Last night while doing research on the music players came across a neat little software called jPlay. It is developed by a polish and dutch guys. It got glorious review on the net including mainstream audiophile gigs like 6 Moons, Positive Feedback, TAS, Enjoy the Music, TNT etc. See the reviews at
http://www.jplay.eu/reviews/ Core difference between jPlay and other computer music players (except may audiophile linux) is the "real-time" streaming. All sources and DACs process the data in real time so the timing of the bit stream is maintained. Computer CPUs are built for multi-tasking (task switching) and almost all OSs are multi-tasking also. When it is time for the music player to process the next group of bits, it might be swapped out of the CPU causing the delay in the bit stream. Add to that the multi-tasking OSs like Windows and Linux where several hundreds of processes are running and competing for resources, those delays could be substantial.
According to jPlay developers, their main focus is on "time perfect" streaming in addition to "bit perfect" streaming. To achieve this, jPlay takes over the computer stopping/hibernating all the processes and gives itself highest Priority. In "Hibertating" mode (recommended) even the mouse and keyboard are disabled. Computer looks as if it is struck, it will not respond to any thing until the jPlay finishes the playing. And it loads the entire music file into memory before starting to play to avoid any delays.
jPlay developers created plug-ins for jRiver, foobar, iTunes etc, ie jRiver etc are used as the front-end (UI) and jPlay takes over the entire back-end (music playing) operating. jRiver did to like it and issued a statement calling jPlay "Hoax" and recommended removing it completely.
https://jriver.com/jplay.html . That convinced me to try jPlay
Last night, installed jPlay trial version on my laptop. It comes with bare minimal user interface. It opens up a terminal window. To play music, select the files from windows explorers and copy. Go back to jPlay terminal window (Jplay Mini) and press space bar. JPlay takes a few seconds to load the files into memory and hibernates all other processes. You will see screen flicker and music starts playing.
I did a quick comparison of two songs between jPlay and foobar2000. I did not immediately notice the huge difference the reviews claimed but it felt like jPlay created deeper soundstage and it was little smoother.
Going to reinstall windows on my laptop and try out jPlay and Audiophile Linux (since both are trying to process the music in realtime) for the next couple of weeks.
Anyone using windows for music playing, give it a try and share your observations.
BTW, trial version of jPlay creates random gaps in the music. Full version is 99 Euros with lifetime support.
JPlay is good, a minimal memory player for Windows but expensive for what it is. Depends on whether you think their proprietary driver works well. It does offer choices of WASAPI, ASIO and kernel-streaming, with system tweaks.
If you want to mess around with free minimalist players you might try CPlay (cicsmemoryplayer.com) and wtfplay (
). These are both pure memory players like JPlay. Going totally the other way, there's Bug Head and XXHighEnd. I find Bug Head maddening due to eternal wait times while it "rewrites" data or whatever it does, and there's a bewildering array of options. If you install it and just choose the basic settings you'll get an idea of how it sounds. XXHighEnd is actually really interesting and a very rich player. I've just spent about six months with it, but it needs a fairly strong CPU and memory. It looks daunting but actually isn't that hard to get started. Also, Peter is an interesting designer, with his Phasure DAC and computer, USB cables and other interesting gear he has developed. I'd like to hear it but don't know anyone who owns his stuff. Worth checking out: xxhighend.nl
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Okay, I'll try installing it. 
