Hi,

Just wanted to chime in with a similar observation after switching to 09-w3 yesterday. It took only a couple of songs to notice that the sound is overly lean in my system and seem truncated in the low frequency response. When I first used XXHighEnd it was only slightly leaner than my other player software, but it was good in a way of providing more details, lighter flow of music while keeping a good balance and the low notes were precise and less bloated. With w3 I find the low notes to be too absent and the mid to highs in turn sound a bit to sterile to be enjoyable. I'll yet have to experiment a bit more with settings to see if changes can be made for the better, but with just transferring the settings I had with the last -v version I was using it does not sound right to me at all...

Best regards

Joerg

Hello Peter,

Sorry I could not get to it sooner and try 09-w2, but I have finally installed 09-w3 a few minutes ago and I am very happy to report that all the FLAC files are now very nicely sorted and the track numbers show up in front of the tracks! 

Thanks for implementing this, I'll do more listening on the weekend.

All the best

Joerg

Hi Peter,

Sorry, no time to test things yet. I'll get to it in the next few days as soon as I can and post my findings.

Joerg

Hi Peter,

Congratulations on that move, as soon as the first SSD drives were installed I was also thinking that with increasing capacities and falling prices they would be perfect for dedicated music PCs.

It is not just the power consumption. I have the HTPC case in my audio rack and when the disk are spinning it causes vibrations that can be felt even on the lower shelves of the rack. That is on a finite elemente master ref, which I would consider to be excellent with handling vibrations. I have the PC now sitting on a SAP Relaxa magnetic levitation base, which helps damping hard disk vibrations a lot. But still, I am sure things would improve with a SSD disk immediately. Less heat would mean less cooling, also less noise...way to go I would say 

I hope to make the same move sometime soon, but I guess I won't get round to do it before 2009...

Best Regards,

Joerg

Hello Russ,

Thanks for the suggestion, I am aware that this could be done. I am using JRMediacenter for all my ripping and tagging, it could also easily rename the 1000+ CDs. Besides the tag information from the files it keeps also a database of the information, that is why it never occured to me that the trackname might be useful as part of the file name.   

But since software players are not like expensive CD players where I would not keep two around, I can wait until the feature is in XXHighEnd sometime.

Best Regards,

Joerg

Hi Peter,

Yes, still around. I have subscribed to the RSS feed so I keep reading what's new. I am not using .cue files at all. So unless you have implemented to read the track number from the tag in the flac file itself it is not going to work for me at the moment.

I guess I'll have to wait. I was reading your post about the new release and had hopes it would be done. Anyway, comes time, comes feature. Patience is a virtue :-) Since I can switch to use XXHighEnd or my other player software I have the option to pick a different player when listening to classical or concept albums. On the others, it does not bother me much to have an unusual order of tracks.

All the best

Joerg

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the quick reply! The track numbers are stored in the FLAC file, I am 100% certain. I used JR Mediacenter 12 (and will continue to use it for ripping and tagging) before chaniging to XXHighEnd for playback. JRMC 12  gets the data from the Internet, but I have things setup so that the FLAC tags contain the important information as well.

I know that XXHighEnd started with WAV where tags are not an option. The tag information is one big plus with FLAC for me besides the compression.

It would be brilliant if you had an easy way to support the basic tags and the track number would be my most important one :-)

Regards,

Joerg

Hi Peter,

Had a power supply problem on my desktop PC, this is fixed so I am back online. I have also setup my signature a little with what I am using and some of the XXHighEnd settings. The music PC was working all the time and I got a bit more used to the interface of XXHighEnd. I am enjoying the really excellent sound, but hope for a few of the usability enhancements that were mentioned on the board here 

The biggest annoyance is the track sort order still, as it is not possible to play anything in sequence. On some albums it is quite cool to listen in an unexpected order, on others it is really bad (like soundtracks, classical pieces or concept albums that tell a story).

Anyway, I have the option to rename all the files with the track number in the file name, might just have to do that since I don't think I am going to switch back to my old player software.

Regards,

Joerg

Hi Peter,

 

It's my first post here, so a brief introduction before the question. I only tried XXHighEnd as a player recently and got it activated after a day or two playing around comparing it to my previous playback software (JRMediacenter with ASIO output). The SQ with XXHighEnd is a big step forward, I quite simply never had a better source so far!! I am using 09v-5 running Engine3 on Vista. My DAC is Doede Douma's USB kit (60 parallel 1543 Chips, NOS).

I have a few questions concerning the use of XXHighEnd, I read a few posts here but did not find the answers, if there is a documentation somewhere that I should read first, let me know and I check there.

My questions:
- My FLAC files are stored in this structure: C:\MusicServer\FLAC\Artist\Album. Each album folder contains the individual tracks. This is how I organised everything so far. The file names do not contain the track numbers and when I use Library in XXHighEnd the Albums show nicely under each Artist, I can add the Album to the playlist and play it from there, no problem. But the tracks are sorted by name on the playlist instead of track number. Is there anyway to get the sorting by tracknumber without renaming all the files to contain the track number first for sorting?

- Currently I use a Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard to control the playback. Is there an option that would allow me to design and program my own user interface and use the XXHighEnd engine for playback? I was thinking about a very simple display with CD player style controls for my touchscreen, that would also respond to standard remote control functions...if that's not possible, can I make some feature requests instead 

Thanks in advance!

Best regards from Frankfurt, Germany

Joerg