[Puma Cat]

   
Ok. Lots of modifiers there. "Better than it was" etc.
 
But from your post: it still has idiosyncrasies, it isn't all that hard to get it to go sideways, there's a learning curve, they want you to use their forum to learn to use the program, their ethernet player is significantly handicapped, and the real kicker is, "it works well enough if all you want to do is play albums." And yet you say "it is useable and much better than iTunes?"
 
In what way, pray tell?
 
Because it plays DSD and 24/192 natively? Because it plays OGG and FLAC natively? Or what? I'd be curious to know.
 
Every disclaimer you made about JRiver made me shudder and happier with iTunes, because I don't "just want to play albums." For that I could drag a folder of any audio format onto the free Vox.app player, and in fact that's what I do with files iTunes won't handle.
 
But what I really want to do with my music collection is to find and play individual songs, I want to curate playlists, I want beautiful album art, I want to be able to fling the audio to my living room, kitchen or bathroom, sync it with my phone, my tablet, my iPod, listen to it in my car, on the bus, on walks. I want to play with my music, not my music player. iTunes is a great database for music management and curation. And, yes, playback.
 
It sounds like JRiver is a typical UNIX-like program, where there are dozens of developers jamming in hundreds of feature requests and you spend more time getting it to work and managing updates than working with it, and you always have the nagging feeling there's a feature you don't know about that would make your life perfect if only you knew what it was. I use Calibre for that.
 
iTunes just works. Yes, it could be improved (or in recent releases, dis-improved) but it works better than well enough, it has never crashed on me, you don't need to post in a forum to learn to use it, and the ease with which it deals with network play verges on magic.
 
And Genius playlists are, well, genius.
 
Edit: PS - I'm not trying to be confrontational, btw, but from your thumbnail overview I can't see why I would be tempted to switch. Especially with 2.5 TB of music and hundreds of thousands of individual songs that iTunes handles without a hitch (albeit, somewhat slowly on occasion).

I'm using Audirvana 2 and it works just fine.

 

[reddog]

This is killing me right now.

I sank probably hundreds of hours into metadata on my iTunes collection (over 2 TB of music, about 1/3 of it Apple Lossless). When my HD crashed, I lost my iTunes xml file. Not the music, that was on another drive, but the metadata. My playlists, ratings, comments, genres, categories, all of that stuff. Gone. It's like someone reached into my record collection and just shuffled everything so I can't find it any more. Think of it this way - I've got a relatively small collection of 1,200 phylsical CDs - it's like they all just got de-categorized and de-alphabetized. Imagine trying to find a favourite CD when someone just threw all your music on the ground and then put it back on the shelves willy-nilly.

At least digitally you can find an artist/song/album by searching (even though iTunes makes even that harder with each "improvement"). But those perfectly curated playlists - it's like losing all your favourite mixtapes. And I'm a recovering DJ, so playlists mattered.

I want to type *sigh* but that doesn't come anywhere near expressing how I feel.

Killing me.

My drives have been shipped off to Drive Savers: the scare-off-the-poor quote was "between $900 and $2,900" to recover my data.

Killing me.

Bummer man, I hope the tech's at Drive Savers can recover the xml file for a more reasonable price. I feel your pain my old computer/ and it's hard drive finally went belly up and I miss my music library. I am using cd's for now, but will get a new computer up and running again soon. Thanks God I backed up the data before it crashed.

 

[BirdManOfCT]

  This one
 

 
I don't often find myself saying that a new CD Box set is brilliant value for money. This is not only great sound and great music (nearly 4 hours worth) throughout, but the package is great as well. The booklet has loads of info and good photos. Graham Nash should be given some kind of music industry award for this. He has done a fabulous job. If like me you are a fan of 'Mr Shaky' then you will know that this was recorded during his 'golden period' and this CD does not disappoint if you are. There is a lot of material from On The Beach and I think 4 or possibly 5 previously unreleased songs a couple of which have never made it onto a bootleg either.
 
I do have to confess an ulterior motive. I would love one of those $1000 limited edition vinyl boxsets and I am hoping that nice man from Manchester may read this if he does get an award and will then feel generously inclined to send me a free one lol.

Thanks!
 
Saw your signature:
 
     'I'm looking at the river but I'm thinking of the sea, thinking of the sea.....'
 
     Randy Newman - Little Criminals (In Germany Before The War)
 
Love that album and that song -- many good songs on that album.

 

[reddog]

A dedicated media PC with foobar, a single USB cable to the dac and you're done.

Want wireless, get a Sonos or similar and you're ready to go.

It cannot be any simpler since you only have to choose and configure once.

If your DAC is NOS, it doesn't need fiddling all the time. Same with a streamer or a dedicated PC. You don't have to change anything once you're up and running.

My setup has been the same except switching amps/speakers/headphones.

Thanks for the information, I will follow a similar strategy, when I get a new computer. I just want a system for music, to play music in a lossless format, at least burn my cd collection to the HD.

