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Poweramp for Android just dropped a major upgrade. First impressions:

- Overall, seems to be a nice upgrade, with a few minor issues.

- I already had the paid version, and didn't need to pay again to get the full version upgrade.

- The new default UI skin looks nice, but the new way of implementing the seek bar is lame (it is mostly hidden behind the Pause/Play/Forward/Back buttons and is difficult to access/use without accidentally triggering other unintended actions).

- Volume control with smaller steps than the Android system volume control is nice.

- The upgrade toggled the setting that replaces the lock screen background with the album cover art of currently playing album (I previously had that feature disabled). Easy enough to change it back, but IMO upgrades should preserve settings wherever possible.

- The Artist list shows too little info per screen since they now insist on showing per-artist artwork (or placeholder for same), and there's no choice for a pure text list view any more. And if you're going to insist on doing that, at least default the artwork to something reasonable (e.g. grab the album cover art from one of the albums) instead of just taking up screen real estate with a placeholder.

- The audio effects screen doesn't render correctly depending on your screen aspect ratio. Renders fine on my co-worker's Samsung, but one of the knobs (and labels for same) is chopped off on my LG (which apparently has a slightly shorter height-to-width ratio than the Samsung). Not that it's an effect I'd use much (audio tempo shift), so whatever.

Still exploring the new features, will post more thoughts if anything noteworthy comes up. Above mentioned co-worker swears that it "sounds better" but I'm not convinced, and can't do a direct A/B since the old version has been replaced. Bluetooth glitches are still there, but that's Android's fault not Poweramp's.

So, Poweramp is nice, but it was kinda stuck in a rut for a while there. I've been using Player Pro for years and can't recommend it enough (in case anyone is looking for something else). Great dev, great product. It doesn't look SUPER modern, but it has the features I want.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... o&hl=en_US

FWIW, here are the old Poweramp APKs, though you'd have to modify the name within the APK to have one installed at the same time as the official (and I'm not willing to do that right now ). https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?q=poweramp

What's a site that one can download lossless audio that's of higher quality that can take advantage of something like this?

Rip your own CD's?
HDTracks is a good place for 192/24 content. Prices are completely reasonable for HD content, IMHO. Speaking of which, I need to get more of those.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Rip your own CD's?
HDTracks is a good place for 192/24 content. Prices are completely reasonable for HD content, IMHO. Speaking of which, I need to get more of those.

Both good suggestions, though I'm not sure 192/24 is even worth it on a phone. Also, HDTracks can be more expensive than say, artists own sites at times, so look around.

Yeah, I still buy a lot of physical CDs.

HDTracks is good, but can be expensive.

Bandcamp is good for a lot of smaller "indie" labels.

At the end of the day, for my phone I still use lossy compression (OGG Vorbis) to save space. But I'd still rather start from a "clean" source to avoid transcoding artifacts, and make the quality tradeoff myself based on what I can hear vs. storage space.

And where I'm not constrained by storage capacity (home network), I use FLAC.

Been happy with Foobar on the Android phone, so never looked elsewhere. Someday I will have a current-gen phone with enough storage for my entire music library in FLAC (though I'd prefer WAV). FTR, that's about 223.7 GiB (FLAC) or 371.6 GiB (WAV).

Captain Ned wrote:

Been happy with Foobar on the Android phone, so never looked elsewhere.

Yeah, once you get passed the "can it play my source material?" it really comes down to things like album/artist art, DSPs, and custom playlist stuff. If you don't use any of that stuff then a super basic player is all ya need.

Captain Ned wrote:

Been happy with Foobar on the Android phone, so never looked elsewhere. Someday I will have a current-gen phone with enough storage for my entire music library in FLAC (though I'd prefer WAV). FTR, that's about 223.7 GiB (FLAC) or 371.6 GiB (WAV).

Audiophilia Nervosa alert!

Foobar2000 wasn't available for Android when I got my current phone. Been meaning to check it out.

I could use FLAC on the phone if I spent the time to whittle the music collection down to its bare essentials, but I really like having everything with me at all times, and that's just not going to happen without employing some form of lossy compression. With OGG Vorbis @ 160 kbit it fits onto a 200 GB micro-SD card with a little space left over, and it's transparent vs. lossless on our car systems and on the headphones I use on the train and at work (unless I do a careful A/B comparison). IOW, for me OGG Vorbis 160 kbit is "good enough" for casual listening.

