StreamerPlus Audiophile Style Streamer

[Juha]

After months of modifying and testing speakers and amplifiers I had to try something else.
Being a computer consultant and a programmer I decided to try something different.

Why not do my own audiophile music player for Windows (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8)?
After 2 days of research and 3 days of programming I got this far.
Here is my player StreamerPlus, first alpha version.

http://hoone.com/streamerplus.jpg

Audiophile player:
- Plays music with WASAPI (some use ASIO or Kernel Streaming) on Windows
- This goes directly to the sound card bypassing Windows sound mixer
- Plays exclusive mode where the soundcard is only used by one program
- Is a light weight program that takes very little cpu resources
- Does not have a lot of bells and whistles just for show

What happens here is that one audio file is opened at a time.
It is not loaded into memory, it streams from hard-disk or USB stick in small parts.
Taking very very small cpu and memory resources.

StreamerPlus takes less than 1% of cpu.
It uses 7 megs of memory on Windows 7 and only 3 megs on Windows 8.

http://hoone.com/streamerp.zip

You can use this right now.
Download link from my own server.
Unzip all 5 files to the same directory. USB stick or hard-disk.
Select audio files with Windows Explorer / Foobar2000 / JRiver right-click mouse and copy.
Start the program StreamerPlus.exe
Click the Paste-button and then play.
This only uses the default soundcard. Open Windows Control Panel / Audio.
There you can set the default audio output.


Is the sound any good???

[Juha]

New version available at the link above.

Added .m3u playlist support. Paste a playlist and it is loaded for play.
Added history-log playlist. There is a playlist for each day. This contains all files played on that day.

StreamerPlus sounds as good as the two main players, but there is nothing to install.
No need to look for special WASAPI plugins.

[Juha]

Testing high resolution audio

I have a new StreamerPlus version at
http://hoone.com/StreamerP.zip

Download high resolution music from
http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html

I took some FLAC 24BIT/192kHz files.
Set your soundcard to 192kHz. Go to Control Panel / Hardware and Sound / Manage Audio Devices.
Click on your default device / Click Properties / Click Advanced.
Here we have settings for Default format.
Set it to 192kHz. Play the high resolution file.

WARNING: It is a good idea to set back to 44.1 or 48 kHz after high resolution play.
Normal browsers etc might not like 192 kHz.

http://hoone.com/streamerplus2.jpg

[Juha]

Hello,

I have a new version of my player here:

http://hoone.com/StreamerP.zip

There is now support for mp3 / flac files tags. These tags contain song performer / album name / track name.

Do you have any ideas on how to continue?
What features would be interesting?

Many players have these song databases where you have to add music.
I am thinking of reading a music directory on the fly.
Every time the program is started. Then there would be no need to "add" anything.
This could be useful for browsing music directories.

[Tim]

Hi Juha, I plan to give this a go when I have the time, but I'm a bit busy at the moment - great work though.

[Juha]

New version available

StreamerPlus download (http://hoone.com/StreamerP.zip)

Now better up-sampling.
Program runs at higher Windows priority.

TRY THIS:
Set your default sound device to 96 kHz.
Go to Control Panel / Hardware and Sound / Manage Audio Devices.
Click on your default device / Click Properties / Click Advanced.
StreamerPlus will up-sample.