Hello, was just posting a bit about this on the computeraudiophile thread, but figured this forum was a better location to go into this than to co-opt that thread.
I just started playing with XX, and so far the sound quality is quite nice, though I've got a lot more investigating to go. I've got a new system I just put together, using an ESI Juli@ soundcard, SPDIF out to a benchmark DAC.
I was never able to get it working in XP. It seemed like there was a much larger variety of crashes and failures that I haven't yet seen in Vista, and it never produced any sound. Vista was better, and I have it running there, though it's not error free. In demo mode it pops up a half dozen errors/notifications every time I start, and never saves the config file, though the last playlist is saved. I don't mind the fact that the demo mode has a time limit before the application stops playing and needs to be restarted, but it seems like a significant number of other things are handicapped/broken in demo mode, and this is making it really difficult to effectively evaluate anything but the basic music playback capability.
That said, I've got to say I have yet to see a dotnet application that actually looks nice and is nice to use, and XX isn't any exception to that so far. I hope you don't take any offense, I blame microsoft for that. I can understand the choice for dotnet and ease of development, but it is a turn-off for me. I haven't figured out galleries or how to really use the library, I may feel differently if I can figure that out (not sure if the demo mode problems are preventing this).
The other bit I'd really love to have is a front end that provides lookups and playlist generation based on tags, etc. This is where my xbmc request comes in. I don't know if you've checked it out before -
http://www.xbmc.org/. This is basically an open source media center, and they have an excellent library mode that build out your library based on the tag data. It also supports allmusic scr*ping, so it really brings back an element of switching to computers that was lost when we gave up our CDs and vinyl - it creates an equivalent of liner and artist notes one can peruse while exploring their music.
Anyway, my main point with that is XBMC already supports the idea of calling third party applications rather than use it's internal player. Personally I think it would be awesome if I could load up an album or playlist in XBMC and have XXhighend play it rather than their default player. Check this topic:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43511&highlight=sample+rateOf course, the step beyond that would be creating a new project that turned XBMC into a dedicated music player with something like XXhighend replacing the existing paplayer. I'm guessing that might get into stickier GPL issues, though there are always ways to bundle this sort of thing to avoid those sorts of issues, and anyway the external player option above bypasses that problem neatly.
I've run into several other bugs, but will report those individually as I find a chance, the AIF one was the primary one preventing me from evaluating.
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