Foobar Remote Control – with Samsung Galaxy S Tablet

I have started playing with CAS (computer audio source) for over a year now. My system comprises of an Asus EEEPC netbook feeding an M2Tech Hiface USB to coaxial converter, which feeds into the coaxial input of my Benchmark DAC1. In term of sound quality, my netbook + hiface setup is as good as (if not better then) the Oppo DVD/SACD player for red book playback. The benefit of CAS is it allows me to play hi-res recordings up to 192/24 (although the CAS cannot play SACD), which usually sounds way better then most redbook recordings. For example, the HRx 176.4/24 recording ‘Thinking about Bix’ – Dick Hyman (Reference Recording) is extremely good sounding.

However, one aspect of my CAS setup has been quite annoying. I have been using foobar2000 as the music player and every time I want to change to a new album, I have to get up and bend down to find the album. While this is similar to getting up to change a CD when using a CD play, there is a subtle yet signficant difference – I cannot browse my music collections easily. The netbook sits between my speakers, so I have kneel between my speakers while picking the next album, which is very annoying. So at the end, I decided to get a tablet for remote control, and I picked the Samsung Galaxy S Wifi 5.0, which has an excellent 5 inch screen.

The Samsung Galaxy S, together with the Foobar2000 controller PRO application, has surprised me and performed very well:

1) The Galaxy S screen is very nice. The 5 inch screen is perfect for remote control application – big enough for touch control but not too big to carry around.

2) Foobar2000 controller app is stable and very easy to set up, and I find it better than a few other android remote apps on the market. One of the shortcoming is that you cannot play songs from the media library folders (actually, I cannot find any apps that allow you to do that). It is easy if you use playlists, but I do not use playlist and organise my music with a folder structure. Fortunately, the search engine works very well so I can find my album very easy – more about it in my next point.

3) The Galaxy S has a voice recognition software (I guess most android tablet would have it?), and it works very well. When I want to search for an album, I can simply speak it out instead of typing in the name of the album (or the artist etc). This makes my life so much easier. After discovering this feature, it really doesn’t matter whether I can browse and play from the media library. I just use the voice recognitioin to find my music. And it works with different languages (although only one language is active at a time and you have to manually select the language you want to use).

The tablet and the remote control application have been the missing link for my CAS setup. The voice recognition is a very useful feature and is a nice surprise for me. CAS now provides both excellent sound quality and convenience. I can finally use the netbook as my main playback source.