A quick tip to improve your Spotify / Apple Music / Amazon streaming

[JasonM]

Note, this tip only works for people with 2 GPU's such as discreate and integrated graphics.

Here is a quick tip to help smooth out the processing on your on demand music stream.

As I'm sure many know, the audio from these services is decompressed, normally by the GPU.

Many of you will disable your integrated graphics, and only run GPU processing from the discreate card.

Basically you enable both the integrated and discreate, then you dedicate the processing of your audio streaming to your integrated graphics only. All other GPU tasks are run on your discreate card only as before.

The advantage of this, you can have as much processing load you like on your main GPU, at the same time your streaming service is unaffected as it's processing has been moved to the integrated GPU. The importance is there could be subtle music timing issues that could otherwise occur when sharing processing with your primary GPU, these timing issues should now never occur as you have given your streaming service it's own dedicated GPU. Of course the integrated GPU is slower then your dedicated GPU, however the integrated GPU is still an order of magnitude more powerful than required to process your music streaming service, especially when that's the only task it's doing. The key thing is the music streaming has sole access to it's own GPU that would otherwise normally not be used.

To set up enter graphics in Windows 10, you need to select the exe for your music streaming application and set to the integrated, see screen shot below.

 

[rids57]

Good idea, it was sitting there doing nothing otherwise - I've added Amazon Music HD and JRiver

 

[JasonM]

Good idea, it was sitting there doing nothing otherwise - I've added Amazon Music HD and JRiver

Yes exactly, the integrated is doing nothing normally.

This way and for example. Your discrete GPU could be compressing a video in Adobe, the same time your music streaming is unaffected as it's processing is on the integrated GPU.

And anything you can do to reduce temporal issues, such as timing issues or jitter, will improve your audio quality.

 

[JasonM]

I've added Amazon Music HD

I'll give you another handy tip.

The HD add-on for Amazon Music is now free. If you have paid for HD before HD became free, if you phone them up they will refund you for the HD part, at least they refunded my HD part in full!

 

[rids57]

I haven't paid for it at all yet, I'm 2/3 of the way through the 3 month trial - I will be subscribing, very impressed with the quality and the library

 

[JasonM]

I haven't paid for it at all yet, I'm 2/3 of the way through the 3 month trial - I will be subscribing, very impressed with the quality and the library

I've been using Amazon Music HD for over 2.5 years, I use to pay £129 a year for the HD, now it's reduced to £79 (with HD included).

But yes it's amazing both the sound quality, and library. It did have a few bugs early on, however they have fixed the bugs now.

 

[rids57]

Not all of them, their idea of Exclusive mode WASAPI seems to differ from most people's in that it still goes through the Windows mixer, every track shows up as 384kHz on my DAC, which disagrees with what it says within the App.

 

[JasonM]

Re Exclusive mode.

Does JRiver sound better in exclusive mode, then Amazon Music in exclusive mode?

I use an Asus Essence ST card, so I can't see what the card is processing.

 

[rids57]

I honestly don't hear any difference, although I normally use ASIO these days so I can play DSD.
The Windows mixer gets a bad rep but it's improved a hell of a lot in over the last few years.

 

[NutritioN]

Although this isn't relevant to me as I have no integrated GPU, I do use HDMI audio when playing music. I've decided I don't care enough about jitter (timing) to move to a better DAC so my setup is nice and simple. I use AMD 6700XT HDMI out to receiver > Optical > Kef LSX.

JasonM, you said you're using an Essence ST (I loved mine for the headphone out when I had it). So are you saying the audio path is source > Soundcard > GPU processing > Soundcard out? It's a digital signal until you plug in an analogue cable so there shouldn't be any processing going on by the GPU. Also if you're listening to music, what strain is the discrete GPU being given? And, if you paid for a discrete GPU I assume it's better than integrated, and far more powerful and able to cope with passing audio through without messing bits up.

I was wondering if there's anything I could do to improve my HDMI, but this sounds like a weird solution to a non-issue. Help me out! Are there any examples of audible timing issues down to an overloaded GPU?

 

[rids57]

The GPU processing is performed by the music playing App, the result is then sent to the soundcard and then on to speakers/headphones.
An example would be, I sometimes convert PCM to DSD from within JRiver MC, which would now be done by the GPU then sent to my DAC (as native DSD) and then on to the amp.

Where this would be really useful is when using HQ Player, which upsamples FLAC files before performing extremely complex filtering before sending to the DAC. Normal filtering uses hundreds of taps, HQ Player filtering uses up to 1 million and this can hit the CPU quite hard whereas the GPU would do it easily.

 

[NutritioN]

Never used HQplayer before but I tried it with a DSD file and quickly found out a combination of output filters that pounded my AMD3600 CPU

JRiver uses CPU not GPU for me, are you using a different plugin/audio route? Unless it's already using your discrete GPU, this thread won't apply.

Amazon Ultra HD uses so little GPU resources I can't see off loading it to the integrated GPU being anything more than a faff. Playing an Ultra HD track while running Furmark occupies 0.5% and 98% GPU respectively.

Admittedly a better test would be to max out the GPU doing a similar competing task, not 3D. But doubt the result would be different.

I did find a post on some forum where someone tested load (CPU + GPU) and effects on jitter (timing) in audio transport. Didn't look like it made any difference, can dig it out again if it's useful.

I understand this is my experience and not yours. If having your default discrete GPU processing streaming audio was producing a sub-standard listening experience, I'm glad you found a solution.

 

[JasonM]

JasonM, you said you're using an Essence ST (I loved mine for the headphone out when I had it). So are you saying the audio path is source > Soundcard > GPU processing > Soundcard out? It's a digital signal until you plug in an analogue cable so there shouldn't be any processing going on by the GPU. Also if you're listening to music, what strain is the discrete GPU being given? And, if you paid for a discrete GPU I assume it's better than integrated, and far more powerful and able to cope with passing audio through without messing bits up.

The GPU processing is done by the Amazon Music HD app. On my i7 8700 the integrated GPU has loads from 3-6%, again nothing else is running on the integrated GPU.

I'm using Amazon HD that uses a FLAC codec, what I have noticed is if I'm playing say a 24 / 192kHz this generates more GPU load than say a 16 / 44kHz, again peak is only 6% load.

The discreate GPU is of course much faster, however it's been shared with other resources, where as Amazon Music now has sole access to the integrated. The only possible disadvantage I can see is the integrated is sharing memory with the main computer memory.

BTW This all came about as I was running some Zoom music nights - basically I was running a disco over Zoom during lockdown, I noticed how much work the GPU was doing handling both Zoom and Amazon Music HD. The discrete GPU was doing Zoom video processing, Zoom video audio decoding, post processing on my web-cam. By moving the Amazon Music to integrated I offloaded some work from the discrete GPU.

EDIT. I have just been watching GPU processing loads from Amazon Music. When I said it's typically 3-6% this is correct, however when tracks are played for the first time integrated GPU can peak to 16%. Amazon Music is doing caching of streaming tracks, so say you have an album that you repeatedly listen to that will eventually use the 3-6% GPU only, however if your streaming a track for the first time since Amazon Music application loaded, then GPU load can peak up to 16%.

 

[THX1138]

Some good tips here thankyou.