Hi Johan,

Thank you for this information;
Could you please tell me :

For how long were you running XXHighEnd without pressing Play, Next, Previous, IOW how long was it running without touching anything before this happened ? Note that dragging new tracks onto the Playlist Area during playing (it just grabbing those for further playback) does not count as pressing Play etc. as mentioned.

Did anyone else bump into a thing like this with Engine#3 ? I myself have never seen this.
Also note Johan, that 1.5GB of memory is on the low side. E.g. two subsequent tracks consisting of near a full CD can't load with this. Not with Vista itself using 400-500MB.

Peter

It's a pleasure to announce the first version (all still beta ) with a "Library" function;
Although it took a lot of effort to present what is there now, it really just is a beginning with a lot more to come. Also, please note it is not tested upon any of "your" libraries, and it will be unavoideable currently to have some issues in various areas.

One of the major reasons for issues as such, is that I just wanted you to have this first version, while it is up to, say, creativity to extend it. This means that the basis for rather infinit extension is in there, but the withgoing complexity had to be dealt with too. So currently it's a kind of mixture from possibilities and beneficial features.

The possibly most important feature might be that everything and all can be combined. This is in today's functionalities, but also with future gadgets. Example :
The Library Area contains search results. No matter how they came about, you can select them and load then into the Playlist Aera (Load button). But, when the result (-item) is coincidentally an Album, all the tracks of the Album are loaded. On the other hand, when the result consists of Albums, you should be able to "active search" by means of Album Name (the more letters you enter, the more close you come to the Album Name you want). This is what the Library Area does, but it's also a difficult task to program, depending on the result list in there.
For future versions think of Keywords defined by yourself and attached to Albums and Tracks by you, working out the same.

Currently, many of the kind of Search Criteria depend for workability on the size of the images (coverart) you selected. Start small. The larger the image sizes, the longer it takes to present the results. With the default right after getting this version, however, all works okay for the largest size.

The speed (or better, slowlyness ) is one of the other "fast implementation" issues. I'm fairly sure it can be improved to a certain extend. Note though that exactly these kind of matters are very time consuming. So not now.


The reason behind the Library Area -besides being able to find the music- is to enable a kind of random selection of all the material we have. This goes from selecting all tracks longer than e.g. 7 minutes via selecting all with "sun" in them, to each second track of the Albums we have. Or a combination of that. It can be quite reveiling. Selecting tracks with "blues" in them 95% of cases gives songs about (the) blues, while "guitar" presents tracks most often emphasized on the guitar as an instrument, like  "bass" might give you an interesting evening of music with a "bass" as the main instrument, while "drums" actually does not bring what you expect from it, unless you have recordings of chinese drums and like those. "Remix" will give you dance or hiphop and the like ...

Enough said. It's all obvious once you get the hang of it (and start to learn your own collection).
However, take your time on reading the ToolTips on the various controls underneath the Library Area. They eleborate a bit on how to set things to your conveniency.


Some other matters :

First of all, nothing happened on the issues which arose at version 0.9k, let alone the Bug List. This includes the possible degraded sound on Engine#1 since that version, as it was reported. However, for that Engine things may have changed again unintendently.

Then, XXHighEnd is now more oriented towards 640x480 resolution. You can still drag it all away to your likings, but since HTPC screens might not be larger than this, it should be kind of workable at this resolution (size).

As you can see below, coverart may now be shown as large as it can fit on your screen, which is done by means of
a. the height of the form
b. the width of the left-bottom area.
The latter is done by means of a draggable "splitbar" which is at the position of the mouse pointer as shown in the bottom picture below. You catch the splitbar when the mouse pointer changes into two small bars with arrows to the left and right (which could not be caught by the image copy program which was used here).
Since the images need to remain square, its the combination of both height of the form and position of the split bar which determines the size of the image.

During playing with - and exploring things, do not uncheck the Test Checkbox as you can see in the pictures below. It will prevent from outputting more than 100 items in the result list as shown in the Library Area. That's always much less than the 50,000 you might have with choosing a too large image size nothing can cope with.

