Digital CD Player Program

[MERRICK]

The last thread I started on the old Icrontic had me asking about a program like this. So I thought I'd put this info up again.


When you listen to an audio Cd (.cda) and you're looking to bypass the less than desireable D/A converters on computer CD drives, and you want to use the D/A converters on your sound card, then you want a program that does this by taking the digital throughput from the CD Drive>IDE>PCI Bus>Sound Card. Surprisingly this is a hard to find program.

With a less than 700Kb footprint and minimal resources requirement this program blows away Windows Media Player's bloated~10MB install. Okay no pretty vizualizations, but I recomend this for any computer anyway!


Get it here:


http://homepage2.nifty.com/~maid/index_e.html


Windows Media Player 7.0 and higher offers a digital CD option along with it's bloatware bulls**t. Winamp offers a realtime .wav ripper but I don't use winamp for MP3's on my DAW. (I use audioactive MP3 player http://www.prosoundreview.com/showproduct.php?product=67 )



(Special thanks to icronticforums member ElanMorinTedronai for finding this digital CD program and sending it my way).

[Shorty]

Very nice! One for the up and coming sound sticky thread :)

Cheers Merrick.. good to see you in bud :beer:

[Xyphus]

Have you tried foobar 2000? It is my media player of choice... Not much flash or nifty GUI, but it's sound quality is excellent. (and if you have a sound card that supports 24bit or 32bit, it will take advantage of that as well...)

http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org/

[Bad_Karma]

When it comes to running mp3s I use this nice little program. Definately no bloatware and the thing comes with the usual bells and whistles. If your looking for a new player try it out. I personnaly won't ever go back to winamp. As for windows media player I try to stay as far away from it as possible.

Here's the link:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dbpoweramp.htm

[MERRICK]

Have you tried foobar 2000? It is my media player of choice... Not much flash or nifty GUI, but it's sound quality is excellent. (and if you have a sound card that supports 24bit or 32bit, it will take advantage of that as well...)

I went to the site this looks very interesting and I'm going to review it for here and my other site. Thanks Xyphus. Now to the best of my knowledge, the widest wordlenght for audio is 24bit. 32 bit refers to the additional 8 dsp processing bits added to manipulate the data (volume, echo etc.) when 32 bit data reaches the 24bit card there is a dither applied at the output. This is one factor when comparing soundcards if using hardware dither, or a factor to consider when using software dither. The dithering noise is extremely small as compared to going 24bit to 16bit audio.

When it comes to running mp3s I use this nice little program. Definately no bloatware and the thing comes with the usual bells and whistles. If your looking for a new player try it out. I personnaly won't ever go back to winamp. As for windows media player I try to stay as far away from it as possible.

Thanks Bad_Karma

Another app I'll checkout. The Audioactive uses Fraunhofer MPEG decoding algorithms which I find to be more pristine than the other codecs IMHO. If you want to really hear a quality reproduction of MP3, get the Cool EDIT Pro demo and open an mp3 in it (Fraunhofer). The thing is it's an editor and not really a player. Takes a long time to load etc. But I believe it is the clearest mp3 reproduction I've ever heard (but the LAME guys will flame me for saying it).