Portable music players

[hello_hello]

I bought my current MP3 player 13 years ago. It only has 4GB of memory, which is a bit annoying these days, but the battery still powers it for 6-8 hours on a full charge, it's not much bigger than a matchbox, and I love the sound. It's a "small doses" thing and I'm only referring to listening with headphones, but with "bass enhance" enabled and a smidgen of BBE sonic maximiser, rather than the sound sitting in the middle of your head it moves it out a bit for a nice stereo image, even when using ordinary quality headphones.

Cowon iAudio U5


After 13 years I think I might relegate my old player to the job of providing background music at work in an emergency, but I don't know much about what's available these days, especially when it comes to sound quality and listening to music through headphones.

Cowon's JetAudio software is available for Android but there's no BBE sonic maximiser as far as I can tell. They boast about including an AM3D audio enhancer for the paid version (happy to pay) but I know nothing about it. I've no idea if JetAudio on Android should sound the same as the version included in their dedicated players, although I still like the idea of a dedicated music player anyway, as long as it's small and light.

Because I'm just wanting a portable player for listening to music, and because I'm not a girl, I don't care much about skins, and I don't care at all about album art or displaying lyrics or visualisations. My main goal is to find a player (be it dedicated hardware or software for Android) with reasonable support for playlists and a sound that won't dull me to death when using headphones.

What would the kind folks at doomi9 recommend?

Cheers.

[GMJCZP]

Try Total Commander for Android, it may seem rough but take a look, this program also works to play music, and by folders, which is uncommon, and even in random order.

[hello_hello]

A file manager as an audio player wasn't something I expected, although a better file manager would be nice anyway, but I'm not sure about the sound aspect of it. I'd really like some sort of stereo enhancement ability, similar to my current player.

I think I foolishly assumed stereo enhancement would be quite common-place for portable devices these days, and many of the regular posters would be able to tell me the type they use or prefer..... or am I the only forum mender who didn't pay $500 for a pair of ear buds.

[Brazil2]

On Android, I'm using AIMP and foobar2000. The first one is using BASS libraries, the latter FFmpeg libraries. Both are free and without ads.

Some enhancements are now built-in in Android: Settings → Sound and vibration → Advanced → Sound quality and effects, but I only use a bit of EQ, stereo 'enhancements' are a nonsense to me as they destroy some frequency ranges.

[hello_hello]

Originally Posted by Brazil2

Some enhancements are now built-in in Android: Settings → Sound and vibration → Advanced → Sound quality and effects, but I only use a bit of EQ, stereo 'enhancements' are a nonsense to me as they destroy some frequency ranges.

I had a look and there doesn't seem to anything I'd use amongst the built-in Android sound effects. Concert Hall reverb.... sigh.... I'm pretty sure foobar2000 has a better EQ built in. I will check out AIMP later today though.

I'm not sure stereo enhancements necessarily destroy frequency ranges. They might phase shift them to play tricks on your brain. I don't really know, and I've certainly heard enhancing that sounded more like the opposite of enhancing to me, but when the audio just sits in the middle of my head, which is what it does when I use headphones, and even more so with lower quality headphones/ear buds. I find it uninteresting... even tiring... and a little stereo widening can make a huge difference.

[chainring]

I have a mix of Android devices (phone and tablet) used for music, plus some dedicated DAPs. Common to my usage of Android is USB Audio Player Pro. If you don't need album art, don't include it. It can browse by folder/file mode, or it can scan tags and stick everything in a database. Overall, it's one great player.

A popular, and free, music player on Android is Musicolet. Very nice interface. Of course, there's Foobar mobile; clean and cut down to the essentials.

[Brazil2]

Originally Posted by hello_hello

I'm not sure stereo enhancements necessarily destroy frequency ranges.

There are two ways: damaging the center so the stereo image appears to be wider or adding some delay/reverb. In either case it alters frequencies and this is not how the artist and the producer wanted the final mix to be.

Originally Posted by hello_hello

They might phase shift them to play tricks on your brain.