Get yourself familair with when - and when not things change in the Library Area. Example : changing the Picture Size (as per the slider in the right bottom) only has effect after pressing Search again; there's more of these things.

Do not forget that within the Library Area you can actively search (by just typing) in the items (from left to right), which usually is an Album Name, but which can be different once you check the Grp checkbox. When you do that indeed, do not forget to select the "View Setting" as per the combox at the right and set that to OneLine/Group.
Also, when nothing happens at the "just typing" as mentioned above, just click onto the Library Area to make it active.

Lastly, at selecting the items from the result (by Click, ctrl-Click, cltrl-shift-Click as usual in Windows), get familiar with pressing the Load button in order to load the items in the Playlist Area for Playback (when one item represents an Album, all the tracks from the Album are loaded).
Cue Files (the large WAVs) can be loaded, but the individual files are not being extracted in this version (like dragging a large WAV from Explorer does since version 0.9k).

Important : The zip at the bottom now contains an additional nopicture.png. This is for showing explicitly there was no coverart found for the Album concerned (see last screen copy below the second picture at the right with the red cross, with the text "Akoest" just visible). So do not forget to include this file in your current XXHighEnd folder, or otherwise search results will be incomplete (searching stops at locating this file while it's not there).

Even more important : Currently some raw intelligence is applied in separating Artist Names from Album Names, while all includes your structure applied (also see Most convenient Storage Structure ?). Please note that your deviations from the applied intelligence here will be the cause of Search Results not showing the proper data, when the Grp checkbox is checked and the View Settings have been set to "OneLine/Group". Better solutions for this will grow in time. Do not hesitate though to show your setup when things are not working out.
See, as an example, the one but last screen copy below and the Ben Harper albums; the first two are stored in a Ben Harper folder, while the next two are stored at the one-higher level, the Ben Harper determined by the part before the " - " as you can see it in the folder name (that's what it is). If you have that differently, things currently won't work. But please tell what you have then.


Anything else ? probably yes. If so, it will be added here later.



PS: The zip to download is 0.9la which is right at the bottom of this post. It replaces 0.9l which has been there for 30 minutes and which was not the latest version. It was downloaded by one person already ...

I'm not aware of that Johan ...

Just for your information :

After playing with Q1=30 for several days (not to forget, with 16dB uplevelled highs) all the time the fun had gone. Also, voices (mainly women) now *did* have a flair over them, though slight. Tonight I switched back to Q1=0, and the fun was back.

I again heard the spatiousness, the better realness of cymbals afterall, the no flair at all over voices, the better balance.
Joy.

Q1=30 started to annoy me more and more. It's faking things.

Hi Johan,

It is just there. Maybe read this to get it going.

With Feedreader3 you can use it.
You can use IE7 instead (might even work better).

More questions ? I don't have the answers. All I know is it just works from another SMF forum I "own" (with above mentioned links/tools).

Peter

Hi Chris,

Well, uhhm ... you are not sure how it works, and I am not sure what you mean.

The Q1 slider treats one phenomenon all the way, and 30 is just the current max position while -4 is the current min position. Both could be extended. For me the -4 is the best when going down from more upwards, but 30 seems the best when going up from more downwards. Both ends seem best at there own characteristics (and remember, it would be jitter-influence only). This should imply that both ends should be extended in order to find the real best setting.
When things start to crackle, repeat, or show drop outs, it is not jitter-only anymore, and obviously then the data is molested.
Be careful that you don't arrive in that range, where a tad too low (Q1) could cause regular missing samples (to my findings expressing as stressy sound, and (for me) enabled with USB only).

If you control your Fireface still at 256 samples (?), be careful that because of that everything is perceived differently at your side. For me, the 48 setting goes along with the very low Q1 values (and at Q1=30 the FF is still at 48).

I'm afraid the combinations are endless ...

Of course you can't destroy anything. Things can be stressed though, and the reboot stuff is true.

The timeouts you get, everybody has. At least they are caused by "your" cue file software (hehe); the cue files itself are not related.

