I have been using VLC as my music player for quite a long time, but I really hate the way it handles album art (files with long album name will fail to create folder in AppData thus nothing to display)
Then I tried to find an "audiophile" alternative with good UI with great handling for displaying album art.
In terms of UI, Musicbee is literally the best one, and the only one showing the tags correctly, displaying large and clear album art without badly compressing it.
However, while I found that some people claimed that Musicbee is also one of the "best sound quality" music player, I found that it is not the case when having experiences with many different players, and honestly speaking I think most of the others are doing a better job including VLC (of coz changing all setting to best audio quality)...
The music is clear, but that's it, feeling it too "thin", losing a lots of dynamic, details etc.
Using the latest version, all settings that might alter sound quality such as fading/EQ/DSP are disable, and WASAPI shared/exclusive for output module.
One of the best audio quality I've tried is audirvana,
and for strawberry music player, it also provides a exceptional "clear" music but retaining a good quality
for dopamine player, even though it is only using WASAPI in shared mode, I do think it is still quite better than MB in exclusive mode...
I really love MB's UI, and it's the only one fulfilling my requirement, so would like to ask if there will be any change in the future.
I am not so sure why this is happening since WASAPI(exclusive) is bit-perfect and no processing should be done and sent directly to the DAC.
But I guess one possibility might be due to software volume adjusting, and I find that enabling logarithmic volumes scaling seems to improve a little bit (not so much though)
Another larger possibility might be due to the resampling method, since resampling is unavoidable for sending the sampling rate that my DAC is accepting.
Hope that this will be investigated and improved