I keep the lossless rips at home on the server.

Also been meaning to see if OGG Opus offers much of an advantage, but it's pretty far down the list of priorities right now.

Yeah, it's not ideal, but I usually have about 30-40GB of FLACs on the phone. Switch out when I want diff stuff. It's, again, very much not great but it's enough music that I don't mind doing the work every once in a while.

Anyway, I'll have to check out the new poweramp to see if it can unseat the current champ on my phone.

In my case, having 4+ decades worth of music collection (I've ripped a fair bit of my old vinyl in addition to all the stuff which was purchased on CD and as downloads) presents some interesting challenges. It barely fits, even with lossy compression.

just brew it! wrote:

Audiophilia Nervosa alert!

Yeah, if anyone here has it, it's me. Might have something to do with being a Stereophile subscriber since 1986 or so, way back when the mag was irregularly published and in digest size.

If I were to digitize the vinyl not already duplicated in CD, my guess is that I'd just about double the existing library size. Digitizing all of the vinyl would likely triple the size. Nervosa would demand full digitization, which also means a new deck and cartridge before embarking on the project.

just brew it! wrote:

In my case, having 4+ decades worth of music collection (I've ripped a fair bit of my old vinyl in addition to all the stuff which was purchased on CD and as downloads) presents some interesting challenges. It barely fits, even with lossy compression.

Hey man, I get it. This is just what's on my local PC. The NAS has more. I'm just willing to sacrifice the expandable storage to get the device that has more features than not, that I want.

Been using this for awhile now and will not go back to any of the others, it can actually bi-pass the android ecosystem and hook into the audio codec itself...which is great on my Lg G5 as I get 24/192.

Plus I can play iso and dsd format as well.


http://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Audiophilia Nervosa alert!

Yeah, if anyone here has it, it's me. Might have something to do with being a [i'Stereophile[/i] subscriber since 1986 or so, way back when the mag was irregularly published and in digest size.

Get the exact same bits back and you're golden, assuming no timing jitter has been introduced (and AFAIK jitter is generally a non-issue with modern digital playback systems).

Interesting aside: FLAC apparently employs lossy compression, but also has a lossless side channel which conveys the sample-by-sample error between the original source and the lossy compressed version. This allows the original source material to be reconstructed exactly. And yes, I did a double-take when I first read this.

The other elephant in the room is the ROIO collection. All of this is lossless (APE, FLAC, SHN):



I'm one of the repositories for the known Pink Floyd ROIO universe.

just brew it! wrote:

Interesting aside: FLAC apparently employs lossy compression, but also has a lossless side channel which conveys the sample-by-sample error between the original source and the lossy compressed version. This allows the original source material to be reconstructed exactly. And yes, I did a double-take when I first read this.

All I know is that MD5 hashes of a WAV and an de-converted flac of the same WAV match. That said, you're not helping my nervosa. All of my archival rips are in WAV.

credible wrote:

Been using this for awhile now and will not go back to any of the others, it can actually bi-pass the android ecosystem and hook into the audio codec itself...which is great on my Lg G5 as I get 24/192.

Plus I can play iso and dsd format as well.

http://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

That's really interesting. Not something I'd use myself though, since most of my source material is 44.1/48 16-bit anyway, and I'd rather not need to deal with an external DAC on my phone.

Captain Ned wrote:

All I know is that MD5 hashes of a WAV and an de-converted flac of the same WAV match. That said, you're not helping my nervosa. All of my archival rips are in WAV.

Unless someone's maliciously trying to trick you (it is possible to intentionally generate MD5 collisions given the amount of computing power available to mere mortals these days...) the MD5 doesn't lie.

Though I suppose storage is cheap enough these days that if storing the raw, unadulterated PCM bits lets you sleep better at night, there's no real harm.

And as an aside to the aside, this is why MD5 is no longer recommended as a protection mechanism against malicious alteration of files. It's still perfectly fine for detecting incidental bitrot though (which is how I still use it).

Just gonna leave a couple things here for the....uh.....nervosa crowd.