With cue files the large wav is always addressed. It jumps in the middle of it when a track has to be played, or it just keeps hooked on the file at subsequently playing the tracks (but not with diacritical marks).

On the Q thing ...

Maybe you should try Q1=-2 too. Technically -2 and -3 act a little different from alll of the others (including -4).

But we are not done with it yet;
I was told by Gerner to try 30 (we both use the same PC->DAC configuration) and had to tell him what I found of it. To make a long story short, 30 could even be better. So the d*mn thing is related to the base quality, and the base quality is so much different with 0.9k (with 0.9j things became fuzzy only at the higher levels).

Things get kind of mysterious indeed;
(keep in mind that for "your" DAC and (USB) connection things like below may not apply)

Although I did not test long enough, things may get too "smooth" at the lower Q1 levels.  In the end this comes down to less (or no ?) "rubbish" in the sound, which IMO is there at Q=0 and even overexpressed compared with earlier versions. I find it grainy, although it will depend on the speakers whether it's much audible. So with -2 (and lower) this grainyness has disappeared, but seems to have turned into "too smooth".
Oh for your information : I judge this by uplevelled high frequency output, gradually starting at 5K, ending at 20K with 16dB more output as at 5K.
And yes, I say smooth.

I only now realize that this would be the same as Gerner's infinite resolution, because it (the too smooth) really feels like so (at normal 44K1 btw).

Now, what occurred to me is that at Q1=30 the necerssary gaps (yup) are added to make a cymbal a more real cymbal again. To make clear what I mean : think of a cymbal with (loose hanging) nails mounted in them; that kind of sound is coming back. The necessary squarish harmonics apparently were not there at Q1<-1.
Note that it could be fake, and jitter can be perceived as gaps (holes) in the sound, but possibly this is just what it needs.

Do not forget : my judgement above is done with high frequency output which is over 5 times the normal level (with btw a serious attempt to let it stay like that ).

Hahaha, nice trick.

I must say, you're not much original now. 

Gerner, why are you mooning at us ?

I've been watching CNN for the last couple of days, but saw nothing. Well, nothing that looks like your face.

But do you mean an avatar ? If so, that can be 65x65 pixels only. I think it is so that when it's larger it just does not show up (or is thrown away).

WOW ...

Gerner, yes, infinite resolution ... something like that.
I was just told (off line) to step to -3. I'm scared ...

What I will do, since for "us" this seems to work very well :

I will introduce a "fine res checkbox", that will allow for a say, chosen -2, to have 30 gradations within that.
I don't want to be responsible for PCs on fire, okay ?

 

What Q1 does will keep on being a mystery, but that your 1543 stack won't allow for the lower values is known (from the DDDac). Note that the fact that you can't go so low does not say anything about the max sound qualty you can perceive from your DAC opposed to e.g. mine. Both will have a "max best SQ", but with your DAC it's at a higher setting.
Of course in absolute means both "your" and "my" DAC are incompareable anyway.

For your other question, there's a little Help link in the player.
People say (Vista) that it matters. I never noticed it, it even shouldn't (by explicit design of XX), but it could. For Vista it was added because people asked for it.

Peter

I wish are were at home in order to be able to try it ...


Keep this in mind !
It will be the Fireface here doing the trick. I already know that my same DAC, though USB connected then, will die instantly.

Also think of this : Although it has not been proven at all yet, I think you may find that the Q1 settings in this area (say, around zero) will be (very) temperature dependent.

Start laughing, shooting, anything, when later this is proved to be a BS remark.

Also keep in mind that in these VERY fragile areas, you might stress the DAC or anything in front of it (towards the PC). So indeed you might find your Vista hanging, the sound repeating (in the DAC), or even your system rebooting during playback.
But hey, it's for a good cause ! (if you can get it working without anomalies).

Well, it's allright if people are listing requests, as long as they don't think it's treated like a bug. I'll listen anyway ...

No, it is not likely that the HDCD format will be supported.
Btw, this is a kind of mp3-like construction (codec) that suggests 20 bits in the data, while physically still 16 are used.

Thank you Chris. But please press the "Details" button then. The real info (for me) will be behind that button.