4 ms·

Disclaimer: VLC main developer here. I would love to tell you that VLC (or mplayer or xine or whatever-video-engine) is great to play music, but it is not. And

by jbk 14y ago

Disclaimer: VLC main developer here. I would love to tell you that VLC (or mplayer or xine or whatever-video-engine) is great to play music, but it is not. And yet, a lot of person use VLC to play music, to our own astonishment. Therefore, we are working to make the audio part getting better, and we are working hard on that part (next hackdays topic, in December, is only the audio core). However, except gapless and a correct media library (which we have but is not activated), all the things listed from this article are done in VLC, including resampling, equalizer, loudness, fingerprinting, software amplification... VLC has also a compressor, a parametric equalizer, a spatializer, pitch correction, scaletempo and many downmixers / headphones enhancers. We have also Karaoke support... Moreover, libswresample is far from being the best quality ever. So, why don't we have gapless in VLC? Well, because to get correct gapless (not the 50ms you can have with VLC) or cross-fading, you need to have 2 inputs at the same time. And this needs quite a bit of work, notably to be sure to detect correctly EOF.

derleth 14y ago
> And yet, a lot of person use VLC to play music, to our own astonishment. Because it runs on every OS most people know about and it plays every file most people are able to feed it. Also, people have been willing to put up with RealPlayer, which is even worse for playing music.
- jbk 14y ago
  > Also, people have been willing to put up with RealPlayer, which is even worse for playing music. The number of people using RealPlayer is incredible, indeed.
albertzeyer 14y ago
Hey, the dev of this project here, Thanks a lot for the feedback! I didn't knew that VLC has advanced so much in such functionality like loudness normalization and dynamic range compression. How does it analyze the loudness? Does it also use the ReplayGain spec? What about album-loudness? It sounds like besides gapless playback and a database, VLC already has everything what a music player needs to have - or what you need that VLC becomes great to play music. Or is anything missing on the list? For me, the intelligent automatic queue is, besides the audio quality, a very important element (because it is the way I listen to my music).
- dsirijus 14y ago
  Sorry for derailing the discussion, but what do you think of foobar3000? Ideally, VLC guys would answer to this question too. :)
  - BCM43 14y ago
    I assume you mean foobar2000? http://www.foobar2000.org/ http://www.foobar2000.org/
  - albertzeyer 14y ago
    Foobar2000 is proprietary and Windows-only (thus I cannot even try it).
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Wow, how is it even monetized? And if not, why bother with proprietary?
  - Evbn 14y ago
    No nice visualizations, as my son discoverd . :-(
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  Wow, I'll have to check your music-player out. Ever since I left windows, I haven't found any music player that quite does things how I want like winamp did.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
thewarrior 14y ago
VLC gives you the option of increasing the volume upto 400 %. But its often the case that this damages the speakers (especially the tiny inbuilt speakers on some of the cheaper laptops). I dont know how this is but I've plenty of anecdotal evidence that this happens. So I think you guys should caution the users against using it too much .
- davewasthere 14y ago
  Feeding DC (when clipping) to a speaker is never healthy for it. But clipping has many sources. The internal amplifier being one of them.
- jbk 14y ago
  This is, of course, nonsense. This is software amplification, so at worse, you clip everything. It's like saying that you should not listen to metal or experimental music because it is more saturated and might destroy your speakers. The software cannot make the difference. VLC only uses the normal system APIs, so at worse, it will have a fully saturated output, that could be caused by the input OR the software amplification. If the laptop speakers cannot hold what the audio card is outputting, the issue is in the drivers.
  - thewarrior 14y ago
    Since I know nothing about this subject I'll take your word for it . Well I'm from India and the guy who sold me the laptop told me - "Dont use VLC" . Since then I've heard this "wisdom" from some others as well . I would like to respectfully add that I too have faced this and I dont know the cause . You can try googling "VLC damages speaker" and you'll see hundreds of threads turn up . Eg: http://www.indiastudychannel.com/experts/27429-Does-VLC-player-destroys-speakers-laptop.aspx http://www.indiastudychannel.com/experts/27429-Does-VLC-play... And another one: http://superuser.com/questions/337265/vlc-sound-boosting http://superuser.com/questions/337265/vlc-sound-boosting From what i gather on the above thread it turns out that some sound drivers are not that smart and so it ends up damaging the speakers and its not VLCs fault .
    - 14y ago
keenerd 14y ago
> Well, because to get correct gapless or cross-fading, you need to have 2 inputs at the same time. But, but VLC has no problem with multiple inputs. http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic
- jbk 14y ago
  Good catch. :) (of course, this is HN) Mosaic is using VLM, but VLC's main playlist does not use it :)
narag 14y ago
First thing first: thank you very much. VLC is a fine piece of software that has made me happy for so many hours! A data point about your surprise: I don't like database-like interfaces, just a plain list of songs, taking the minimum screen real state. The only really useful extra feature I like is loudness adjustment per song, and I prefer to set it manually.
pasbesoin 14y ago
I hope this isn't too OT. I used VLC to listen to several audio streams. I wish the built-in bookmarking was a bit better -- just enough to keep track of these URL's without jumping through hoops. For local media, it would be nice if VLC would (optionally?) remember where one stopped playback, so that one could resume there without having to hunt around or to manually note the location/time. I don't want to detract from core development (i.e. thank goodness I can view/listen to this stuff reliably and without tackling a plug-in hell). Just one user's anecdote. P.S. I'll add that initiating recording of a stream that is already playing could be a bit easier. (On Windows, I've found I have to start a second instance of VLC and start recording without first playing the stream.) And, my sincere apology if I've described features that are available but that I've missed or missed the controls for.

