Wanted : 20 Beta Testers

With a super thanks to all of you who helped so greatly - and with 0.9z-7 around the corner (oh, is that so ? swoon

), here is a preview of the 0.9z-7 Release Notes which hopefully allow you to do a few things in advance of the official release compared to others.
Hey, you earned it !!

Thanks a lot !
Peter

Notice : In this version the small vinyl like ticks in between tracks (only for tracks with gaps in between them) exist.

Finally 0.9z-7 is out. Never before so many changes have been applied to the software. Also, never before the changes implied extensive outlay for even one new subject, while this time there are many. Therefore you will see links within the Release Notes, referring to a "manual" section in the forum. So, the Release Notes and way more extensive than they already are.
It is to be expected that this 0.9z-7 version is not bug-free, and we encourage you to mention whatever it is you find in the forum, and please open a new topic for each bug, remark or question and give it a recognizable title.

As you will see, many features are User Interface related, and while useful and nice in general, the aim of it is using a Tablet for Remote Control. Also, it should be a joy now to start up XXHighEnd and see whatever it is you made of it yourself.

Expectations about change of Sound Quality : all over and from various angles;
What you will learn is that Music Reproduction through loudspeakers by means of a PC has achieved another giant leap forwards; in a few weeks time you will notice how "distorted" the sound has been, even with XXHighEnd which was considered to be the best out there already anyway. But it could be bettered.

Below, only the most prominent changes and bug fixes are mentioned; Especially in the bug fixes area there are a dozen or two more but weren't mentioned because it only creates text to read over, and they will be obvious anyway.

SQ Related changes

New Q1 Factor (Engine#4 / Kernel Streaming)

The maximum value of Q1 has always been 30. Today the Q1 Factor slider operates as a multiplier for that up to a maximum of 40x. So, Q1 can be 1200 now.

More here : Q1 Factor (huge latency setting - more advanced usage).
Playback Drive

The Playback Drive(/Folder) is a new setting in XXHighEnd's Settings that adds another dimension to the plethora of "where playback happens makes a (SQ) difference". The Playback Drive is a very explicit means though, and it is created to eliminate the source of SQ differences for the same files, but played from another location. This includes FLAC files which (always) convert to WAV, native WAV sounding perceivedbly different.

More here : Playback Drive (for advanced PC usage !).
Phase Alignment

The Phase Alignment feature can well be the best invention for Music Reproduction through loudspeakers of the last century together with the current one so far.

Its working will remain secret, but what can be told in general is that this comprises of a very mild form of digital signal processing (DSP), but completely lossless like the Digital Volume of XXHighEnd.

What happens (for sure without saying it all) is that a better alignment of the phase of individual frequencies take place. For the result you should be perceiving enormously more pure and undistorted sound.

More here : Phase Alignment (advanced usage).

User Interface changes

A huge overhaul has taken place and it should lead to having a great time creating a few things yourself, to next just look at it full of joy. For the largest part this is up to you. Now, let's see :

You will notice that the small graphical buttons have been changed to one-letter abbreviations which should be logical enough to find their meaning. Otherwise engage the ToolTips (which are default On, but otherwise can be switched on with a field at the bottom of Settings (which latter is now reached by means of the [ S ] button at the top of XXHighEnd).
The larger Playback buttons contain their operation by means of plain text (again, like earlier versions oif XXHighEnd).
There are some new buttons and the first to notice are the ones captioned with [ 1 ] and [ 2 ]. These are splitter/slider buttons which allow to drag the two splitbars (which by themselves allow dragging the three panels to your needs).
These buttons (which can be dragged) are especialy useful when operating XXHighEnd from a Tablet (when the splitbars otherwise can't be operated).
At the right side of the middle pain you will see [ U ] and [ D ] buttons which also are there for Tablet operation, and which allow to scroll through the Library Area and Settings Area (which otherwise would be sheer impossible because of the too thin scrollbars there on a Tablet).
When the [ 1 ] button/slider/splitter is dragged to the left, you will notice that at a certain stage the top part of the left panel disappears. This allows for the left panel to be way more small than beforel, and was made so to gain space on the middle panel, again for Tablet operation.
When the [ 1 ] button is dragged to the right, the top part of the left panel reappears.
There are [ X ] buttons at several places which end the operation of the panel concerned (don't try to understand this now because you will do automatically when you see them). One of them is for ending XXHighEnd itself, and it is located at the top right of the form, close to the normal "x" little button. This too is needed for Tablet operation and when you have brought up XXHighEnd during Unattended Playback and you want to quit the User Interface again (the normal "x" button there being way to small to ever find it).
Stepless scaling

The main form of XXHighEnd (only that !) can be Scaled to any size now, up to 3.2 times its original size (this is huge already, as you will see).