Even worse! And that does destroy frequency ranges

[hello_hello]

Well.... I started to get paranoid about liking the effect, so I did some googling, and to be honest, I'd be surprised if there's much music produced today that's completely devoid of enhancements. I'd forgotten about it until I saw it mentioned on a page I stumbled across, but back in the 70's the Aphex Aural Exciter was so popular it was credited on albums, and it was effectively a stereo enhancer for vocals.

Chances are most "compact" speakers already do their own enhancing. My memory's shot so I've forgotten most of what I read already, but I did see reviews for a couple of sound bars that mentioned something like "sound algorithm" in their specifications.

What seems to have happened while I wasn't paying attention, is headphones became wireless (I was aware of Bluetooth) so they required power, and once they had power... it's almost hard to find any half decent quality Bluetooth headphones that don't boast they have some sort of base enhancement. X-Base, or Tru-Base or similar names. I've forgotten how that sort of thing works, but it does. It's called MachBase in my old MP3 player. I don't mind if it's sonic witchcraft as long as my brain's happy there's an abundance of low stuff in my ears. The alternative would be to push it up with an EQ, which I doubt would get close to sonic wizardry before most headphones are farting in your ear.

From what I read a long time ago, then completely forgot until I read about it again today, one of the many ways our brains determine the location of a source is using what's called "critical bands". It's been studied since the 30's, but the brain divides the audio spectrum into 24 bands. If two sounds in the same band arrive together... that's responsible for the beating sound you hear when tuning a guitar and two strings are almost the same pitch. When they're different enough to be in different critical bands, the beating stops and you hear two notes. When two sounds in the same band arrive at slightly different times, the first one masks the second one unless the second one's louder....
Eventually the penny dropped and I realised I was reading about the voodoo and sorcery MP3 encoders take advantage of, and they sound great. It seems like fiddling with the phase of those critical bands is one of the main tricks used in stereo enhancing, so maybe it'd be silly not to do it, given today's processing power.

There's sites selling DSPs and plugins for DAWs all over the net, invariably with a category for stereo enhancers. I watched a video by a recording engineer, who explained how to change the sound stage for the drums by twiddling a few knows on his new processor. The toms moved out wide and back in, they sat together near the middle, and the snare went from the back of the mix to something Phil Collins would've lost a load over in the 90's.

Now the loudness war is ending I think there's a chance the enhancer and exciter wars will be next, which is almost too horrible to contemplate, but maybe it's already begun.

Anyway... I have a friend who bought Sony's latest and greatest noise cancelling headphones recently. I was fully prepared to dislike the effect of the noise cancellation on the audio until I gave them a spin and they impressed me instead. At one stage I was lying on the floor with a vacuum cleaner running next to my head and I couldn't hear it, but the audio itself didn't seem to change. Even if the noise cancelling was having an adverse effect my brain isn't trained to notice yet, it'd be small compared to adding vacuum cleaner noise to the track It looks like they have enhancement abilities as well, so next time I visit my friend I'll give that a test drive.

[Ghitulescu]

Apart from what I got for free (gifts), all my portables have at least one feature in common - the ability to play uncompressed files (WAV, FLAC).

My first one was a Teac MP-580, I think it had a long battery life, definitely more than a day - it takes weeks of commuting until I had to charge it again. True hardware buttons for all important functions, plus touchscreen.

This and others went to the drawer once I got my first Xperia, which, as a world novelty back then, allowed hardware FLAC and WAV decoding.

Display and file browser are not important, in particular when their purpose is to provide music on the go - which means the music listening is a secondary task (biking, working etc is the first).

[hello_hello]

My old Cowon MP3 player supports wave files with the original firmware. Version 2 firmware supports flac and ogg, although lossless support isn't terribly useful with 4GB of memory, and I can't say I really care about the audio being lossless when I listening to it via a portable player using headphones. A flac track sounds just as uninteresting to me through headphones as an MP3 track because the bulk of the sound still seems to sit in the middle of me head. It doesn't happen the same way through speakers because the sound from each channel makes it to both ears.

I might audition some Android software players with sound enhancing abilities to see how they sound. I still like the idea of a dedicated music player though, especially one as light and small as my old one. I don't put my smartphone in a pocket all that much and I'm not going to want to start doing it more even if I do load it up with music.