Not sure of the “studio” terms, but for stereo width I used " A1Stereo Control" (free) and it worked pretty well, both to make stereo image wider and smaller and with no apparent side effects as long as you kept it below 130%. There might be better ones available from big VST plugin manufacturers like iZotope and Wave.
For sound signature I tried various saturation and mastering plugins (FabFilter, Ozone) which could definitely be used to fine-tune the sound, but some of them are very complex.
For adding harmonics I tried this one, its rather subtle most of the time but works very well and complement my somewhat dry and sterile HiFi sound:
It is no-go, since they don’t play nice with DSD, GPU offloads, or multi-platform (Windows, macOS and Linux). And have a lot of other issues too, like having their own baked-in GUI not suitable for headless servers like HQPlayer Embedded.
I think that adding “special effects” goes against the purpose of HQPlayer, which is all about fidelity. Once you add in special effects like harmonic distortion etc then there’s little need for high quality upsampling - they are taking the data in different directions.
if you really want to flavor your sound with harmonics and such, use a class A SET amp - I think you’ll get better results than trying to emulate it digitally. Thats what I do …
I did read his response… And there are many other vendors of player products, DAWs, etc, that manage to support the various industry standard plugins… Audirvana for instance… Its just competition for HQplayer and Roon’s own software… And it is OK for them to say they don’t want to support that stuff… It is just an opportunity for someone else…
The way HQPlayer is architected, it cannot use VST or AU plugins. They are not “industry standard” plugins. They are plugins with an API that some vendors choose to support because they can do so without redesigning their product. Let’s not assign motives to Jussi when you don’t really have a clue if you are right or wrong.
I personally don’t have any need for plug-in, but already there are HQPlayer features that are platform specific.
Like UPnP renderer for Embedded.
So I guess plug-in support could be limited to HQP macOS / Win10 ? As an Embedded user I would’t be angry because I understand technical limitations exist with different platforms.
Most DAWs support single operating system. And even fewer suppport DSD.
Audirvana is macOS and Windows, it doesn’t support Linux. It also doesn’t support processing DSD files to DSD output through those plugins without intermediate conversion to PCM (if even then).
In addition, there’s no headless embedded version of Audirvana that works on Linux based streamer devices. Also Audirvana doesn’t support offloading DSP processing to a GPU through CUDA/ROCm.
And you my friend have no clue about my experience with hardware and software research and development for the past 35+ years… Most sw developers would consider VST and AU APIs as de facto industry standards… Even Apple includes the AU API as part of their OS… Which is mostly BSD Unix at its core…
And by the way… I never said I wanted such a thing… I only opined on how it might be an interesting feature given the requests from others…
OTOH, macOS, nor Windows understands anything about DSD. Which is also de facto industry standard. VST which was created by Steinberg for their DAWs, doesn’t understand anything about DSD either. While ASIO driver interface which was also created by Steinberg supports DSD, but their DAWs don’t…
I have looked into VST API and concluded that it is unsuitable for HQPlayer.
I could go on with various things like level of native plugins for ARM64 (Apple’s M1 silicon and Raspberry Pi4) platforms and such.
Would it be possible to get a no GUI option for Windows? Or a way to launch it minimized without splash. That way we could easily launch hqplayer at the startup without having to deal with the desktop window. Since I run hqplayer through Roon I have no need for the gui unless I want to change settings.
Good idea, maybe start with one of those mini-icons in the bottom-right of Windows, so you can open the GUI when you need it, but it stays hidden by default.
A setting to run at higher priority would also be nice (its important when you use Windows for other things at the same time).
Thanks for the loudness functionality, to make it even better it could be combined with volume levelling in such a way that the volume adjusted by volume levelling is not used for the min/max dB parameters to the loudness (so that for example -30dB always sounds with an equal volume level). That way you could apply proper loudness according to real sound pressure…
Volume levelling could be used in Roon, but it’s of course preferable to only involve DSP and volume adjustment in one software. But I guess Roon needs to send volume information at the beginning of each tune (if/when needed).
