Computer Audio Blasphemy, nige tries Another SD Card Player

[jkeny]

I have some similar ones to these if anyone wants one? They don't have the same solder pads on the back but are easy to modify too

[Fran]

One point to note for users - the SD player doesn't handle tagging of WAV files - it expects raw WAV file - you get a burst of white noise if your WAV files have tags.

It handles Flac file tags fine

One way to overcome this is to convert tagged WAV files to 'WAV without tags' when putting files on SD card. Many programs have this facility

this should be stickied,.......

[jkeny]

One point to note for users - the SD player doesn't handle tagging of WAV files - it expects raw WAV file - you get a burst of white noise if your WAV files have tags.

It handles Flac file tags fine

One way to overcome this is to convert tagged WAV files to 'WAV without tags' when putting files on SD card. Many programs have this facility

this should be stickied,.......

Has the white noise happened for you? I guess when we develop the UI for this, the sending of files via WiFi could strip off wav tags

[Fran]

yep, and that little nugget of info doesn't seem to be all that well known....

[nige2000]

I searched through quite a few wav files in my collection before I found an album with white noise
which is weird cos the vast majority was db power amp converted

[jkeny]

I think wav tags can be put at the beginning OR end of a wav file - think Dbpoweramp has asetting that does this?

[jkeny]

What we need is our own STM software in order to be able to control this functionality

[jkeny]

If we could develop our own firmware for this or a similar player what functions should it have? All suggestions welcome. Here are mine:
- I like the idea of keeping the processing to a minimum on a processor - keeps the self-generated noise to a minimum
- Part of this is the simplicity of the existing SD player & our approach of keeping WiFi comms off the main audio processor but wonder if this is the best config?
- I believe synchronous clocking also has a lot to do with the sound of this SD player - only two audio clocks for all clocking duties, system clock as well as audio clock
- support for ALL WAV formats & other tagged lossless files supported
- maybe two different modes of operation:

1. normal SD card player where SD card carries full music library - the same as the current SD player
2. an SD player like we are attempting to create where the FULL music library is hosted off the SD player (on computer or network storage) & the SD player acts as a playlist player where files are added to the playlist folder on SD card via WiFi
3. maybe more automation happening in the STM software like reading playlist folder - play first track - when finished, delete it & read playlist folder again - repeat cycle

If we could hire an experienced STM programmer to create this software would anybody here be willing to crowd-source this?

Going rate for such a person is probably around €50 per hour but there is a lot of STM library software already available & similar audio player software examples on github so it wouldn't be necessary to build this starting with a blank canvas but rather getting someone experienced in STM programming & these existing libraries/existing software.

[randytsuch]

John
I'd contribute a bit, but I'm worried that the group here is too small to be able to pay for a developer at 50e/hr.

I like the idea of using Volumio for the SW for our player, wondering if we offered them 100-200e as a "contribution", if they would write the SW for us? Seems like it should be fairly straightforward for a programmer already familiar with Volumio, how to build it and how it works.

Randy

[Fran]

Thats a good idea Randy. I'd chip in - I suppose its hard to know at this stage because we don't even know what we want yet, never mind seeing what it would look like.