[everybest]

 
Sorry... no, I must have missed the FLAC part in an earlier post. If you want to sync FLAC files to your iPhone, I recommend one of two approaches:

 
My bad, I neglected to mention that.  I have over 30k tracks and some music I have FLAC only.  I don't care what format it is on my phone but I would like to be able to sync those tracks as well.
 
From what I can tell, J River converts the FLAC files to ALAC (or some other format) on the fly during the syncing process, so I'll probably give that a try.
 
Thanks for the help

 

[everybest]

I'm not sure that I really like J River.  If I go with the conversion route, is there a way to bulk convert all flacs without having to sort through all my folders?

 

[Krutsch]

  I'm not sure that I really like J River.  If I go with the conversion route, is there a way to bulk convert all flacs without having to sort through all my folders?

Yes. If you are comfortable with your Mac, you can use the finder to locate all .flac files under the top-level folder, open in XLD, and convert in place (i.e. replace the originals) to ALAC.
 
I would make a copy of your library and try it to make sure it works... then, just drag/drop into iTunes and you are all set.

 

[miceblue]

I'm a Mac user and I love the A+ simplicity but as recent posters have said, v2 is buggy. Just updated this morning and, well, my FLAC songs sounded like it was recorded with a smartphone in a noisy night club. Switched over to my JRiver MC 20 and much as I hate its complexity, it worked fine.

A+ 1.5 was great, I never needed the library function, and I wasted my money upgrading. Improvements (library etc) be damned if it is so buggy.

That's what I got out of the 2.0 demo: buggy and lacked the ease of use that 1.5 has. I'm still using 1.5 here too. I have no plans to upgrade to 2.0 at this point, and other media players don't look too eye-catching to me either in terms of price/performance/features.

 

[Currawong]

Audirvana doesn't like some USB DACs, that is for sure. I suspect the main problem is USB3 ports. 

 

[miceblue]

I bought Bitperfect  - it's very convenient if you use iTunes for most of your listening. However I still think that Audirvana and Amarra ar better sounding Players.

I really want to believe that is true, as a part-time subjectivist, but as a software engineer I am struggling to understand how that can be. These players all playback from memory, avoiding disc/network processing or delays, and they all feed modern DACs using a direct/integer mode, bypassing the operating system's audio processing layers and with no conversion to floating point math.

Unless DACs have sensitivity to how data is pushed into I/O buffers, I am dying to know these players can sound different from one another (assuming no forced up-sampling).

Not trolling; curious.

I'm curious about this too. It's hard for me to do an accurate A/B test between players because of the relatively long time needed to switch, not to mention any level-matching that would be required.

Generally I've found myself to like Audirvana Plus, but with a MacBook Pro equipped with a solid-state drive, I myself am a bit skeptical of any benefits for A+.

 

[AnakChan]

I've had stuttering issues with A+ & iTunes on Yosemite (no issues on Maverick) esp when I'm web browsing, etc.

So far I've managed to solve the problem by hooking up the DAC directly to the USB ports of my late 2009 iMac instead of using a USB hub. I'm speculating Yosemite treats external hubs somewhat differently in prioritisation to the iMac's onboard hub, compared to Mavericks & older MacOSes.

 

[Kiats]

I've had stuttering issues with A+ & iTunes on Yosemite (no issues on Maverick) esp when I'm web browsing, etc.

So far I've managed to solve the problem by hooking up the DAC directly to the USB ports of my late 2009 iMac instead of using a USB hub. I'm speculating Yosemite treats external hubs somewhat differently in prioritisation to the iMac's onboard hub, compared to Mavericks & older MacOSes.

Thanks for sharing your experience with Yosemite, Anakchan. Thus far, I've resisted upgrading to it from Mavericks on my MacMini. I connect the DAC directly to the MacMini. So, it would appear it should not adversely affect playback to upgrade. Glad to know that.

 

[Krutsch]

I've had stuttering issues with A+ & iTunes on Yosemite (no issues on Maverick) esp when I'm web browsing, etc.

So far I've managed to solve the problem by hooking up the DAC directly to the USB ports of my late 2009 iMac instead of using a USB hub. I'm speculating Yosemite treats external hubs somewhat differently in prioritisation to the iMac's onboard hub, compared to Mavericks & older MacOSes.

 
I've had similar issues, but for me I believe it to be an issue of disk I/O. I am still running a 1st-gen Drobo F/W 800 and when the Drobo is busy re-organizing blocks, performance is extremely low (e.g. 15 MB/s, as opposed to my internal SSD at 365 MB/s). I really need to upgrade the Drobo, but it's been reliable and handles disk failures well - I've had 2 - so I archive everything on it. When I run A+ iTunes from a portable external HDD, I never have stuttering issues.

 

[Krutsch]

I'm curious about this too. It's hard for me to do an accurate A/B test between players because of the relatively long time needed to switch, not to mention any level-matching that would be required.

Generally I've found myself to like Audirvana Plus, but with a MacBook Pro equipped with a solid-state drive, I myself am a bit skeptical of any benefits for A+.

 
Well, these are a few of the benefits for me (none of which are about SQ, although I think the system sounds great):
 
1. Does a nice job of switching sample rates with no fuss (others do this too, but A+ works); with my DACs, it's flawless;
 
2. A+ remembers your preferred DAC and will try to reacquire the preferred DAC if it's powered off and back on; huge benefit for a headless Mac Mini;
 
3. A+ has a lot of flexibility; for me, I use the Spl rate switching latency to accommodate delays incurred by my DAC (again, on the headless Mac Mini);
 
4. A+ allows use of Audio Unit plug-ins, like EQ, room correction and surround up-matrixing; I use a third-party EQ and am in the hunt for the other two plug-in categories;
 
5. Automatic system optimization; yes, you can do this stuff yourself, but it's nice that A+ does this for you (and reverses the effects, when you are finished).
 
I experimented with the forced up sampling stuff (i.e. iZotope 64 built-in), but no longer bother with my latest DACs on my Laptop and Headless Mac Mini systems; but it's there and works great.

 

[Lohb]

That's what I got out of the 2.0 demo: buggy and lacked the ease of use that 1.5 has. I'm still using 1.5 here too. I have no plans to upgrade to 2.0 at this point, and other media players don't look too eye-catching to me either in terms of price/performance/features.

Forgot if you tried Decibel or not before...? Not feature-rich but it is more natural-sounding than A+ to my ears.....

 

[bixby]

Plus 1, but you already know that lohb

 

[Lohb]

Plus 1, but you already know that lohb

Yes, I should have attributed my Decibel lead...you ! It is the quiet (hype-free) low-priced winner of OSX music players....

 

[miceblue]

Forgot if you tried Decibel or not before...? Not feature-rich but it is more natural-sounding than A+ to my ears.....

Yup I have the demo version installed at the moment. I haven't had the chance to do critical listening yet, but I like its user interface much more than A+ 2.0 from the demo I tried. It might be worth the money to get that over A+ 2.0 at this point in time for the UI alone. For local Head-Fi meets, the extra information that Decibel provides is much better than A+ 1.5 for sure.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it seems to be finicky when changing DACs.


Speaking of A+ 2.0 though, I found it funny that most of the comments on A+'s Facebook posts are about drag-n-drop. XD

 

[BirdManOfCT]

Speaking of A+ 2.0 though, I found it funny that most of the comments on A+'s Facebook posts are about drag-n-drop. XD

 
Same here. I never use drag-n-drop. I mostly use shuffle, which still has issues (sometimes it shuffles, sometimes it plays the next in library, regardless of what the setting is).