 

[reddog]

I seriously used to covet such a wall. Being married to a marine, and moving every 3 years made me get rid of even my CD collection.

Yes moving that much must get old fast, and even a CD collection becomes a pain to pack and unpack. My grandfather was a army surgeon and he moved all the time and made my Dad pack his small record collection and his record player. My grandfather never drawn but like to listen to his music lol.

 

[johnjen]

   
Ok. Lots of modifiers there. "Better than it was" etc.
 
But from your post: it still has idiosyncrasies, it isn't all that hard to get it to go sideways, there's a learning curve, they want you to use their forum to learn to use the program, their ethernet player is significantly handicapped, and the real kicker is, "it works well enough if all you want to do is play albums." And yet you say "it is useable and much better than iTunes?"
 
In what way, pray tell?
 
Because it plays DSD and 24/192 natively? Because it plays OGG and FLAC natively? Or what? I'd be curious to know.
 
Every disclaimer you made about JRiver made me shudder and happier with iTunes, because I don't "just want to play albums." For that I could drag a folder of any audio format onto the free Vox.app player, and in fact that's what I do with files iTunes won't handle.
 
But what I really want to do with my music collection is to find and play individual songs, I want to curate playlists, I want beautiful album art, I want to be able to fling the audio to my living room, kitchen or bathroom, sync it with my phone, my tablet, my iPod, listen to it in my car, on the bus, on walks. I want to play with my music, not my music player. iTunes is a great database for music management and curation. And, yes, playback.
 
It sounds like JRiver is a typical UNIX-like program, where there are dozens of developers jamming in hundreds of feature requests and you spend more time getting it to work and managing updates than working with it, and you always have the nagging feeling there's a feature you don't know about that would make your life perfect if only you knew what it was. I use Calibre for that.
 
iTunes just works. Yes, it could be improved (or in recent releases, dis-improved) but it works better than well enough, it has never crashed on me, you don't need to post in a forum to learn to use it, and the ease with which it deals with network play verges on magic.
 
And Genius playlists are, well, genius.
 
Edit: PS - I'm not trying to be confrontational, btw, but from your thumbnail overview I can't see why I would be tempted to switch. Especially with 2.5 TB of music and hundreds of thousands of individual songs that iTunes handles without a hitch (albeit, somewhat slowly on occasion).

 
Media Center is a continual work in progress.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work.
And it's relatively inexpensive, with a free trial.
 
I'd encourage you to try it and see if it works for you.
 
At it's heart it’s a refined data base that allows a great deal of flexibility and configurability.
This is a reflection of the pc origin of it's roots.
 
Being able to create playlists which are made from anything loaded into it, (individual tracks, whole albums etc.) is quite easy actually, once you understand how it operates.  And just like any program, first you have to learn how to use it.
 
In some ways itunes is quite acceptable but it seems to be getting less and less so.  Especially as it seems to be heading towards being a gateway program which has little or nothing to do with playing music.  And it can be said that Media Center has these same traits, though less so. 
 
So if itunes works for you then by all means continue to use it.
But if you want choices, such as more sophisticated players (Media Center, Audirvana etc.) to very simple (Decibel) there are other options.
 
And you can install several players and load a portion of your music library into them for testing and learning.
 
I've been using Media Center 4 Mac since it first was available and despite it's "idiosyncrasies" I will not go back to itunes.
 
If what itunes provides is sufficient, it's hard to beat 'free'.
If you want more sophistication, it IS going to be more 'involved' (time and money).
My post was meant to shed some light on where Media Center is today and what its foibles are.
 
I'd suggest that you expereiment and determine if any other player is going to meet your needs, or not.
And instead of me writing a detailed answer to your queries it will be better for you to try these programs for yourself, mostly because the list of, not just the features, but entire modes of operation is extensive and you know what you are in need of.  
 
So try them for yourself and figure from there.
 
JJ
ps I'd also strongly suuggest that you back up your music and then make a 2nd partial backup as a subset of your music as the source for the player(s) you want to test.

 

[swannie007]

I simply do not understand why some consumers put up with software that is difficult to use when there are alternatives that work perfectly well and with minimum fuss. I suppose some people are just pigs for punishment. I, for one, do not want to do beta testing for some outfit that didn't develop it's product properly prior to release for sale. I want to just listen to my music with minimum fuss.

 

[Chris J]

​

I simply do not understand why some consumers put up with software that is difficult to use when there are alternatives that work perfectly well and with minimum fuss. I suppose some people are just pigs for punishment. I, for one, do not want to do beta testing for some outfit that didn't develop it's product properly prior to release for sale. I want to just listen to my music with minimum fuss.

Which is why Foobar gives me fits!

 

[StefanJK]

 

 ​

Which is why Foobar gives me fits!

Foobar is close to perfect, easy and simple.  

