Mr Pops Alot

Musicbee isn't that bad, I've tried it and it's decent (can't tell differences between sound quality of music players), but moved back to JRiver because I was more familiar with it. Most people in my circle main Musicbee (and primarily listen to 16/44 FLAC) and had no issues. Oh yea, Foobar is getting really old. You could put on the Eole or Georga skins to make Foobar look like a modern player, but you then suffer the issues of performance since its only a 32bit application (with subpar optimization), used to use it, now I don't. I "tried" Roon, but if you took away the metadata services (either because your library is just obscure indie Japanese music or you blacklisted Roon labs), you're left with a good looking shell that hogs your computer, sounds bad because of said resource use, be forced to import every artist picture even if you have a directory that you could just set and forget, and it doesn't even split range rips There's a reason why there's an entire thread bashing Roon on this fourm. Don't forget about Windows 11's "Media Player", which doesn't even have album artist nor date sorting; neither does it support DSD or WavPack. It's literally just Groove Music (an already bad player) and put a video plugin, that's all.

If you're using a ripper that can write log files (ExactAudioCopy, DBPoweramp with secure ripping), if it says that it ripped 100% of the data without issues (track/range quality 100%), you should be fine. This happens a lot with independent releases or ones only available through events.

Sounds promising, but I expect it to be another ffmpeg based player (a la Jellyfin/Plex) and have mid-range sound quality (hence why no one cares about ffmpeg-based players). If they are going to build their own audio engine, I expect it to be on par with Audirvana (haven't tried it yet, but reviews say sound quality is very good) At least it'll probably blow Roon into the purgatory that it belongs in by looking, sounding, and handling tags and pictures better and not costing a fortune

This basically just acts like Groove Music without the Spotify integration. Complete with lack of DSP, lack of sorting by album artist, and not being able to separate multiple artists And it doesn't want to read my folders, or the metadata, and there isn't a manual scan option either. This is all you get with the options menu. At least Groove Music gave you a equalizer (even if it sucked) Another case of Microsoft half-assing like they always do. They could've just bought up Roon and made it free with Windows 11 (not a good idea, but possible), but no. Even Emby/Jellyfin had full codec support, actually read my metadata, and had more than two sorting options (and also use DLNA to connect to HQPlayer embedded. I couldn't manage to connect Emby to HQPlayer 4 desktop due to no http playlist output).

Now since the Date metadata field is shown in HQPlayer and grouping by year has been added, it wouldn't be hard to add sorting by dates (either from oldest to newest or newest to oldest). Definitely agree about adding artist and album bios. It would make album pages more complete with less whitespace. Going from artist -> album can also increase performance (my 3 year old Ryzen computer and phone doesn't like it when all 5K albums are shown at once) and allow the artist bios to show. Oh and artists aren't shown in track listings, meaning in albums where vocalists take credit or in various artists albums, you have no idea who is the artist until you play the song. A simple Artist - Album or having the composer and track artist/performer have their own lines Mock-ups of what it could look like are at the end of this post PS: It was funny clicking on an album image only to see it shrink to nothingness; but was definitely not practical