In an earlier post I mentioned I was switching my PC music players from Winamp to GOM player. Well, GOM player is not far enough along in its development for me to use it on a daily basis.
I have 3 issues with GOM player today: a bug in mp3 decoding, and a bug in sound-driver-playing, and buffering.
Some of my music (actually, a large portion of it) plays fine in Winamp, but flickers badly in GOM player. What I mean is, a little chunk of audio is skipped (like 1/10th of a second's worth), so the song "speeds up" by 1/10th of a second, which sounds horrible to the ear; it messes up the beat of the music, especially if you're trying to sing to it or follow it in your mind while listening to it.
I know there's a ton of different mp3 encoders that can generate mp3 files in a wide variety of ways, including CBR versus VBR differences; Winamp just seems to handle them all perfectly, today.
There's some bug in how GOM player talks to my sound driver, in a way I've never seen before. Let's say I load up an m3u file (which is a list of many mp3 songs to play, in the order to play them). GOM player plays the first song. Then, it switches to the second song, and begins "playing" it - except no sound is coming out of my speakers! I can see the little thumb/bar moving horizontally, showing that the music is "playing" from GOM's point of view, but I can't hear a thing.
If I grab the little thumb and drag it ANYWHERE (including right to the spot it was just at), the sound immediately resumes playing through the speakers! So, I have to baby-sit every song - grabbing the thumb and dragging it back to the beginning OF EVERY SONG, to get that next song to play. Frustrating.
The last issue is that GOM player isn't buffering up enough decoded music ahead of the play-point. I know this because when I start launching apps and opening windows, even IE windows, the music cuts out for fractions of a second, then resumes. The music gets choppy like that, over and over, until the CPU is back to "idle", then the music plays continuously again. Winamp never did that. I assume it's a buffering issue; perhaps Winamp is multithreaded, with one thread doing playback, and another doing decoding; the decoder must run fast enough to be ahead of the playback by a wide margin, for times when CPU becomes scarce. Then the playback can read its data from the buffered-up audio, play it, and not hiccup.
Really intelligent software will even do internal "low-water-mark" measurements to see how well the buffer size is working; if it ever runs out of buffer entirely between decoding and playback, it tweaks an internal setting so it remembers to keep a larger buffer next time! That way it can prevent hiccups in the future by learning about how this particular machine works.
Yes, I'm running this on a machine with not quite enough memory (512MB Windows XP; it's the max this poor box can have). But if Winamp can do it, I would like to think GOM player can, with the proper programming.
So, I guess I don't have a good music player after all.
Yes I've tried VLC media player, which is awesome for movies, but has a sucky user interface in my opinion. You can't display a playlist of upcoming songs you've queued up, such as when you open a m3u file which VLC player does understand just fine.
I'm going to look around some more.
I have 3 issues with GOM player today: a bug in mp3 decoding, and a bug in sound-driver-playing, and buffering.
Some of my music (actually, a large portion of it) plays fine in Winamp, but flickers badly in GOM player. What I mean is, a little chunk of audio is skipped (like 1/10th of a second's worth), so the song "speeds up" by 1/10th of a second, which sounds horrible to the ear; it messes up the beat of the music, especially if you're trying to sing to it or follow it in your mind while listening to it.
I know there's a ton of different mp3 encoders that can generate mp3 files in a wide variety of ways, including CBR versus VBR differences; Winamp just seems to handle them all perfectly, today.
There's some bug in how GOM player talks to my sound driver, in a way I've never seen before. Let's say I load up an m3u file (which is a list of many mp3 songs to play, in the order to play them). GOM player plays the first song. Then, it switches to the second song, and begins "playing" it - except no sound is coming out of my speakers! I can see the little thumb/bar moving horizontally, showing that the music is "playing" from GOM's point of view, but I can't hear a thing.
If I grab the little thumb and drag it ANYWHERE (including right to the spot it was just at), the sound immediately resumes playing through the speakers! So, I have to baby-sit every song - grabbing the thumb and dragging it back to the beginning OF EVERY SONG, to get that next song to play. Frustrating.
The last issue is that GOM player isn't buffering up enough decoded music ahead of the play-point. I know this because when I start launching apps and opening windows, even IE windows, the music cuts out for fractions of a second, then resumes. The music gets choppy like that, over and over, until the CPU is back to "idle", then the music plays continuously again. Winamp never did that. I assume it's a buffering issue; perhaps Winamp is multithreaded, with one thread doing playback, and another doing decoding; the decoder must run fast enough to be ahead of the playback by a wide margin, for times when CPU becomes scarce. Then the playback can read its data from the buffered-up audio, play it, and not hiccup.
Really intelligent software will even do internal "low-water-mark" measurements to see how well the buffer size is working; if it ever runs out of buffer entirely between decoding and playback, it tweaks an internal setting so it remembers to keep a larger buffer next time! That way it can prevent hiccups in the future by learning about how this particular machine works.
Yes, I'm running this on a machine with not quite enough memory (512MB Windows XP; it's the max this poor box can have). But if Winamp can do it, I would like to think GOM player can, with the proper programming.
So, I guess I don't have a good music player after all.
Yes I've tried VLC media player, which is awesome for movies, but has a sucky user interface in my opinion. You can't display a playlist of upcoming songs you've queued up, such as when you open a m3u file which VLC player does understand just fine.
I'm going to look around some more.
2 comments:
GOM Player is great, but IMO better suited for video playback rather than music. Of the video players, another player perhaps worth looking at is the Korean KMPlayer.
But more than any video player I'd like to recommend, if you haven't done so yet, having a look at foobar2000. Its probably the most advanced and feature rich free audio player available and may well suit your needs. It is also highly configurable. The only weak spot I can see is its interface, but if the appearance is very important to you, there are ways to improve the appearance, though you may have to look around a bit. Alternatively, it can be delegated to the task bar, a location from where many of its functions can be used.
I've just discovered your blog, btw, and it seems to contain a lot of useful or intersting stuff. Liked your research into flies sensing "emotion". Though I'm not sure if, in this case, it isn'[t more the sense of danger that not only flies but other animals including humans, if they aren't distracted, can feel when another being wants to impinge on them/us. I think it may be related to the fact that existentially, prior to any conception we could have about it, everything in nature is interconnected. Also, your observation may be related to what Rupert Sheldrake is trying to introduce into science and refers to as "The sense of being stared at":
http://www.sheldrake.org/books_tapes/staring_interview_SeattlePI.html
That is an interesting article on the Sense of Being Stared At, I appreciate the link, and the media playback software suggestions. Thanks.
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