Greetings from Munich 
Playing from RAM. All music server software, that I have ever seen and worked with, do just that. There are two key goals of the player software designer in this area: get the music playing as soon as possible; get the entire music file into RAM as soon as possible.
Are there differences in the code between different solutions? Yes, because there is a short period in some situations when you have started playing the file but do not yet have all of the file into RAM yet. Not everyone addresses this the same way. For example, this is what streaming protocols address. And if the file is too large for the available RAM then there may be some differences in approach. But for anyone to tout that they do something unique, because they put the entire file into RAM for playback, would be highly misleading.
Does Antipodes use Sonicorbiter software? Yes we do. One reason is that Sonicoriter does a very effective job in a number of areas. Equally, we focus our coding on three areas: improving sound quality; improving the ease of use for customers; adding functionality not present in the Sonicorbiter suite.
To clarify this, it is worth explaining what areas of Sonicorbiter we do not choose to mess with.
When a customer uses the GUI interface to change a setting, this change in setting is either made to a system variable, or to a configuration file in the third-party software. In some of these cases, this is pretty much standard stuff, such as when ALSA gets told what output to use to play music. This does not constrain you from having your own implementation of ALSA. It is just about getting one part of the ALSA file changed from one setting to another. In other cases, there may be more complexity, such as ensuring the new setting is accompanied by an optimised set of settings that we have decided we like the sound of.
Executing this is not as simple as it may sound. Sonicorbiter has worked closely with third-party application providers to make a wide variety of applications work seamlessly in the one system and with stability. This work they do is highly valued by Antipodes. Could we do it ourselves? Yes. But why bother unless we can improve on it. In AMSv4 (yet to be released, at the time of writing this), we do add a lot of functionality to make more of the power of the overall system easily available to users, but this does not undo any of the solid work Sonicorbiter does to integrate things together very nicely.
Changing some settings may also seem simple. It isn’t. Any web app that involves input from users is a potential gateway for hackers, and so the architecture of web apps makes it quite complex to pass settings, selected at a page the user has access to, to the system level. Sonicorbiter has a thoroughly effective way that it enables this, and given the many settings available across the entire system, it is a very significant task to make that work dependably every time.
Antipodes has been making changes in its implementation of the Sonicorbiter software for around 6 years now, and Sonicorbiter is aware of that. Our initial emphasis was on optimising the sound quality of the total system and of each of the third-party playback apps, to the extent possible and without violating anyone’s rights. In the last three years we have added an emphasis on usability, and we have only just begun to implement our vision in that area. You will see some big changes in AMSv4, but we already have a future vision on how we will go a lot further.
To be clear, we use the great work that Sonicorbiter does to create a highly integrated and highly stable platform for what we do. There is not much point in focusing on fixing what isn’t broken, and indeed is the best integration in the industry. There is a lot of point in focusing on making things sound better, and on making the user interface simpler and more powerful. That is where we focus our energies.
We do have a large and detailed plan for where we are headed, but in the software world, these things take time. And as any sensible company would do it, we pick off the things that deliver the biggest bang for the buck first and then move onto the next thing.
. I agree squeeze is marginally better than roon for sound quality but roon’s gui and Tidal/Qobuz integration leaves it far behind.
. Very much look forward to the next version.
