Multitrack/Multichannel Audio Players by rebooter23 at 4:54 PM EDT on March 14, 2017
What Audio Players for VGM with multitracks are you using?
I used to be very content with Cog while being on older OS X Versions. I could route Cog's Output through JACK and then mute individual channels by not connecting them to the output. Now on macOS Sierra JACK does not work anymore and there's no alternative so no way to listen nicely to the 14 Channel Tracks of Super Mario Maker or Hyrule Warriors while maintaining a loop.
Trying foobar2000 (either on Windows or via Wine) did not help because the only way to manage channels/multitracks is with the plugin "Channel Mixer" and this allows for a max of 6 Channels who are also mapped wrong (e.g. a set of stereo channels being mapped to center and then played mono).
Winamp doesn't have the latest vgmstream and it's multichannel support is bad just like foobar's.
Converting the streams into wav doesn't transfer looping information too so I need to play the original streams.
What to do? Has anybody a recommendation of a good multichannel-able player?
Recently, I discovered Looping Audio Converter to handily split .brstm, .bfstm and .bcstm files' channels into other .bxstm files (can create files for each channel, or for each pair of channels which seems to be the common number of channels for most of these files). Did it with SM3DL, SM3DW, ALBW, TFH and BotW songs with more than 2 channels, and after some crashes it seemed to work. So at least for that particular file format and multichannel tracks, I'm set for now.
I programmed my own. It natively supports loops, however there is no nice way of muting multiple channels / voices (only via JACK as described). But it's on my todo list. It's on github
Currently a bit buggy and linux only. Though thanks to C++11 shouldnt be too hard porting to win / macOS.