hifihere

Sadly Squeezeslave only supports 16/44.1 but it is gapless.

Wilbert-vb I absolutely agree with you regarding iPeng. Recently I made similar comments on the VB forum. It is the most polished controller I have used. I left MPod quickly and moved to MPDroid. I like the new version that came out last week but still miss the slick features of iPeng. My main reason for leaving the Squeeze platform was the lack of gapless playback which I consider essential. An added surprise was how much better the sound was when I moved to MPD control with MPod and MPDroid. Demian, maybe I have done all I can with the config at this point. I agree with your choice of the Juli@ for digital output. It is the best I have heard so far for that use.

I am glad to see this thread light up again after six months Demian would you please provide specific details for a configuration of ALSA/MPD? Earlier you suggested defeating the mixer for example so that and any other setting details would be appreciated. My mission is to get a more transparent sound from the Vortexbox using ALSA/MPD. So far my biggest improvement in software settings was to move away from the Squeezebox control environment to direct control of MPD. I expect a streamlined ALSA/MPD configuration would benefit many users . Perhaps this should be moved to a new thread where we could share our results.

Thank you for your rapid response Demian. I do realize that either ALSA or OSS are necessary with Vortexbox Player. I just spent 47 days experimenting with replacing ALSA with OSS4 with disastrous results so it's back to ALSA tuning for now. I don't know what is specifically being bypassed by using "hw" but I can report that the software volume control is no longer functional and the muddy sound is transformed. When USB is used the volume control is not functional either regardless of what hardware setting I enter so I assumed that USB was a more direct path (?) I would like to remove Pulseaudio but that left Vortexbox crippled when I did. When you said "I have tried this with the latest mpd..." were you referring to disabling the software mixer?

Hi Demian, I am intrigued by your mpd.conf settings. I don't mean to hijack this thread but your conf settings seem to apply to me. My current project is to squeeze all I can out of Vortexbox. It uses MPD as a player and recently implemented USB 2.0 support. Pulseaudio and ALSA are terrible sounding paths. I have been able to get large improvements for SPDIF output by setting hardware to "hw" or "spdif". This bypasses the volume control and improves sound tremendously. What would be a good conf to get the most direct connection to USB?