Bug Head Player

[darshanjoshi]

Had an opportunity to hear Joshua's setup. This Player sounded much better than Foobar+Asio.

Better Texture in the bass. Very detailed Mids and Highs. Easy on ears. Each and every instruments were very prominent.

Settings optimised by Joshua were very promising. Without any settings, sound was okish.

Cons were high CPU Usage, Loading Time, Too much time taken if songs stopped in between and started another one. Optimisation of setting changes the upsampling rate and a Standard 44/16 DAC wont accept it.

In all very good player and worth trying it.

Nice find Josh. :clapping:

 

[reignofchaos]

Well I tried this out today after a lot of pain. To be honest, it sounds different compared to Foobar - maybe a bit smoother. Whether that smoothness is because of lack of hf content or extra jitter or if it really is more accurate is hard to say.

All in all - an incremental upgrade that is worth it when I'm in critic mode wearing my tinfoil hat. Foobar works at other times.

 

[jls001]

@RoC: do try some of the settings mentioned in post #49. If you have something better than Dual Core and 4 GB of memory, you can be a bit more adventurous with the settings. But on the minimum, try upscaling to 176.4 kHz, and use at least four flavours of Self Sound Optimizer.

The smoothness in the highs initially make it sound like the highs are a bit rolled off, but on repeated listening, I've concluded that BHE avoids the glare and etch in the high frequencies, thus making it sound smoother and less etched. Another way to prove it is in the better resolution one hears on BHE, especially of micro details, and the more precise placement of images.

If you feel that your bass has become a bit more than your usual liking, you can do minor repositioning of speakers.

 

[jmascreen]

Just downloaded and installed it sounds really good. however I am not able to change it from Normal to 2x or 4x after rewrite it doesnt proceed. I have a I7 with 6GB ram. Is it a sound card limitation? I am using my dell laptop's default sound card with ASIO for all

 

[manniraj]

Today I uninstalled it as its a pain creating the playlists as well as other settings every time I restart my PC. I am back to my all time favourite Foobar - simple, easy and relaxing within my control via the mobile app as I got a feeling that I try to listen to music to relax and not get into complications of setting up the player each and every time.

With my 8GB RAM and Celeron processor the count down starts and takes up close to 4 min (I have done the minimum settings as jls001 has done) for the playback to start and by that time I just loose the interest as my Soekris DAC does not get the I2S signal lock hence it goes to sleep. So I loose initial 4 to 5 seconds of song every time the Rewrite happens. Moreover if I want to skip a song the "Rewrite" starts all over again and wait for another 2 to 3 min. I felt like I just want to listen to song when I press play and no more hungaama

 

[jmascreen]

Just downloaded and installed it sounds really good. however I am not able to change it from Normal to 2x or 4x after rewrite it doesnt proceed. I have a I7 with 6GB ram. Is it a sound card limitation? I am using my dell laptop's default sound card with ASIO for all

Just figured it out by changing galaxy to blade and mmx settings

 

[bornfi]

Just downloaded and installed it sounds really good. however I am not able to change it from Normal to 2x or 4x after rewrite it doesnt proceed. I have a I7 with 6GB ram. Is it a sound card limitation? I am using my dell laptop's default sound card with ASIO for all

where can I download this from?

 

[manniraj]

where can I download this from?

Look at the first post and you can download it from here.

 

[regeHA]

Today I uninstalled it as its a pain creating the playlists as well as other settings every time I restart my PC. I am back to my all time favourite Foobar - simple, easy and relaxing within my control via the mobile app as I got a feeling that I try to listen to music to relax and not get into complications of setting up the player each and every time.

With my 8GB RAM and Celeron processor the count down starts and takes up close to 4 min (I have done the minimum settings as jls001 has done) for the playback to start and by that time I just loose the interest as my Soekris DAC does not get the I2S signal lock hence it goes to sleep. So I loose initial 4 to 5 seconds of song every time the Rewrite happens. Moreover if I want to skip a song the "Rewrite" starts all over again and wait for another 2 to 3 min. I felt like I just want to listen to song when I press play and no more hungaama

My sentiments exactly, I can understand rewriting initially, but doing it all over again every time I skip a track is taking things too far.

It makes sense for when you want to listen to an entire album or a particular artist, but most folks are serial skippers or forwarders (I do this for Netflix and TV shows too), making this an extremely unsuitable player for regular use.

Maybe the perfect fit for when you want to wind down with a glass of wine after a hard day's work.

PS: Play with Foobar EQ settings as well as additional components like RAM playback and resampler, they do upgrade Foobar performance considerably.

 

[jls001]

PS: Play with Foobar EQ settings as well as additional components like RAM playback and resampler, they do upgrade Foobar performance considerably.

Foobar EQ that works for me: keep 1 kHz at -0.7 dB and 20 kHz at -2 dB, and adjust in-between values for a smooth curve. Adjust 500 Hz value also so that the drop at 1 kHz isn't a sudden drop.

