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I'm hoping the mac people can give me some guidance here.
As you can tell from my sig, I have an external dac. I trust the way to go is mac mini plus airtunes. With airtunes I have to use itunes right? Does itunes play apple lossless gapless? Also I may be inheriting an ibook so if the music is on hard drives connected to the mini will it be easy to play music using the ibook if everything is on the same network?
Anything I'm missing? Anyone want to tell me I'm stupid for going this route?
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Benchmark DAC1 -> Event 20/20 bas V2
I don't have a minimac, but I think I can share some info:
Airtunes with an airport express works great for getting the bitstream out.
If you turn on sharing within itunes on the main computer, and have itunes running, any computer on your network will be able to access the library. Very slick feature, btw. It will not let you copy files, just play them.
I don't think the mini has much HD space, so an external firewire drive may be needed.
There is software to use airtunes without itunes, but I don't have a link. Check with blessingx.
I don't know about gapless. I also have not figured out how to upsample or use an external software equalizer with itunes. Maybe something out there, but I haven't looked very much.
With my wireless network, everything just stops when the microwave is turned on. The more wireless jumps in the process, the more vulnerable it is. Example: internet radio routed wireless to a laptop, wireless back through the router, then over to an airport express = asking for trouble.
I've never worried about gapless since I do very little Dance and Pink Floyd listening. I think though I have noticed the odd gap. If you put yourself on a network and take advantage of the power of Rendevous with iTunes, it really is a breeze to stream music throughout your home. Nomad is one of the involved Mac iTunes experts I can think of to ask about the gaps. I've left my Mini where I'm working at the moment so can't tell you for sure now.
I'm going this route, albeit with just one Mac so far... and I don't think it's stupid. Some people have pointed out that the Mac lacks a '10 foot' (i.e. TV-friendly HTPC visual front end) but it's not an issue for me. I'll think about involving more Macs when I've had time to play with everything properly. My fingers have only just finished recovering from the cuts they've recieved from heatsinks and badly finished cases trying to put together ******* near silent Wintel PC's, and that's before spending several days so far messing around with ASIO drivers, foobar front ends, etc. I had the Mac set up in an hour, even while making tea and lunch inbetween and struggling with an unfamiliar plasma screen, and had iTunes going in 'real unmolested' 44.1khz, 16-bit audio out to optical through a firewire soundcard about 10 minutes.
There's lots of cool stuff you can do with minimal hassle after the initial set-up. Remote control from bluetooth mobile phones, etc. I'm just scratching the surface myself.
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ear: HE90 - HD650 - UE-11 - SE530 - Triport /// amp: HEV90 - Max
spin: dCS Verdi La Scala, Elgar Plus /// digital: j.River Media Center, Prism Orpheus, dCS Scarlatti
walk: iPod Touch 1/2G, Nano 4G, Classic, iPhone 1/2G, N95 (only in desperation when others get forgotten)
I think macs are great, so im not going to tell you your stupid.
If you have one computer set up with itunes and all your music, its really easy to send it across your network to all the others in your house. And it doesnt skip or anything.
As far as I know, there is no way to get rid of the gaps. They drive me crazy though. Supposedly Quicktime says that its impossible, even though windows media player does it fine. So I think quicktime is just lazy and arrogant and they've got kind of a monopoly going for them, so they probably dont care.
But if anyone knows how to fix the gaps, do tell! or maybe i'll make a new thread at some point...
I should have a couple of Mac Mini's to play with soon.
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* Music: Independent/underground hip-hop, funk, jazz, breaks, turntablism, soul, rare groove... This is some of what I'm listening to...
* Main Source: iTunes/Apple PBG4/LaCie d2 HD -> Apple Airport Express.
* Main Headphone Amp: Single Power PPX3 (with Solen capacitor), with Ei Elite driver & US GE Military 6cg7 tubes as outputs.
* Headphones: Beyer DT 990 (2005), Senn HD 595 (120 ohm), Beyer DT 990 Pro, AT ATH-A900, Beyer DT 531, Alessandro MS-1 (Todds Flat Pads), Senn HD 25-1, Senn PX 100, UE Super.fi 5 EB Earphones (black).
* Post your headphone reviews at http://www.headphonereviews.org/
I wonder how a 3.5" drive (it must be a 3.5" inside if there's up to 400Gb of capacity) works in terms of noise?
Yeah, some big drives can be pretty noisy. It has no fan so it would only be drive noise. I'll look out for any reviews.
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* Music: Independent/underground hip-hop, funk, jazz, breaks, turntablism, soul, rare groove... This is some of what I'm listening to...
* Main Source: iTunes/Apple PBG4/LaCie d2 HD -> Apple Airport Express.
* Main Headphone Amp: Single Power PPX3 (with Solen capacitor), with Ei Elite driver & US GE Military 6cg7 tubes as outputs.
* Headphones: Beyer DT 990 (2005), Senn HD 595 (120 ohm), Beyer DT 990 Pro, AT ATH-A900, Beyer DT 531, Alessandro MS-1 (Todds Flat Pads), Senn HD 25-1, Senn PX 100, UE Super.fi 5 EB Earphones (black).
* Post your headphone reviews at http://www.headphonereviews.org/
Anything I'm missing? Anyone want to tell me I'm stupid for going this route?
No way! AirTunes is neat!
Form what I remember the DAC1 has no problem re-syncing with the AirPort Express station, but do a search on the topic here. Some DACs are a wee bit slow, resulting in loosing 0,5 seconds when you manually skip tracks. When you just "let it run trough" there is no gap, at least I never noticed one. The only real problem you could run into is reception, but then again the mini is so neat & silent that you could put it up by the rig if you happen to live in a steel-concrete environment and have five microwaves...
Regarding the HD space you have already been shown that docking station you can put under the mini, I've just seen a second model with more ports by another manufacturer (keep an eye on endgaget.com). You can just stack those whenever you run out of space.
I think this is what bangraman was talking about: http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Clicker/
I wish gapless were easier but its not really a deal breaker. I figure 10% of my collection maybe needs gapless so I'll just find a way to flag them and get off my fat behind and use my dvd player as transport for those if it bugs me too much.
That HD dock thing is snazzy but I wish you could buy it empty and use your own drives, like bangraman said they must be 3.5" and as we all know it would be fairly easy to go over the noise floor of the mini with the wrong choice of 3.5" drive.
For now I'm going to use a 160 gig ide drive I have laying around in a firewire enclosure, any recommendations for a good enclosure (good = quiet and enough cooling ability for a drive that will spin up intermittently [music only on the drive])
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Benchmark DAC1 -> Event 20/20 bas V2
The newer usb/firewire hub/stand/dock Oliver mentioned is indeed empty and you can put your own hd in it. I would say such an item would be a good choice, since the mini is painfully limited on ports.
I'm thinking of a mac mini for audio, questions
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