More here : Scaling the User Interface.
When the Treeview in the left panel contains a CoveArt file, using the Enter key on it now opens the file to show it.
For conveniency reasons (and to have a choice), double clicking a Library Item still loads the album in the PlayList area and activates the Playlist Area right away, while using the Load Button and all the other means now keep the Library Area active.
Skinning

Here is the fun part of 0.9z-7 - just for when SQ is not enough for you;

Real Skinning as such is not really in order, but what you can do with the provisions applied for you, comes close to infinity sufficiently enough. So, apart from the Scaling you can define your own colors for each of the general elements and in addition, but merely, you can create your own gradient backgrounds with generic means that will allow people to find new cool backgrounds in even a year's of time and beyond.
The module for this allows you to make screenshots of whatever it is your art-soul created, and apply that as images for the buttons. Those buttons can be rendered again with colors and really within no more than a few seconds (think 20) you will be having a totally new look from what you created earlier, you being sure that you never want to dive into it again because it looks so way cool now.
An infinite number of "skins" can be saved and shared with other XXHighEnd users.

More here : Skinning.
With the explicit support for tablets aa XXHighEnd dedicated "Virtual Keyboard" (on-screen keyboard) emerged, which actually makes XXHighEnd fully touch screen compatible (not multi-touch). With that, also a virtual keyboard for smartphones has been developed.

The keyboard is scaleable by dragging its left or right edges, or more easily : by dragging the top and left upper corners horizontally.

More here : Using the On Screen Keyboard.
Use other players for your User Interface

A maybe strange addition because it is merely a procedure, but did you know that you can use any player to select albums/tracks etc., build a playlist in them, to next drag that playlist on to the Playlist Area of XXHighEnd and use Alt-P to start playback in Unattended Mode hence by means of XXHighEnd ? So envision this :

Format XXHighEnd such that actually only the middle pane is the one you will need. Maybe leave some space at the left for the Digital Volume (might you want to use Digital Attenuation by means of XXHighEnd's lossless digital volume).
Start e.g. JRiver (etc. etc.) and by all means select your album to play in there. Done ? select all in the playlist there, and drag that onto XXHighEnd's Playback Area. Now press Play (or indeed Alt-P when you really don't want to touch anything of XXHighEnd) and there goes all as intended, including the fine SQ means as per your settings (yes, which you must have set in XXHighEnd before of course). One thing : when you really want to apply the SQ 100% the same as intended, a player like JRiver will vanish like all usually does, so when you finished playback (Alt-S) you'd want to restart JRiver of course. Well, connect that to Alt-S in your XX.ahk settings, and you are good to go. Connect it to Alt-X may even be better, so both will start.

