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[Poison Dan]

As a lot of you know, all AC97-compliant soundcards work internally at 48kHz, while most audio files are 44.1kHz. Therefor, the soundcard always has to resample the audio signal to 48kHz.

The problem is that a lot of soundcards have a rather bad resampling quality (onboard AC97 codecs, SBLive!, etc).

A possible solution to this problem is using high-quality software resampling algorithms to do this conversion, bypassing the hardware. Shibatch's SSRC code is generally known to be of a high quality:
http://shibatch.sourceforge.net

Now there's a very interesting Winamp plugin that uses these SSRC algorithms to resample the audio during playback:
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/out_wave.zip

I'll quote a part from the readme file:

out_wave_ssrc has built-in SSRC resampler; it's intended for sblive/audigy/ac97 and similar hardware. most of recent consumer soundcards have fixed 48000hz output samplerate, forcing any sound input other than 48000hz (eg. all mp3s ripped from CDs are 44100hz) to be resampled by either hardware (sblive/audigy series) or software / windows kernel mixer (all the AC97). quality of used resamplers is relatively bad in both cases; out_wave_ssrc uses its own ultra-high-quality resampler to produce 48000hz output and bypass resampling in soundcard drivers/hardware, giving better audio quality on hardware mentioned above. DO NOT use out_wave_ssrc on soundcards that do not resample themselves (eg. sb128 and older soundblasters), if you do so, sound quality will suffer; also, SSRC resampling is still relatively slow, out_wave_ssrc will require much more CPU power than any regular output plugin.

As this part already mentions, the drawback is increased CPU utilization. It's up to the user to choose the tradeoff.

Now to the point: I would really like it if this kind of high quality software resampling would be incorporated in MJ. I don't really need it at home, because I have a Santa Cruz soundcard that already has a very good resampling quality, but as a contract programmer I regularly have to switch PCs at work, and I mostly work - and listen to music - at systems which have a poor onboard audio chipset.

Listening to: 'Bachelorette' from 'Homogenic' by 'Björk' on Media Jukebox

[Osho]

One more case of where an external player plugin would be helpful to have in MJ

Osho

[Poison Dan]

One more case of where an external player plugin would be helpful to have in MJ

I'd have to agree.

[ChicoSelfs]

my too

[Osho]

If you guys haven't already, vote for External player interface under Interact -> Wishlist if you would like to see this.

Osho

[Matt]

Oh boy, external player support?  Give us some credit...

Media Jukebox 9 will have hi-quality resampling and ASIO output.  That's on top of all the other great things MJ's playback engine already does that other players don't...

[AlonsoN]

Matt:

That's on top of all the other great things MJ's playback engine already does that other players don't...

Hey! Good marketing/promo idea: put out a poop sheet/white paper with the fiddly/tehcnical things that MJ does better than the average.  It would be to know that MJ does better playback, rip, burn, etc.  That kind of thing would prolly be very attractive to the kinds of folks that would be interested in MJ.

Ah, but I can hear JimH now... "We can't reveal that MJ samples the playback stream better/faster/cleaner because then the competition will copy us..."

Still, geeks would love to know that the solution that they like is technically superior, if you know what I mean.

[KingSparta]

I Know All The Details And Here They Are...


[Content deleted -- JimH]


So thats What Is Comming, I Hope This Helps.

[PhatPhreddy]

I am very very pleased to hear that v9 contains ASIO and frequency resampling / bit depth oversampling...

You may want to look at getting some of AVS's Golden eared (and Golden speakered / Golden soundcard / Golden taps / Golden pets drinking bowl by the amount they have invested in Audio !!!) community to help with any beta'ing... Email me if you would like a list of suitable candidates who review HW and would probably commit time to be helpful... People with 24/96 sources etc...

Not only is this the uber player but there is no reason it cant be the uber quality too... You guys dont feel adventurous enough to take on the unchallenged DVD-A player category do you ?? Or consider a (purchaseable) plug in for DPLII support ??

[Poison Dan]

Media Jukebox 9 will have hi-quality resampling and ASIO output. That's on top of all the other great things MJ's playback engine already does that other players don't...

This is so cool !!

Thank you, you guys rule !

About that external player thingy: the problem is that a lot of users don't want to give up Winamp, and simply want a library that will serve as a front-end for Winamp. For example, check out this thread on HydrogenAudio.

So, when I said I agreed, I simply thought of it as a way to attract those kind of people to MJ. Once they do find out what a great player Media Jukebox is, they may switch to a MJ-only setup.

For the record, I personally do not need an external player feature.