Do music player programs (Foobar, Winamp, Dopamine, etc.) affect the quality of digital music file playback? Or do they just spit out digital information to the DAC? Or sound quality changes due to prebuilt internal EQ from the player (software)? I am wondering if some programs fail to send complete digital information of a FLAC file to the DAC? Maybe it’s placebo thing; Potplayer (I use it to watch video files) makes the music much noisier than VLC to my ears.

If no difference, are there some better programs (for Windows) to playback digital music files (ie FLAC)? No commercial, no privacy theft, etc.

Thanks!

  • gnostalgick@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Windows itself can mess with the sound if it’s not bypassed. So you do need to make sure you’re choosing ASIO, KS, or WASAPI output in your player to ensure it’s bit perfect. All of those options are available in Foobar (probably by default, but easily downloadable from their site if not). No idea about the others, but any player that supports any one of those should sound the same.

    • SirMaster@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      The W in WASAPI stands for Windows, so it’s definitely not “bypassing” Windows. It’s a built in feature to Windows.

      • audioshimaudio@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Agreed. The Windows OS is still handling the delivery of the audio. I wrote my own music player/management software and I use Asio. The only thing windows does to the music is to read the audio stream directly from disk and send into Asio and the Asio communicates directly with my DAC.