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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
That is not necessarily nonsense, but it depends on the speakers.
Digital clipping is one of the worst things you can do to speakers with a separate high frequency driver - it radically changes the power distribution due to the additional frequencies generated by square wave clipping[1]. This can overload and burn out the driver (depending on its design). Even expensive speakers may not have sufficient protection, or the "conservative" ratings may be not adequate.
I don't know if any laptops come with 2-way (or better) speakers, but lots of computers are connected to such.
Did you read that reference all the way through? It's not at all convincing, IMHO. In nearly all of his experiments you need a gain factor of at least 5-10x before the high frequency range starts to damage the tweeter. He starts with analysing artificial waveforms, and the effect actually lessens as he tries it on more real-world examples. My conclusion: don't play HIA's UFO Detection System too loud? Which no sane person would do, anyway.
That aside, I've always perceived some type of limiter-effect whenever I turn up VLC over 100%. Which is not clipping. I never really considered whether this limiting happened in VLC, the OS or my soundcard. It's a small laptop so no fancy soundcards either.
So, checking VLC's preferences, under Advanced>Audio there's an option called "peak protection", which is on by default. Sounds like something that does a type of limiting?
But I may be wrong, I just checked, (apparently my VLC only seems to go up to 200% by default?), but with a sufficiently loud sample, I could definitely hear clipping, instead of limiting.
But, just like your reference says, at the moment you've applied 5x clipping that's pretty extreme. You might as well have a 1-bit waveform at that point because it'll be either up or down. It won't sound like the original any more, at all. If you play that to your expensive speakers at high power, and think it's a good idea to do that for a while, then I really don't think it's VLC's job to protect you from yourself. The only possible excuse might be someone that has a long playlist of quiet sounds, amped up to 400%, leaves and isn't there to correct it when a forgotten loud track starts up. But that scenario is somewhat far-fetched, somewhat stupid and at 400%+clipping still not certain to damage the tweeters much more than loud sounds might do in general, clipped or not.
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-play...
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 .
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.