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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 23 for Linux => Topic started by: audiolover on December 28, 2017, 07:37:23 am

Title: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: audiolover on December 28, 2017, 07:37:23 am: When I open the settings menu in JRiver I have different options for the output:

FRONT-HW-IEC958-DMIX etcetera. What is the difference and/or which one to choose?
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: Awesome Donkey on December 28, 2017, 07:46:05 am: I'd recommend choosing a front: or hw: output (which matches your sound card/DAC) with DEV=0.
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: audiolover on December 28, 2017, 07:48:14 am: OK, so there is NO difference in quality using either one? Is ALSA the way to go or are there better (more audiophile) solutions?
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: Awesome Donkey on December 28, 2017, 07:49:35 am: Nope, both front: and hw: are bit-perfect ALSA outputs that bypass (don't go through) any system mixer. If you use the Pulse output, everything is resampled and dithered to 24-bit/48 kHz by the system mixer if I recall correctly.

ALSA is the way to go. If you have both front: and hw: as choices (like I do on Ubuntu), I tend to choose the hw: output for no any specific reason. However on my Arch Linux install I only have front: as an output option so I use that instead. There's no difference in quality and choosing between them is a personal choice. EDIT: I now have the hw: outputs on Arch Linux - thankfully it was easy to do by simply porting alsa.conf and alsa-base.conf from Ubuntu to Arch Linux and the hw: outputs work great along with everything else sound related.
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: linefader on January 25, 2018, 07:27:02 am: Quote from: Awesome Donkey on December 28, 2017, 07:49:35 am
.. on my Arch Linux install ..
can you point me to the location where you downloaded your JRiver Mediacenter that installs successfully on Arch?
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: Awesome Donkey on January 25, 2018, 08:10:08 am: It's on the AUR. Easiest way to install MC on Arch Linux would be to use a AUR helper for easy installation (I'd recommend Trizen (https://github.com/trizen/trizen)). If you go that route, you will likely need base-devel installed to build Trizen. If you know how to do it manually, you can download the snapshot (or the PKGBUILD) and manually build a MC package for Arch Linux that way. I personally go this route for quick MC updates (I do flag the AUR package out-of-date and blackhole is quick to update the AUR MC package).

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jriver-media-center

P.S. There is a "flaw" with the jriver-media-center package on AUR - it'll update each year to the next/latest major MC update. If you don't upgrade every year you might have to manually fork and edit a PKGBUILD to keep a specific older version installed.
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: linefader on January 28, 2018, 11:08:16 am: Trizen did it for me - thanks!

Now I am looking for an option to play PCM as PCM and DSD as DSD. I selected "no upmixing or downmixing" which works fine for PCM. However DSD is always downsampled to PCM 32-352.

When I select DSD as output encoding everything is upsampled to DSD.

I have a DSD-capable DAC (which plays DSD DoP and native DSD) however, I still need to find the correct setting for JRiver. In MPD, I configured it as follows:

audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "Manhattan"
device "hw:1,0"
auto_resample "no"
auto_format "no"
auto_channels "no"
mixer_type "none"
dop "yes"
replaygain "off"
use_mmap "yes" }

Can you show me the corresponding setup for JRiver?
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: Awesome Donkey on January 28, 2018, 11:20:25 am: Enable DSD bitstreaming and don't use any Output Format settings.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DSD
Title: Re: which soundcard to choose?
Post by: linefader on January 28, 2018, 11:30:59 am: .. with bitstreaming - DSD/yes, it works, thanks!
I was searching all the time in the audio output options.