 

[jls001]

Clearly, I'm enamoured by Bug Head so I went and bought myself a new motherboard, processor and some RAM. Will try to cobble it together over the next few days with the help of Rikhav.

 

[rikhav]

Just came back from joshuas place sometime ago
Had a taste of bug head player

Its a witch craft of digital audio

Every little setting changes the sound and once you get it right the sound is so so good.

There are quiet a few settings to play with and no real manual to refer what does what. So it will take quiet a lot of experimentation to get it right

And yeah it needs some serious amount of dual or quad channel ram and a hefty cpu

One thing we learnt that one does not have to blindly choose max settings possible because most of the time it screwed the sound

 

[jls001]

Rikhav helped me cobble together my music PC with new parts tonight :thumbsup:

It can now go to High Professional Mode, as the RAM slots are fully populated, and there are now four threads to play with. Higher number of threads would have been nice to have but the outlay became much higher than what I was mentally prepared to fork out on an as yet unproven (in my setup) configuration.

The learning for the night is that higher number of Self Sound Optimisation settings does NOT necessarily equate to a more likable sound. At least not in my setup. In general, more number of lines seem to make the sound denser, and even more lines make it even denser to the point where details are lost and bass overwhelms.

The ideal thing would be to try each of the settings incrementally one by one while keeping a specific parameter constant, listen, try the next, etc., but the sheer number of settings available is HUGE, and will take time to try and to discern the changes they brings. But one thing they do unfailingly is change the sound with every new setting, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. So the tedious agenda for now is to patiently try incremental changes to find the best sound.

But for now, a modest setting still sounds better. To put some numbers, the PC can now do 21 lines of Self Sound Optimization without giving up, but the sound is hardly to my liking, so I didn't try anything higher. But it was good to know how far one can push the PC.

So x4 upsampling in Snow flavour at level 3 or 4 sounded much better than level 7.

The availability of more memory and higher processing power released more tuning options in sGalaxy. Of these, Slash Crystal tuning sounds very nice to my ears, making the overall sound quite laid back while bringing out loads of new details in very familiar tracks. Bug and Kitty were kept at a modest LVL 3 or 4, and mmx+ processing was kept at 'mistake' level. I briefly tried Oruchi Wind tuning too, but preferred Slash Crystal tuning for now. I will try my earlier fav, Star tuning again.

Will report as I make further progress, but I have a feeling each user must bear his own cross to arrive at his personal sonic nirvana.

 

[jls001]

To add: the size of the buffer for ASIO driver was critical. With the default 1024 bytes, there used to be occasional stutter. On reducing this to 512, it played without any disturbance in the audio. On reducing it further to 256, it couldn't play continuously (start, then stop, start, etc). So at least on my system, 512 works flawlessly. I use the ASIO driver for my sound card. I'm yet to try third-party drivers like ASIO4ALL.

 

[regeHA]

I have played with the highest settings and RAM has never been an issue, and my system is limited to 16 GB RAM. However, my i7 CPU does get pushed quite a bit (video encoding is the only other thing that pushes it).

I am wondering, if the folks are using any specific settings to necessitate the need for getting 32 GB RAM?

It might be a good idea to share the settings being deployed as well as the individual tracks being tested on and what to hear for in terms of subtle differences, etc.?

 

[mpw]

but I have a feeling each user must bear his own cross to arrive at his personal sonic nirvana.

Pardon my ignorance - but wont a graphic equalizer do the same job ??

 

[rikhav]

Hi regha

Recomended is 32 gb but i guess 16 gb is also good enough but its suggested it be 4 x 4 dimms and dual channel for faster speeds

Also we observed yesterday that depending on buffer set the load on cpu varies

Which i7 cpu you have?

I7 would have lots more level 1 , 2 and 3 cache then i5s

 

[regeHA]

Pardon my ignorance - but wont a graphic equalizer do the same job ??

It will, for the most part. However, where the Bug scores (and trumps IMHO) is the upsampling/upscaling. Nothing in Foobar components comes close.

So yes, while a graphic equaliser will help you achieve similar results (for the most part), it is also at the same time only one part of the equation.

A good example here is the PotPlayer, it has resampling/upsampling/upscaling for both audio and video that other players simply do not have.

 

[regeHA]

Which i7 cpu you have?

I7 would have lots more level 1 , 2 and 3 cache then i5s

4th gen, i7 4790K.

The Bug does not seem to be interested in my GPU, I have a GTX 980 that software like madVR maxes out as well as most games, but the CPU and RAM do not take much of a hit. With the Bug, the hit is on the processor, much less on the RAM, and negligible on the GPU.

 

[rikhav]

4th gen, i7 4790K.

The Bug does not seem to be interested in my GPU, I have a GTX 980 that software like madVR maxes out as well as most games, but the CPU and RAM do not take much of a hit. With the Bug, the hit is on the processor, much less on the RAM, and negligible on the GPU.

4790k is a beast for consumer grade cpus

Its also unlocked so you can do good over clock. Have you tried?

There is no graphics or video involved so bug would not bother the GPU at all IMO