[Jeremy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jaska /img/forum/go_quote.gif According to Apogee's Duet FAQ, there should be no problem using the Duet with a FireWire hub.

But I just read the following from another Duet thread in this forum...

Quote:

Originally Posted by alainstein /img/forum/go_quote.gif Apple told me that the issue is to "power" the duet with a firewire hub, or to daisy chaining it to a firewire hard drive. But when i mailed Apogee, they told me that they doesn't recommend to use a firewire hub....

 

[Jaska]

I would tend to trust the up-to-date FAQ on the Duet web pages sooner than second-hand information from an e-mail communication from a single Apogee support person. The responses that you get from Apogee should reflect the same information imparted in the FAQ. If their continued testing of the Duet leads them to think that FireWire hubs should be avoided, then naturally one would expect for them to update the FAQ with different answers.

If I used one of my FireWire hard drives with the Mac I use for my music listening, I would have no hesitation at all to daisychain the Duet into an available port on the hard drive. If I wanted to disconnect the Duet without restarting the computer, I would just unmount/eject the volume(s) on the FireWire hard drive, power it off, and then disconnect the Duet.

 

[Jeremy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jaska /img/forum/go_quote.gif If I used one of my FireWire hard drives with the Mac I use for my music listening, I would have no hesitation at all to daisychain the Duet into an available port on the hard drive. If I wanted to disconnect the Duet without restarting the computer, I would just unmount/eject the volume(s) on the FireWire hard drive, power it off, and then disconnect the Duet.

Sounds like a good plan. Unfortunately my G-Tech drive I purchased from the Apple store only has a single firewire port on it! Maybe there's a firewire splitter cable I can buy to offer a similar solution. I will have to look into it. Thanks for your help, though, as always.

 

[spencexxx]

Here is the dumb question of the week...MUST you use Itunes to take advantage of the core audio and software included with the Duet? I have read a lot so far, but have not found anyone saying they use COG or PLAY with Flac files with the Duet. (Those are the 2 players I use...gave up on waiting for the Songbird player)
Great discussions and impressions otherwise!

 

[Currawong]

I can't remember if it was the Benchmark DAC1 pages or another that said that VLC is as good a player for a Mac. If i bother with flac, I have installed the Xiph component, so all my flac files are thrown in iTunes and converted from within it to ALAC.

According to the page on Versiontracker for Play 0.3:

Quote:

Play processes all audio using 32-bit floating point precision, providing the highest possible playback quality for files sampled at all bit depths. Additionally, Play is tightly integrated with Core Audio and supports DSP effects using Audio Units.

 

[spencexxx]

Thanks, Currawong. Vlc is great for everything except music as it doesn't play gapless! I have the Xiph component, but converting 900gb of flac music over to ALAC sounds like a lengthy chore!

 

[Tarkovsky]

Ok here goes:

Word length should always be 24bit. This will not ever affect the audio adversely. This is not the same as sample rate conversion. Let me explain. 24 and 24.00 carry the same information, but are not the same data. All word length conversion does is add those redundant digits. These redundant digits are useful if we want to apply dsp (INCLUDING DIGITAL VOLUME CONTROL).

Secondly. For bit perfect (and IMO the best sq) playback audio midi must be set to the sample rate of the playback file before itunes is opened. So you can't do it whilist itunes is open. It's a hassle depending on how much you have @ 96k, as you may just be able to leave it at 44k1.

If that's too much hassle for you apparently itunes has very good, perhaps inaudible, SRC (as opposed to OS X's SRC, yuck) which means that you can just leave the interface at 24/96 if it's bothering. Personally I think a few clicks of a mouse are a small price to pay for getting your moneys worth out of your equipment, but each to their own.

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spencexxx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Thanks, Currawong. Vlc is great for everything except music as it doesn't play gapless! I have the Xiph component, but converting 900gb of flac music over to ALAC sounds like a lengthy chore!

I do it in iTunes as it saves me having to re-do the tags which get lost if you do it using xACT. I did most of my AIFF -> ALAC conversion in one hit overnight. That was only about 60Gb though.

 

[Solan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spencexxx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Here is the dumb question of the week...MUST you use Itunes to take advantage of the core audio and software included with the Duet? I have read a lot so far, but have not found anyone saying they use COG or PLAY with Flac files with the Duet. (Those are the 2 players I use...gave up on waiting for the Songbird player) Great discussions and impressions otherwise!

I am interested in the same question. I have a TB of FLAC files (and SHN and APE since I am into lossless bootlegs), and the prospect of being locked to iTunes is not a buying argument for the Apogee Duet. I could of course convert all files to ALAC, but then they would suddenly become unusable for my portable files player (which is not an iPod).

 

[Jaska]

You can use the Duet to play any audio from a Mac. With software such as Cog or Play, the thing to avoid, I suppose, would be to use Audio MIDI Setup to raise the sample rate since you can't take advantage of iTunes' SRC. If all the files played through these other programs is 44.1kHz, then Audio MIDI Setup should be configured for 24/44100.0 Hz.

 

[Jeremy]

I'm curious what others have their Duet Maestro settings set to. In the Maestro control panel, I have the "level" set to "line out" and volume at -16. In the Maestro Mixer, "inputs" are set at -inf, "from mac" is set to -inf and the "to hardware" is set to "none" with volume at "0db".

 

[feverfive]

^^ I'm still at stock settings until I find a good reason to change. I use mine for playback only; I don't record.

 

[dusk]

specs: duet/dt880s/ALAC/iTunes/44.1/24
verdict:

edit: MAX is pretty cool.