Supurb sound quality with ASIO and ASIO sound card

[JulesC]

Hi
I've just downloaded MB yesterday as i was looking for a an alturnative to wmp.
I have a small audio & video studio and recently changed my audio monitors for a pair of Adams A7x's only to discover that the sound quality from wmp was poor compared to my audio mixing software (Nuendo).  This difference I didn't hear so much with the old monitors.

I ran the first cople of songs using the windows audio, i think direct x or with a Windows MME dirver or something and it sounded only slightly better than WMP, i then changed the driver settings in MB to ASIO as I have an ASIO sound card  (RME Fireface 800)  and the sound was astonishing.  I had never heard a consumer software sound as good as MB.

It is importanat to note that music software such as MB is set to the ASIO driver of the ASIO sound card for it to bypass the windows audio completeley.  So, in essence, MB comunicates directly to the sound card without going through windows sound to deteriorate the quality.

The only issue i have with MB is my media controles on my logitech keyboard don't work when MB is not in focus, but Im sure it will be sorted in time.

[Alumni]

Yes, MusicBee is one of only a few music players I've used that allow for bit-perfect playback modes.
Some users might already have this capability and not realize what it is or why it's a good idea.

You can try remapping your mediakeys with MusicBee's hotkeys - setting them as global hotkeys should enable them when not in focus.

[JulesC]

Thanks for that I will try the global shortcuts, though my keyboard in my editing applications is a bit crowded.  In both Nuendo and Avid Media Composer I have at least 3 shortcut keyboard sets to manage. When MusicBee is open the editing keyboard shortcuts for Nuendo and Avid don't work.  I'm sure I'll find something obscure like Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F12 lol

I still need a bit of time to get to grips with the comprehensive feature set.  I see a lot of thought has gone into not over complicating things....
So far happy sailing.

Just as a side note, I have done some research on ASIO4All and have have learned that if you are not using it for professional sound software to get lower record latency, it does the same thing as WASAIP.  A sound card with an ASIO driver doesn't go through a wrapper to deteriorate the sound.  WASAIP still goes through a wrapper to re-wrap through to the WDM driver but bypasses the mandatory windows 48kkz sample rate conversion and the windows mixer, which sounds so bad.  Most professional sound cards have their own mixer so with mine  I can assign different programs to different playback channels on the RME Total Mix mixer and the inputs are non exclusive.