General

When the Memory Type (like Straight Contiguous) was changed, this disn't reflect the Sound Engine unless it was explicitly killed. Solved.
Adding more than one album to a Gallery could crash XXHighEnd easily. This is solved, although it can still happen once in a while.
Albums can be removed from Galleries now, with the Originals as the source ("Remove from their Galleries" (similar)).
Generally, many of these kind of Gallery functions have been completed, mainly about deleting entries (with Gallery or Original as source).
Uneven SFS sizes couldn't be chosen, or otherwise a memory error would occur. Solved.
Additionally the SFS number is rounded (snapped to) more appopriate numbers, different per OS (Vista/W7).
Album Compare has been totally overhauled and now works with internal unique identifiers with 100% guarantee to find the same, or slightly different. The functionality should be finished now and is super fast as well. Notice though it needs a manual to really use it and this manual is not there yet. It is somewhat intuitive though, so you can attempt to use it, when you trust it does all well (but, it is about this latter and checking it, which needs that manual).
Notice this is about holding a disc etc. against aother or Gallery, and pull out the ones not present, to next copy those not present to another location. Could be 20,000 albums against 2,000 others which goes fully automated.
4x Upsampling 176.4 dis not work (stopped playing somewhere in the track). Solved.
HDTracks albums (downloads) sometimes contain wrong header data because of which they would not play. Solved.
Hot Search (typing for album(/track) title search sometimes wouldn't work unless XXHighEnd was restarted. This is solved now, and it is much faster as well.
The textbox for Hot Search now contains a copy version at the top of the XXHighEnd screen for Tablet usage (not requiering a Split (soft)Keyboard.
When the OS is changed from Minimized to Normal (and the other way around) the chosen Sound Device is now maintained (this didn't work before because of the list of sound devices changing in either OS Mode).
It appeared that the Library Area could only be used in full with the "Text Under" setting. Now all 4 options should work.
Besides the LAN which could be shut off or maintained, there's now also the possibility to keep Bluetooth running and sustain a Personal Area Network from there.
A bug in Windows 7 and another bug in XXHighEnnd caused Remote Desktop Connection not to work anymore after a first playback attempt. This has been solved now.
In order to use Remote Desktop Connection there's a new option "Use RDC" in the Settings. Notice that before this just wasn't in order and or all was shut off when the LAN was shut off, or all stayed when the LAN was set to stay. Now this is an independent group.
The few Randomize functions which remained active since the last or so XXHighEnd version, appeared all not to be working anymore (albums appeared double, triple, more). Now they do again (the remainder still to solve).
As known by some, quite some situations could occur that playback stopped at some stage. Outside Attended Playback (see "Issues" at the bottom) they should all be soved now (because of a different base setip regarding this).
Sound Devices with diacretical marks in them (jn the Registry !), would not let select themselves for playback through Kernel Streaming (Engine #4). This is solved now.
There always have been two sets of buttons for Volume Up and Down, although only in certain situations they were both visible and usable. The one set allowed for "legit" volume steps only, regarding the bit depth (and maintaining lossless) while the other would allow not-legit steps as well (the latter showing red when a not-legit setting was chosen;
It is assumed that these days this is only confusing, people owning more than 16 bit DACs anyway. So, there's only one set of buttons now, and used with a 16 bit DAC they can imply not-legit not-lossless) volume.
There's been a "Power" led at the bottom right corner of the XXHighEnd screen for quite some time. This was dummy, and always showed "On". Today this led has been moved to the right side and it is not dummy anymore; it shows whether the Audio Engine is in memory (On), hence actually running (no matter it doesn't produce sound). When not, the led shows black.
When blue, clicking the led will remove the Audio Engine from memory.
It looks like working in the Library Area with checkboxes for selecting (instead of Ctrl-Click etc.) has ceased working for a long time. Now this has been reinstalled (this is the left topmost button denoted "V" in the popping up panel when the Library Area is active).
Notice though that working with Checkboxes is hardly workable when only 200 or so items will appear in the Library Area because of it being way too slow that way.
The same (it not working anymore) must be said from the button under the one of the previous topic, the one captioned "T". This is for "testing" the result in the Library Area and limiting it to 100 items to be output there. If all is right now it works again (although in not all situations it seems to support the limiting of the output (correctly).
Although it was made for more convenient Tablet operation, the U and D buttons visible at the right side of the Library Area allow for consistent scrolling of "one page". This solves the standard means of scrolling where you must wait and see how "half" the Coverart shown is at top and (or) bottom. It is to be noticed though that with the "One Line" setting (instead of the default "Text Under") it may happen that a scroll scrolls one row too few, which depends on the (by you dragged) height of the Library Area.
There's a message now telling you that you are engaging Minimized OS while nothing has been set in the Settings Area to shut off; such a prevention wasn't there, that making people use Minimized OS without actually changing a thing.
The way how is dealt with stopping Playback and when the Desktop and all is brought back after Unattended Playback Mode, has been changed. See here : Re: Restarting an existing track.
Solved a possible bug on the Music Root being a Share Name, that resulting in an error message when the Library Area was activated lateron.

Known issues emerged from this version :

