Since the beginning of Covid-19 lockdowns in early 2020, we started our journey to build affordable and good-sounding digital music playback system. We spent our time and money on music players software licenses, not to mention huge spending on music server hardware. In this post, we share our experiences and why we ended up using LMS.
Various music players we tried
We did not try all software, but only those which can be run in a headless Windows or Linux operating systems. Over time, some software went through major improvements while others stopped making progress such as HYSOLID and Daphile.
Linux music players we tried
We tried Volumio, Daphile, and Euphony. Volumio started as an open-sourced free software but is now a paid software for its full functionality. Daphile remains free but is no longer updated. Euphony v3 started as paid software with perpetual license, but later since v4, they changed to paid subscription. We liked Euphony v3 initially and purchased 2 perpetual licenses when our prototype music servers were sent to local reviewers.
We are aware the Pink Faun music servers use Euphony v4. Most likely this is the best headless music players available for Linux. However, in Audiophile Style forum, we read that user-reported issues take time to be fixed. Also, different Linux kernel versions give different sound. This is no longer something we like.
Volumio is good for its simplicity and is supported very well, but its sound quality is not competitive.
Windows music players we tried
We never tried JRiver and Foobar since both are not headless. We tried Audirvana previously but did not like it. HYSOLID sounds impressive, but it’s a “dead” free software. JPLAY FEMTO impressed us so we sold a few units of full-LPSU AAMS with JPLAY FEMTO licenses. Unfortunately, being a UPnP music player, different UPnP control app on tablet/phone gives different sound, and JPLAY iOS is supposed to be the best-sounding UPnP control app. We bought an iPAD just to try JPLAY iOS. It is far from being stable even after released for more than a year. Once during setup of AAMS+ at a reviewer’s system, JPLAY iOS misbehaved and embarrassed us. That’s the end of JPLAY FEMTO for AAMS.
We tested LMS for Windows 10 and learnt the tricks to get its best sound. We tried AAMS LE (with built-in Audio Note sound card) at a friend’s house who uses Infinity IRS V speakers. We compared JPLAY FEMTO vs LMS, and LMS sounds closer to his analog system while JPLAY FEMTO sounds very different.
Since then, we decided to use LMS for our music servers. It’s free and open-source. We use the standard LMS but with updated SqueezeLite local player PlugIn which we need to download and install manually.
Other music server makers took LMS source code, modified for their own commercial use, but never shared the codes they modified back to the community, breaking GPL agreement.
No TIDAL for LMS in Feb 2024
In Dec 2023, a new CEO took over Logitech, a Swiss company making accessories for computers. In late Jan 2024, Logitech decided to shutdown mysqueezebox.com server (which is the proxy server used for TIDAL streaming) by end of Feb 2024. It surprised us. Unfortunately our customers were very unhappy.
The TIDAL plugin for LMS will no longer work after mysqueezebox.com shutdown. The community panicked. We dropped what we do and tried to work with LMS community to resolve TIDAL streaming issues. The interim solution was to enable UPnP PlugIn for LMS and then use BubbleUPnP as the TIDAL control app. It works very well when BubbleUPnP server is installed inside Windows 10. We were able to stream TIDAL up to 192k 24-bit, unlike previously only CD quality with the original LMS TIDAL plugin. We like TIDAL sound quality using this approach.
The LMS community was not happy with the interim BubbleUPnP solution – it’s complex for regular users. 2 senior LMS developers decided to develop a new TIDAL plugin inspired by reversed-engineered TIDAL source codes in GIThub, and they finished the prototype in 2 weeks! The original scope was CD quality only.
We played a very small but important role reviewing the prototype TIDAL plugin source code in Perl and suggested to the developers where to change 2 lines of codes to support hires. Viola, the new TIDAL local plugin is now able to stream up to 48k 24-bit MQA streams.
LMS Community is active and alive
We are very impressed by how the community, especially the 2 senior LMS developers, developed replacement plugins for TIDAL and Deezer. A newbie quickly developed Pandora plugin. In less than 2 months, LMS was rewritten successfully so that the dependencies on mysqueezebox.com is removed. We don’t see such speed and spirit with paid software like JPLAY and Euphony.
Our goal is to review and rewrite SqueezeLite for Windows so that it’s optimized for the best audio quality, focusing on the renderer, add native DSD playback, and have DAC auto detect. We don’t have the resources to do it today, but we will eventually.