Replacement for venerable Win2K CD Player application?
 

Over the last several years I have relied on the simple but effective CDplayer.exe (from Win2K) on my XP systems for playing CDs directly to the sound card via internal SPDIF cable - and then out to a 5.1 sound system.

This has had a few significant benefits: bypassing the (poor) DAC in the hardware CD player, bypassing the IDE data bus (thus eliminating hardware interrupts), and allowing independent audio control for the CD player (if Windows meeja player :yuk: is used, it uses the standard WAV audio output, which is shared with every other WAV source).

Anyhow, this idyllic state of affairs is about to come to an end, as I am replacing XP with Win 7 64-bit. Testing shows that CDPlayer.exe is not compatible with this.

I would like to replace like-with-like, so does anyone know of and recommend a (free) cdplayer replacement that would fit the bill?

I know that Win7 has much improved audio handling - you can now separate volume controls for each source, so games, system sounds and CD audio can all be controlled separately, for example. But I would still like to ensure that I am bypassing the DVD transport's DAC (and the IDE data bus.

Thoughts?

SD

I'm surprised you are even using your computer to play CD's, judging by the list of reasons I don't want to use my computer to play my music.

Win 7 has Windows Media Centre which makes a pretty good fist of playing all sorts of media.

Gom player and VLC media player are good, and lots of others are around (Google)

But to be honest; wouldn't you be better off with a dedicated unit? This seems a likely candidate.

Spurlash,

Thanks for that, interesting piece of kit.

The reason I use my PCs (plural) to play CD is convenience. I have a high-end hifi system in one room, which I use less and less frequently. The sound is fantastic, but the opportunities to listen are fewer and fewer, with time, family etc. taking up time and space (you know what I mean!).

I have CD /DVD players in every PC I use, with decent sound cards (upper-end Creative cards), so I use them a lot, particularly with good headphones (it's so easy to just carry the headphones around and plug into the front panel (live drive). Partly due to advancing years, perhaps, but I find the quality to be most acceptable (and I am an audiophile).

I agree with you in general about quality, but the biggest problem with PC audio is the amplification and speakers, not so much the transport and DAC, which can be reasonably good. But this relies upon bypassing the CD player's built-in DAC (or the software DAC) and using that on the sound card, and then ensuring that the sound is handled the way one wants, not the way Windows thinks it should be!

SD

Which Creative cards do you use?

I'll have to play with mine at home (I have one higher-end older Creative card), and it is on XP, but some of the mixers will allow you to change and assign all of the inputs and outputs.

If you do that, and use the "Creative Player" (do they still make that?) then perhaps it can be set to use the cd-in to the card for playing the cd.

I know I did some funky stuff with midi and those dedicated cd/aux in/out pins on the card, to allow my MIDI keyboard to play voices defined on the computer back out to the keyboard's better amplified speakers.

In any case, look for a Creative Control Panel and Creative Player and see if you can find any hopeful looking options there.

Why are you still using a hardware CD player too? Wouldn't it be less trouble to make ISOs of the CDs and store them centrally, using something like Daemon-Tools to mount and play them from a LAN NAS? Thus eliminating both the CD player AND the ISA bus (ugh!) from the equation.

Creative cards and 'Audiophile' shouldn't be used in the same sentence these days either IMHO.

XFI Xtreme Music.

Not really, there's nearly a thousand... and the CD drives are already in every PC...

ISA bus?

Just to re-iterate the question:

Is there a (free) replacement for the CDplayer.exe that works with Win 7 64-bit?

I don't want or need to spend money on a NAS or a new CD transport or a new DAC, nor do I want to spend hours copying CDs to ISO or any another format.

SD

Well, the standard media player in Win7 is Windows Media Player (WMP). I'm looking at it now: on the Devices tab under Options, you can select the output device and change its settings. If you hardware and its driver support S/PDIF (as it should) then you'll see that option there. In my case (no digital out) it has fewer options.

If you like your media player more stripped-down than that, I can recommend VLC, though I think WMP is nicer for CDs (since it downloads track names etc). But you could use any CD player software, since the output selection is a Windows 7 setting, not something the program itself would need to worry about. The same is true of DVD players: the bit you see is just a "front end", while the "back end" that does the work is normally out of sight.

Sorry, IDE. iPhone forum typing means a heavy reliance on my sun-addled memory.