At the Huge Latency settings the Running Time is off by the Latency. Similarly for the WallPaper Coverart and when tracks change. Notice that both run *ahead*. So, at the largest Latency settings, things may be off by 30 seconds.
It is not likely that this will be solved.
For similar reasons quite some constraints now apply for Attended Playback; All can be tried for Attended, but with too wild settings only one track will play and a message will precede playback telling you this.
It is not likely that this will be solved.
When the Monitor is set to Shut Off, this does not work with an RDC connection. This shouldn't be a big deal because you can shut off the monitor permenently now. However, it seems that there's a difference in SQ when the monitor stays on to begin with (and SQ seems better !), plus it will be different when "you" switched off the monitor against the software doing that. When you want the software to do it, you can always start a first track to play on the audio PC; then the monitor shuts off and it stays off (after hopping over to the remote PC). Keep in mind thoug that it will be a different situation again when operating like this. Meaning : when the audio PC is booted and it is only accessed by the remote PC right from the start, it will be different from starting out on the audio PC itself. SQ merits regarding this where not detected, nor were they explicitly investigated.
It looks like the Amazon Coverart functions are not working anymore (for quite some months already). This happened before and is because Amazon changes (security) procedures which go unnoticed (in between the Amazon spam emails), and it always has been a pain to get it running in the first place, or to comply to their changed procedures. It is high time to give up on this ... (so probably in a next version the functions will have been removed all together).
While XXHighEnd's main form can be rescaled, the subforms can not. So, assumed you set a higher scaling to comfort your eyes, you -sadly- have to live with the now very small looking other forms and popups.
This will be solved in due time.
At the larger scaling factors the decimal part of the track time in the Playlist Area is chopped off (one or two positions). This is a difficult to solve thing, but in the mean time it saves on the width needed, so maybe it stays like this.
The centered positioning in height of the button texts, may be off (usually downwards). It is not clear at this time what causes this, but usually it can be solved by chosing another Font (in the Skin Settings).
At this moment of writing, Rescaling XXHighEnd may show anomalies for the "trackbars" (like the one at the bottom for the Play Position) and things are not properly scaled until XXHighEnd is restarted. This is never important for observing the general size or usability of the scaled result, which is why it's left as a thing to do.
Will be solved in the next version.
Per mistake it was never allowed to set DAC Needs to 24 for a 24/768 DAC. Now it can.
Additional notice for Phasure NOS1 USB users (that being the only DAC allowing for this input rate anyway) : The NOS1 allows for DAC Needs = 24 bits all right, but only when "Is NOS1" is *not* activated. That it does allow for = 32 bits only when in NOS1 mode, must be considered an XXHighEnd bug (which maybe will be solved some time).
When the AutoColor slider (at the left edge of XXHighEnd) is set to its lowest position, "Alpha Blending" will be in order per (you) Skinning Settings. However, when XXHighEnd is used on a remote desktop (at least with MS' RDC) this is not respected and it is to be considered an MS bug - or is not applied on purpose because of the additional bandwidth it may take. What happens next though should be considered an MS bug fo sure, because you can clearly see that some panels can do it after all, while the main screen is filled with little black +es to mimic the implied color. This looks bad on the remote desktoip (or Tablet). Remedy : don't use this slider at its lowest position there.
The OSD Running Time in "Bar" fashion is aligned at the right side of the screen. This, while the WallPaper Coverart is now left aligned for convenient Tablet operation. The effect of this when using a Tablet is that this bar will be partly out of sight. On the other hand, the OSD Running Time shouldn't be used at all over the implied Bluetooth connection - or it actually shouldn't be used anyway because of the implied activity in the audio PC.
The OSD Running Time in digits has a sort of similar issue, where it still centers and which is not in the middle of the CoverArt anymore (big deal ? no). But :
For in fact unknown reasons, the OSD Running time (both Digital and Bar version) won't work on a Remote Desktop / Tablet. Notice that this isn't a good thing to activate anyway because of the "load" it implies on the Audio PC (SQ !).
When the Library Area is activated a first time in an XXHighEnd session, the scrollbar in there exhibits 0.9z-6 (and before) behaviour, that causing scrolling via the middle scroll button not to work properly with a larger contents; When the Library Area is activated a second time all is how it's intended and scrolling works okay.
This probably can be solved, but it seems a tough issue.
The Scaling does *not* work together with the scaling the OS can do for you, which happens when you set in Display Settings the "size of text" to 125% or 150%. Some items will be (up)scaled less than others, screen areas won't fit and scrollbars may be visible when not meant to, or are not there when you need them. When possible for you, set the OS scaling back to the normal 100%.

Watch out : There's a new version of XX.ahk (AutoHotkey config file) supplied with this version. Not activating this for 0.9z-7 *will* cause anomalies.

Switch Off UAC (User Account Control) before any first attempt of starting XXHighEnd.exe ! For W7 this means : set the slider in there to the lowest position. And don't forget to reboot after setting it Off.

If you are new, follow the little guide which will appear on the screen right after the first startup of XXHighEnd.exe, and perform the steps shown in there. These steps will be at least about the red coloured fields in the Settings Area.

If you don't want to end up reinstalling your OS, read this first : Minimize OS - How to start with that. Do it !

Kill XXEngine3.exe from memory (TaskManager) before your execute the XXHighEnd.exe from this version.

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