 

[mithrandir38]

My Shiite story

Owned Modi Optical since August

30.11.14 Ordered Modi USB,SYS and Wyrd

3.12.14 RECEIVED order (surprised how fast order shipped/received in UK)

12.12.14 Schiit announce Modi 2/ Uber etc

Now i realise why order was shipped so fast.
To say I'm a little pissed off and this leaves a bad taste in the mouth is an understatement.
Had i have known what was due to be released 12.12 i would have waited and ordered Modi 2 Uber and Magni 2 Uber 
Have emailed request to cancel Fulla order and doubt i will be a Schiit customer again in the future, lost all my faith and trust in the company.
Im sure i will get attatcked for this post , but put yourselves in my position, how happy would you be?

there's a fifteen-day return policy dude. See if you can ship them back and order the new stuff.

 

[Sarvasaha]

  Gawd, I hate vinyl.  Sure, a prestine record can sound wonderful on a precisely-calibrated system.  But once I hear the clicks and pops, I'm done with it.
 
My first CD was Graceland back in about '87.  It sounded screechy and horrible.  But I loved it because there was no "wow and flutter" or tracking errors, or static, or...
 
Thankfully, digital is beginning to live up to its promise.  There is no excuse for the crappy masters inflicted on us in the 80's, and thankfully, even though a bunch of people (rightly) bemoan the loudness wars, there is truly excellent material being produced on CD, and even DVD-A and blu-ray. 

 
Funny you should mention Graceland. I still have vinyl - and I have always looked after it and now 30-40 years later its still in good condition.
I have Graceland on vinyl, and it was one of my first High Definition downloads and it sounds truly bad (as in bad as it was used in the 70's).
Of course I have a Linn Sondek and therefore Wow and flutter are replaced by WOW! (as in that sounds awesome).
Except I have one Motown record where the hole was not in the middle.
 
Of course the problem with Graceland is (probably) not the digital medium but that it has been "remastered".
The loudness has gone from -12 to -7 (dB). I find I cannot listen to most of the tracks. Homeless is ok because it only has vocals.
There are still crappy masters being done.
 
In theory the artist should control the quality, but if you have been in the music business for long enough you are probably near-deaf anyway.
So the hyped top end sounds ok because you can't hear anything over 12KHz anyway.
..and it sounds "punchy". I really don't want to be punched in the head all the time!
 
I remember when CD players first came out. It really was a case of the Emperor's new clothes.
A guy brought a Phillips CD104 to my house and we compared vinyl to CD.
He went out and bought a turntable, and that was before I got the LINN.
 
Anyway, both CAN sound great. Vinyl has an extra layer of mechanical design challenges to overcome. But they were...

 

[madwolfa]

 

 ​

Which is why Foobar gives me fits!

 
Nah, Foobar is perfect.

 

[nicolo]

Yup. Foobar is awesome. It's the only music player i use. And it's the only one which has ever worked perfectly without any problem in all the years i have been using it.
 
SImple. Elegant. Modular. All that you want and no bloatware.

 

[waynes world]

  Yup. Foobar is awesome. It's the only music player i use. And it's the only one which has ever worked perfectly without any problem in all the years i have been using it.
 
SImple. Elegant. Modular. All that you want and no bloatware.

 
And even better if you use rpgwizard's configurations:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/555263/foobar2000-dolby-headphone-config-comment-discuss
 
I've been using the "foward" configuration for a few years now and love it.

 

[xuan87]

  My Shiite story
 
Owned Modi Optical since August
 
30.11.14 Ordered Modi USB,SYS and Wyrd
 
3.12.14 RECEIVED order (surprised how fast order shipped/received in UK)
 
12.12.14 Schiit announce Modi 2/ Uber etc
 
Now i realise why order was shipped so fast.
To say I'm a little pissed off and this leaves a bad taste in the mouth is an understatement.
Had i have known what was due to be released 12.12 i would have waited and ordered Modi 2 Uber and Magni 2 Uber 
Have emailed request to cancel Fulla order and doubt i will be a Schiit customer again in the future, lost all my faith and trust in the company.
Im sure i will get attatcked for this post , but put yourselves in my position, how happy would you be?

 
I think you just automatically assumed the worst about Schiit. The fact that they ship out so quickly is not because they want to sell you the Modi before announcing the Modi 2, but they normally ship out that quickly (and this can be a classic example of how companies are blamed for being efficient).
 
Plus this "issue" has been discussed by Schiit in one of his blog post. Looking at his POV, it isn't good business sense to announce a new update ANYTIME before its launch. Like someone had mentioned, they announce it 2 weeks before, the guys who bought it 2 weeks and 1 day before will be pissed. They announce it 1 month before, the guys who bought it 1 month and 1 day before will be pissed.
 
I read about a quote that I follow till this day about buying gadgets: Never wait for the latest update as you will forever be waiting. Just buy it as and when you want and need to and enjoy it.
 
In some cases, I actually prefer buying older stuffs as I can get them cheaper. For example, I bought the iPhone 5S after the 6 was announced and bought the Macbook Air June 2013 version after the latest was announced.