Socan Music

The advancements in Linux over the past 5 years or so is nothing but amazing. Particularly in the area of gaming – gone are the days of running games through pure WINE, resulting in dreadful FPS for anything that isn’t OpenGL (especially in 3D accelerated games). Instead, now we have amazing technology such as DXVK, which was then implemented into Proton – a WINE wrapper developed by Valve which makes supported games run at basically native speeds (in fact, sometimes better!), and this technology is only growing and getting better!

The advancements in Linux gaming do in a sense overshadow how great the Linux application experience is as a whole. I enjoy using Linux, in a way that using Windows just doesn’t give and that’s probably because I’m a tinkerer – I enjoy messing around with shit, and I love spending forever trying to make something work just for the feeling when it actually works at the end. This isn’t to say that Linux is a painful experience, no far from it, but it certainly isn’t perfect.

Changing to Linux is definitely a learning process, and I can’t challenge that – but what people have to realise is that the things that people use every day nearly always have a Linux equivalent. Hell, even in terms of audio systems – DirectSound for Windows is comparable to PulseAudio in Linux; ASIO on Windows is comparable to JACK on Linux and WASAPI on Windows is comparable to ALSA on Linux. If those terms mean little to you, then don’t worry, because I’ll sort of go over them later when I talk specifics about audiophile software on Linux.

When it comes to streaming on Linux, you have a native Spotify client just as you do on Windows. On Arch, it isn’t in the normal package manager, but it is installable by the AUR with a command such as “yay -S spotify”. The AUR is genuinely a godsend for many reasons, such as some people adding entire features that the original software didn’t include such as ThePoon, an osu! player, adding support for XP-Pen tablets to WizardPen to enable native support of XP-Pen tablets in Linux, which is insanely cool and is a testimony to how important and pro-consumer FOSS is. That was a rather unnecessary tangent but oh well. I cannot testify as to the quality of any other streaming clients (if there are any) because honestly, I haven’t used them.

When it comes to file playback, there has been some controversy with the program I’m going to recommend. I recommend Strawberry for audio file playback on Linux for one main reason – it supports ALSA. When I used Windows, I always picked shared WASAPI as the audio engine as it sends all of the audio information directly to the DAC rather than being processed in any way by the OS. Are DirectSound and PulseAudio bit perfect? I have no doubts that they are, but for a piece of mind I’ll pick WASAPI and ALSA over them any day. Strawberry is a fork of the popular music player Clementine, which actually did have ALSA support until for some reason it was randomly removed in an update a few years ago, and in the storm of “why the fuck would you remove something that people actually use” in Clementine’s GitHub issues page, jonaski made a fork of Clementine and added ALSA support himself. Pretty cool. The program as a whole functions exactly how you’d expect from a music player apart from that, with support for multiple scrobble websites and even Tidal streaming apparently. Although I have yet to try that, lossless Tidal streaming through a music player with ALSA support is fairly enticing and pretty cool.

As stupid as it sounds, one of my main reservations against switching to Linux fully from Windows was the killer app ExactAudioCopy. This program is nothing short of amazing, and makes a completely perfect rip of any CD you have, as well as completely unrivaled error correction which has even fought its way through a massive scratch I have on my copy of Moby’s 13, which refuses to play on any normal media player software. It wasn’t until recently that I found out that EAC works flawlessly through WINE in a 32 bit prefix & architecture, as long as you remember to install “dotnet20” with winetricks. When you do this, the program works exactly as it does on Windows and I have yet to experience any issues with it.

To conclude, audiophilia on Linux is not as point and click as with Windows, but honestly it’s not difficult either. PulseAudio is likely bitperfect, but if you don’t trust that then ALSA support for lossless/MP3/whatever file playback is great with Strawberry.

If you want to message me about the specifics of anything on here, for example installing EAC with WINE, then message me on Discord, where my username is socan (MJGHD)#1244

Socan Music

Video – Interesting Parts of My Record/CD Collection

Audiophilia on Linux – it can be done