode gives by far the biggest improvement. I use it with my Echo Indigo PCMCIA sound card. The increase in detail, resolution, and overall quality is astounding. You'll obviously need an ASIO compatible sound card, like an Audigy 2, Echo, or M-Audio revolution (don't know about Terrac or anyone else). I'm currently using the DLL version, but will do some testing with the EXE version later.

Some other good player I can across are Foobar2000 and The Core Media Player. Believe me or not, if you have HDCDs the best player is Windows Media Player 10. Of course, WMP10 is the ONLY player that supports HDCD since MS now owns the HDCD codec.

I've also played with lossless audio codecs, mainly Monkey and FLAC. Both sound very good, but Monkey audio is easier to use, slightly faster, and imo sounds a bit better.

Though WinAmp with the ASIO plug-in still whoops up on everything else.

That's all I've got to say about that. Any other suggestions for stuff to play with?

Jammrock

[dZeus]

I think for winamp, in_mpg123 is the only tool to interpret the replaygain tag in mp3 files. So for that reason alone, it's the way to go.

MP3Gain is a neat little utility that works by analyzing volume in mp3s on track-by-track basis or on album basis, and will add a volume correction in the replaygain tag to normalise tracks to the industry standard or lower if clipping occurs somewhere. This is a great utility to prevent you to have to change the volume on your amplifier between certain music in your collection.

So this utility won't 'change' the music in the mp3 itself, just will enter a volume adjustment offset in the mp3's tag. This is the way to go for normalisation, as opposed to realtime dynamic sound compression plugins (=EVIL)

note that in_mpg123 can do the replaygain analysis as well, but mp3gain provides much more configurability and can analyse your entire collection without needing to listen to it while analysing it (i.e. at greater than realtime speeds)

[Jon P. Inghram]

Just tested it, the built-in Winamp MP3 decoder uses replaygain also, or at least it seems too: if I use mp3gain to turn the gain on a track down to 60 dB it gets nice and quiet with both the built-in and mpg123 plugin.

[edit]

Err, nevermind, I see the difference now... MP3Gain writes tags AND modifies the gain on the actual data (a lossless process.) The built-in mp3 decoder doesn't use the replaygain tags, unlike the mpg123 plug-in which does.

[Paddy]

Cool - I have many MP3's that would benefit from this!

Lets see if I can bork my entire collection!

[Lucid]

Re: WinAmp 5 plug-ins

Originally posted by Jammrock
I've also played with lossless audio codecs, mainly Monkey and FLAC. Both sound very good, but Monkey audio is easier to use, slightly faster, and imo sounds a bit better.

Where would the difference come from?

[dZeus]

well unless the decoder is borked, they shouldn't sound different

[Jammrock]

Re: Re: WinAmp 5 plug-ins

Originally posted by Lucid
Where would the difference come from?

Dunno ... to me the monkey audio always ends up sounding a bit more detailed. I plan on doing some more testing today, now that the headphones are more broken in.

EDIT: dZeus cut me a WAV of "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burama by Karl Orff using EAC with full error correction. Grabbed the newest of Monkey's Audio and FLAC. Installed them with WinAmp plugins. Configuration:

Dell C640 Laptop (Intel 845 chipset w/ P4M 1.6 GHz, 256 MB RAM)
WinAmp 5.05 with Shibatch ASIO plugin in Gapless mode
Monkey Audio plugin 3.99
FLAC plugin 1.07b1
Echo Indigo PCMCIA sound card, 6.10 drivers, built-in headphone amp, ASIO drivers used
Sennheiser HD-595 headphones, mostly broken in

APE (Monkey's Audio) was decoded using Normal compression settings. FLAC with defualt (compression level 5 (?) with no other options tagged).

Did a listen to specific parts and was able to tell a difference in all three right off the bat. To hopefully eliminate placebo like effects, I closed my eyes and randomized the track order (all tracks were named the same) and then used WinAmps playlist randomizer.

Left my desk for about 30 minutes, came back and listened. Was able to once again tell the difference between each file. FLAC seemed a bit "hollow," like it was missing part of the details. APE was pretty close to the WAV, but lacked the same depth ... mainly the volume seemed a bit muted, but it was better than FLAC, and harder to tell apart from the WAV.

dZeus had me kill the ReplayGain in FLAC settings and retest. Made a big difference in FLAC playback. I still wouldn't say it sounded the same as the WAV, but sounded nearly identical to the APE version. My only complaint with FLAC -replaygain is that playback seemed a bit ... how to put it... harsh, and less smooth than the original. Mind you it's very small and subtle, but percievable. At least to my ears.

These are of course my own subjective remarks. Everyone's got their opinions when it comes to stuff like this ...

Jammrock