The Steinberg DDP Player is a fantastic tool and I use it frequently when sending DDPs to clients for QC. It’s extremely helpful to have a simple, controlled playback environment where I know exactly how the audio is being reproduced.
What I would love to see is a similar Steinberg “Master Player” that could play back WAV files (including Hi-Res) in the same way the DDP Player handles DDP images.
The idea would be a small standalone player that could:
Load a folder containing the final master WAV files
Play them gaplessly and in the correct order
Read metadata / track titles
Provide the same clean and reliable playback experience as the DDP Player
This would make it possible to send clients a Hi-Res reference package together with a trusted playback tool, instead of relying on third-party players where the playback chain and behavior can be unpredictable.
Essentially, expanding the concept of the Steinberg DDP Player so it can also handle Hi-Res WAV master packages.
I think this would be extremely useful for mastering engineers who want to deliver and QC Hi-Res releases with the same reliability that DDP currently provides.
There is definitely a need for something like this. There are at least a few services that come close to this.
In my opinion, Samply was the leader at this.
They have a nice looking lossless and gapless web-based player that plays pretty well on most devices and browsers (mobile & desktop) and they have a macOS and iOS that your more tech savvy clients can use and take advantage of more features.
It can even extract the file metadata and display that so you don’t see the file names. It looks really clean and professional.
That said, they have a history to totally changing the UI and other things WAY too often which tends to break or change core features and functions too often. Then you have to go on their Discord server and ask them to put it back.
The most recent thing for me which is pretty much a deal-breaker is that there used to be both a Play and Download button at the top of the player page so clients cloud either play the files in a browser, or download the files.
Well, Samply decided that the Download button wasn’t needed anymore. They changed to a “Save” button which does not download the files. It prompts users to make an account to access the files which even if it’s free is an unnecessary hurdle. There is still a download icon (which is not nearly as easy to see) and I along with some others had to raise some hell for them to even add the tiny prompt that lets people know they can download the files without making an account.
Talk about ruining a great service.
Anyway, that was a long story but yes, there is certainly a need for this.
Samply was so perfect but I’m not actively looking for something else that checks all the boxes but doesn’t make so many boneheaded changes every few months.
Yes, we started using Samply about three years ago and I do love it in many ways. However, it hasn’t always been the most stable solution and clients do report issues from time to time as well.
In my ideal world, it would basically be everything that the Steinberg DDP Player already is, but with support for Hi-Res WAV playback that also reads metadata and displays album covers.
I’d even welcome a proprietary Steinberg format where you could export an Audio Montage directly into a bundled package, similar to a DDP, containing the audio files, metadata, and album artwork.
Call it Steinberg Master Protocol (SMP) or something like that, I don’t know.
What I’m imagining is essentially a one-shot web app version of Samply without their accounts/overhead/changes but with password protection.
Ideal for me would be something that I could deploy to S3 and Amplify….but that’s just because it’s what I already use. There’s probably a good way to do this that would make it hosting/storage-agnostic.
The only reason I haven’t already built something like it with Hofa’s DDP Player Maker is that I don’t want to handle secure logins. Right now, it seems easiest to use either that or the Steinberg DDP player + fileset via Dropbox. But….there are definitely non-technical people that really don’t understand that concept.
