Using any audio source with HQPlayer - Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, Soundcloud [2021-2022]

It’s easier if you start with your current PC specs?

Do you use Roon and HQplayer Desktop on one machine? Or separate machines?

For using free trial you don’t need to buy a machine. Can use what you have

Embedded can be installed on most Intel and AMD based machines

First tell me specs of your current machines and then can help with steps to do trial

Now I have a Lenovo N5RCO6A laptop with an Intel core i5-1035G1 CPU 1.00 GHz as a source. 8/256. And I use it for everything. And he is the only one who has Windows 10 on it. There were plans to buy a separate computer more powerful for the HQ player, but the war changed plans a little … but I will definitely buy it later anyway. Do I need to remove windows from my only laptop in order to run the Embedded version? Or do I need to take a separate hardware for the experiment? It seems to me that I could ask for some kind of PC for the experiment at my work

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@dabassgoesboomboom have installed latest HQPlayer Desktop 4.20.0 and running UPGateway with Ubuntu NAA against it.
Unfortunately the static noise issue is still there playing Apple Music, Qobuz with changing bit rates.
Staying with plain redbook is still working fine.

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Thanks for testing and confirming. I found the same, even with Embedded 4.33.1 and latest Desktop.

Since it was only me reporting this for nearly 12 months I waited for someone else to test and reproduce

I think it is sadly safe to say UP Board NAA cannot be recommended for NAA input if auto sample rate switching is required :pleading_face:

As you say, it is fine with fixed sample rate

I’ve also tested upsampling to a fixed constant sample rate but unfortunately the same story.
So the issue is connected with the source sample rate and not the target sample rate

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Yep I found same issue.

Seems it is HQP input issue, not HQP output issue.

But obviously affects the output.

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Hi Igor

The best thing is just do a free trial of HQPlayer OS image - it boots from USB stick and does not affect your Windows installation at all.

You just have to make sure BIOS is set to boot from USB drive first before internal hard drive.

If your CPU supports AVX2, use this image: https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/hqplayerd/images/hqplayer-embedded-4.33.1-x64avx2.7z

If CPU doesn’t support AVX2, use this image:
https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/hqplayerd/images/hqplayer-embedded-4.33.1-x64sse42.7z

Unzip the .7z file and use etcher to burn the image to a USB stick.

This means you will need a separate machine to run Roon on.

Or you can use that machine as UPnP renderer. So on a tablet/phone, you can play direct to the HQPlayer Embedded server.

This is a nice way to trial HQPlayer with only 1 machine.

If you borrow another laptop from work, then load HQPlayer OS on the more powerful one.

After it boots, you simply for to the IP address in any web browser, to do the configuration (for example choose filters, sample rates etc)

Don’t buy anything yet till you can spend time with the free trial.

And stay safe.

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@jussi_laako

FYI ive tested both hqplayer-embedded-4.33.2-x64sse42 and hqplayer-embedded-4.32.5-x64sse42
With upboard gateway device mode UAC2 both crash regularly randomly and require hard reboot.

hqplayer-embedded-4.30.3-x64gen is stable

OK, that is 5.4 kernel version. Meaning that for stable performance we would need to stick to 5.4 kernel.

I need to check if I could make a build of HQPlayer OS on top of older OS baseline.

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At the moment I’m making a build of NAA OS with this older kernel. Will be up shortly. Doing HQPlayer OS is quite a bit more trouble. So I’d rather just provide NAA OS, which doesn’t require as frequent updates as HQPlayer.

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Now there are two special builds of NAA OS with “uac2” in the package name. These are mixture of older and latest. With 5.4 kernel and latest networkaudiod.

I made builds for both RPi4 and “x64ramfs”.

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Hi Jussi - I tried both these uac2 builds.

With RPi4 and UPBoard for NAA input - Windows 10 source (Qobuz Desktop app)

Still have the same issues when sample rate changes.

Pausing the track when it goes quiet and then pressing play again fixes the issue 100% of the time - then the issue comes back some track later when sample rate changes again.

I’m not sure if the pause & play trick gives a clue what could be the issue?

I still can’t recommend this method for NAA input unless you are just using a USB source with fixed sample rate. Or happy to pause and play when the issue comes up.

OK, so the mystery is still unresolved.

I would suggest to stick to hardware solutions until there’s some improvement in this scope. So far, this feature has not been particularly popular, or attracted notable amount of interest.

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I think there has been interest in this thread but the reports of unreliability probably turned off a lot of people.

At the same time I see you’ve spent quite a bit of time especially this year (thanks!) trying to fix it but it seems tricky.

Any luck at your end find/testing an interface solution that is cheaper than ADI-2 for inputs?

HDSPe AIO, especially if you look into using something for HQPlayer running on Windows.

I don’t have budget to go shopping test interfaces right now, but I will do it later if possible.

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Continues right here folks!

Using any audio source with HQPlayer - Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, Soundcloud [2023] - Audio Gear Talk / HQ Player - Roon Labs Community

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