by jbk 14y ago

derleth 14y ago

> And yet, a lot of person use VLC to play music, to our own astonishment. Because it runs on every OS most people know about and it plays every file most people are able to feed it. Also, people have been willing to put up with RealPlayer, which is even worse for playing music.

jbk 14y ago
> Also, people have been willing to put up with RealPlayer, which is even worse for playing music. The number of people using RealPlayer is incredible, indeed.

albertzeyer 14y ago

Hey, the dev of this project here, Thanks a lot for the feedback! I didn't knew that VLC has advanced so much in such functionality like loudness normalization and dynamic range compression. How does it analyze the loudness? Does it also use the ReplayGain spec? What about album-loudness? It sounds like besides gapless playback and a database, VLC already has everything what a music player needs to have - or what you need that VLC becomes great to play music. Or is anything missing on the list? For me, the intelligent automatic queue is, besides the audio quality, a very important element (because it is the way I listen to my music).

dsirijus 14y ago
Sorry for derailing the discussion, but what do you think of foobar3000? Ideally, VLC guys would answer to this question too. :)
- BCM43 14y ago
  I assume you mean foobar2000? http://www.foobar2000.org/ http://www.foobar2000.org/
- albertzeyer 14y ago
  Foobar2000 is proprietary and Windows-only (thus I cannot even try it).
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Wow, how is it even monetized? And if not, why bother with proprietary?
- Evbn 14y ago
  No nice visualizations, as my son discoverd . :-(
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
Wow, I'll have to check your music-player out. Ever since I left windows, I haven't found any music player that quite does things how I want like winamp did.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

thewarrior 14y ago

VLC gives you the option of increasing the volume upto 400 %. But its often the case that this damages the speakers (especially the tiny inbuilt speakers on some of the cheaper laptops). I dont know how this is but I've plenty of anecdotal evidence that this happens. So I think you guys should caution the users against using it too much .

davewasthere 14y ago
Feeding DC (when clipping) to a speaker is never healthy for it. But clipping has many sources. The internal amplifier being one of them.
jbk 14y ago
This is, of course, nonsense. This is software amplification, so at worse, you clip everything. It's like saying that you should not listen to metal or experimental music because it is more saturated and might destroy your speakers. The software cannot make the difference. VLC only uses the normal system APIs, so at worse, it will have a fully saturated output, that could be caused by the input OR the software amplification. If the laptop speakers cannot hold what the audio card is outputting, the issue is in the drivers.
- thewarrior 14y ago
  Since I know nothing about this subject I'll take your word for it . Well I'm from India and the guy who sold me the laptop told me - "Dont use VLC" . Since then I've heard this "wisdom" from some others as well . I would like to respectfully add that I too have faced this and I dont know the cause . You can try googling "VLC damages speaker" and you'll see hundreds of threads turn up . Eg: http://www.indiastudychannel.com/experts/27429-Does-VLC-player-destroys-speakers-laptop.aspx http://www.indiastudychannel.com/experts/27429-Does-VLC-play... And another one: http://superuser.com/questions/337265/vlc-sound-boosting http://superuser.com/questions/337265/vlc-sound-boosting From what i gather on the above thread it turns out that some sound drivers are not that smart and so it ends up damaging the speakers and its not VLCs fault .
  - 14y ago

keenerd 14y ago

> Well, because to get correct gapless or cross-fading, you need to have 2 inputs at the same time. But, but VLC has no problem with multiple inputs. http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic

jbk 14y ago
Good catch. :) (of course, this is HN) Mosaic is using VLM, but VLC's main playlist does not use it :)

narag 14y ago

First thing first: thank you very much. VLC is a fine piece of software that has made me happy for so many hours! A data point about your surprise: I don't like database-like interfaces, just a plain list of songs, taking the minimum screen real state. The only really useful extra feature I like is loudness adjustment per song, and I prefer to set it manually.

pasbesoin 14y ago

I hope this isn't too OT. I used VLC to listen to several audio streams. I wish the built-in bookmarking was a bit better -- just enough to keep track of these URL's without jumping through hoops. For local media, it would be nice if VLC would (optionally?) remember where one stopped playback, so that one could resume there without having to hunt around or to manually note the location/time. I don't want to detract from core development (i.e. thank goodness I can view/listen to this stuff reliably and without tackling a plug-in hell). Just one user's anecdote. P.S. I'll add that initiating recording of a stream that is already playing could be a bit easier. (On Windows, I've found I have to start a second instance of VLC and start recording without first playing the stream.) And, my sincere apology if I've described features that are available but that I've missed or missed the controls for.