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

But listen, I get it. If you THINK or FEEL it sounds better, then that's all that really matters. Y'know, so long as your nervosa doesn't plunge you into super debt or something. (also sorry we're so far off topic)

DancinJack wrote:

(also sorry we're so far off topic)

TBH I started to post my Poweramp thoughts in DYMT, then changed my mind and started a new thread here instead. So no harm, no foul?

just brew it! wrote:

credible wrote:

Been using this for awhile now and will not go back to any of the others, it can actually bi-pass the android ecosystem and hook into the audio codec itself...which is great on my Lg G5 as I get 24/192.

Plus I can play iso and dsd format as well.

http://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

That's really interesting. Not something I'd use myself though, since most of my source material is 44.1/48 16-bit anyway, and I'd rather not need to deal with an external DAC on my phone.

Its probably still not for you JBI but you I just wanted to add that you don't need a dac to use this, it essentially turns our LG phones into a dac.

Plus when I set it up in the settings for a 'direct' connection where it bypasses the android ecosystem and hooks into the internal dac, sounds very good to these older ears.

Good for me as well as I have many dsd,dsf and sacd and this app allows you to play them on your phone.

credible wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

credible wrote:

Been using this for awhile now and will not go back to any of the others, it can actually bi-pass the android ecosystem and hook into the audio codec itself...which is great on my Lg G5 as I get 24/192.

Plus I can play iso and dsd format as well.

http://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

That's really interesting. Not something I'd use myself though, since most of my source material is 44.1/48 16-bit anyway, and I'd rather not need to deal with an external DAC on my phone.

Its probably still not for you JBI but you I just wanted to add that you don't need a dac to use this, it essentially turns our LG phones into a dac.

Yes, I actually discovered that yesterday and gave it a try. I turned it off when I discovered that it was causing Poweramp to pause whenever it wasn't the foreground application. It doesn't do that when running through the normal Android audio stack, go figure. I'll have to see if there's a way to disable the behavior.

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

Robotics wrote:

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

I spend a couple of hours a day in a metal can on a commuter train with spotty signal coverage, so I like having the entire music collection stored in the phone. This also has the desirable side effect of not chewing through data from my data plan. I also really like Poweramp's EQ settings.

Robotics wrote:

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

Why should I pay someone else to listen to music I already own?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Robotics wrote:

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

Why should I pay someone else to listen to music I already own?

That too. OTOH, you can use Spotify for free (but then you need to put up with ads, and they limit the quality of the stream). I do use Spotify to check out new (to me) music I'm not sure I want to buy yet, but if I decide I really like an album I prefer to buy the CD (or a lossless download from Bandcamp).

Also... artists receive less than a penny per streamed song on Spotify. If you buy the album on Bandcamp instead, the artist receives the bulk of the proceeds (Bandcamp's cut is 10-15%). Seems like a better way of supporting the artist to me, especially for the sort of obscure stuff I often listen to.

just brew it! wrote:

Robotics wrote:

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

I spend a couple of hours a day in a metal can on a commuter train with spotty signal coverage, so I like having the entire music collection stored in the phone. This also has the desirable side effect of not chewing through data from my data plan. I also really like Poweramp's EQ settings.

This thread made me make a few changes and for now I am quite happy because like you JBI I like to have a lot of music on hand depending on my mood. While I got a decent amount of lossless on my 200gb plus storage card, I still want for more.

So after researching what I could find out about spotify's version of 'high quality' downloads, it appears they are as you have (OGG Vorbis).

Now after listening in the car and having the Aptx I am satisfied with the sound quality and I have a massive amount of my collection with me now at all times and no worries for signal loss because its all downloaded.

Yes, with OGG Vorbis encoding I can fit the entire collection on a 200 GB card (barely). I've been meaning to play around with OGG Opus (their next-gen lossy encoder), as it is claimed you can get equivalent quality at lower bitrates compared to Vorbis. The downside is less widespread device support (especially older devices), but I generally use the lossy compression only for my phone these days (and Android supports Opus since 6.0).

Robotics wrote:

Why dont you use spotify or etc? What kind of music quality do you listen on it? In short why you choice these apps?

Some people live or work in places where streaming isn't always available, or isn't always reliable.

And, some people like to listen to music they already own without having to pay someone else for the ability to do so. Poweramp works really well for this.