lotusaurus

Thanks for the incredibly quick response!

What happens if there are two instances of HQP trying to use the same NAA at the same time? Is that even possible? I was about to do some testing and realised that I might end up doing this, as I have just one NAA.

Mario, Thank you very much for your generous gift and your patience in waiting for my comments. I received Around the World with Kreisler and the samplers and thoroughly enjoyed them, although I wasn't familiar with most of the music. Not necessarily a bad thing for "auditioning": I have no pre-conceived ideas about how the pieces should sound. Disclaimers: I'm not a musician, have no music training and don't have a high-end system, but family members play violin and piano in the house, so I at least have some idea of how these sound. I found the recorded sound very impressive - certainly I can't think of anything else I have that sounded as good in terms of how real the instruments sounded. I can't in all honesty say that the piano was always lifelike, but most pieces in the samples were very good indeed. (For context, I've yet to find a realistic piano recording and I've trawled through various forum suggestions.) The violin was very sweet and entrancing, and showed "bite" when it needed to. I found the staging in Around the World with Kreisler very convincing: from my listening position, the piano was in the centre and the violin was slightly to the left and a little higher. While I don't understand all the nuances of how the recordings were made, I can say that I found the final results to be exceptionally good.

A quick update. I substituted \040 for the blank space in the share name in fstab (//server/audio/classical\040music), and it seems to work. I selected /smb as the path in Library and got the library populated.

You might be partly replying to someone else, but I take the point about not having spaces. The problem is that on my NAS I already have folders with spaces in the names and I've been using other software that is OK with those spaces. I'm a little reluctant to change the names because honestly I don't know how many other things will break. Looks like I'll have to play around a bit.

What needs to be done if there's a space in the name? For example, //server/audio/classical music. And can more than one folder be attached to /smb via the web interface?

Mario, if the offer is still available, I'd like to get Around the World with Kreisler.

I bought a used HP EliteDesk with an i7-9700T CPU: I think this is the (out-of-stock) model at Newegg (although I have 16GB RAM). I can run HQP Desktop under Win10 with output set to SDM, Adaptive output rate grey, poly-sinc-short-mp, ASDM7EC and Bit rate 48k x256. I don't know about convolution. The only time I've had dropouts is when Windows is doing some updating nonsense; CPU utilisation is around 60%. I assume it would be no higher under HQPE. Output is to RPi4 running RoPieee as NAA.

If you just want to tag your FLAC files, I believe Bliss handles FLAC files natively. https://www.blisshq.com/support/faq/general/what-file-formats.html

In my ongoing efforts to find some tool to help me tag my music properly (by which I mean at least consistently), I came across MusiCHI, which seems orientated towards classical music and uses its own reference database for tagging. https://musichieu.wordpress.com/about/ And there's a review here: https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MusiCHI.htm Unfortunately it seems to be dead - well, zombie-like. The developer has moved onto hardware, but in theory the software is still available. In the comments the developer says the software is still maintained and there is a demo version listed in the comments, but it doesn't work. I've been trying to get a demo by contacting the developer directly, who kindly provided a download link and customised login credentials, but the demo still won't run. I think the software can still be purchased. If anyone has had any recent experience with MusiCHI, would love to hear about it. (Even though I couldn't get the software going, the developer's thoughts on the Zen of classical music tagging are very interesting - and amusing: https://musichieu.wordpress.com/tagging-audio-topics/) But right now, bliss does look like a good option. For some reason I thought it wasn't a good fit when I first looked at it. Must take another look.

I'm trying out Euphony with HQPe and was surprised to find that it (perhaps technically more accurately, HQPe) results in short gaps while playing. The gaps are typical of what I've experienced when HQP Desktop is struggling because of CPU overload. When I've run HPQD under Win10 (no optimisations) on the same PC using the same settings (DSD256, ASM7EC, poly-sinc-short-mp) and same 44.1/16 flac files, I don't experience these gaps. I'm sending output to RopiEEE on a RPi4 and from there to my DAC. Admittedly I haven't checked every single setting; I'm not familiar with HQPe and the settings layout is a little different from HQPD, but before I do further checking, I thought I'd check here on whether there are some obvious things I'm missing. I'm not running Roon or anything else under Euphony, but it's the trial version running off a USB stick. Would this make a difference? I don't really want to wipe my current working SSD just to test with a "full" installation. I had thought that with whatever optimisations are done with Euphony, HQPe would run at least as well as HQPD. Is there something else I should be doing? Does Euphony need some time to "settle down" after booting up (but note it's not the first boot)?

I never managed to find the magic cantation or secret handshake for getting a beta version. Probably something is messed up with my RoPieee. But I see that RoPieee has a new version, 4.002, that supports native DSD. It's working fine for me (as long as I don't have the C-3PO plug-in installed).

I stuck in the -W because of what I saw on C-3PO on github: "Starting form March, 15 2016 the mod that originate squeezelite-R2 is included in the squeezebox community official version of squeezelite, mantained by Ralph Irving. You could then use also that version with C-3PO, just remember to activate -W option." Ah, didn't realise that. After a lot more reading and experimenting, I added the pcp-dsdplay extension to pCP. Then I found that I didn't need the the DSDPlayer plugin in Daphile to play DSD natively. BUT this works only if the C-3PO plug-in is uninstalled. Just disabling it for pCP doesn't work; I needed to uninstall it. Here are my active plugins: And here are the most relevant File Types: Now to see if I can get upsampling to DSD512...

Not too familiar with DXD - or Daphile - but could the conversion be based on the filetype rather than the music format? What I mean is, if the DXD file is, say, a flac file, then Daphile will do the conversion based on what is listed for flac. I don't know what filetype wavpack uses, though.

OK, so I lied. I fired up Daphile and took a look at the C-3PO Transcoding Helper dropdown next to pCP under Player. I saw an error message about the player not being R2 compliant (or something like that). I had earlier read somewhere that the player needed the -W option, and it was certainly there in pCP, but I thought I might as well just restart pCP. After doing that, suddenly I could play my dsf DSD256 file upsampled to DSD512 (I think - more below). I added a flac file to the playlist, and that also upsampled to dsf at DSD512. But when I went back to the dsf file, I got the same earlier behaviour - Daphile just skipped over any dsf files. For fun, I restarted pCP and - yes, the dsf file played fine (upsampled). But after that track, it was back to skipping dsf files. It seems that whenever I restart pCP, I can play a single dsf track. After that, upsampling to dsf still works, but only on non-dsf files. @stefano_mbp Interested in trying to reproduce this? One caveat is that I'm not 100% sure that my DAC is receiving DSD512. I don't want to go into the minimalist lights that the DAC uses; bottom line is that it looks like DSD512, but not quite. I'm checking with the manufacturer.