Mac OS X Music Players - alternatives to iTunes
Jan 7, 2013 at 9:05 AM Post #1,698 of 3,499
Aha, goed om te weten!  
tongue.gif

 
Jan 8, 2013 at 8:55 PM Post #1,702 of 3,499
Quote:
Not if you're ripping good condition CD's. If not, Itunes error correction isn't near as good as XLD's.

 
Another bonus; for those that prefer FLAC, XLD has two useful encoding adjustments, the chief one being  “compression level” or how hard it works to compress the data. I’ve run some tests and found that the file size difference between max and min settings is relatively small so, I used to (these days, I prefer ALAC for several reasons) encode with the minimum compression setting to reduce CPU utilization during playback.
 
Jan 9, 2013 at 9:25 AM Post #1,703 of 3,499
Hi all -- I hope you'll forgive this minor advertisement. Nasturtium Player is a new music app for Mac that integrates with both iTunes and YouTube. I will be the first to admit that it is not targeted towards audiophiles -- the backend is simply QuickTime -- but it does intend to be the player for those who would simply like to choose some music and get back to work.
 
Here's a few promo codes for download Nasturtium from the Mac App Store:
http://tokn.co/6yxh56fx
http://tokn.co/ys45p5s2
http://tokn.co/9jwtaugw
 
Otherwise, you can find it here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nasturtium-player/id585354542?ls=1&mt=12
 
Jan 11, 2013 at 11:59 PM Post #1,707 of 3,499
How do you think Bitperfect compares to Decibel sound wise?  
 
Jan 12, 2013 at 12:11 AM Post #1,708 of 3,499
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No retina here, but I know what you mean.
Try setting it to horizontal or vertical, go out of prefs and then get back in and set it to rotate again.
That did the trick for me.

Hm that didn't work for me. I have it on vertical by default.
I tried moving Audrivana to a different part of the screen so I can "rotate" it more. It rotates reaaaaally slowly at first, then rotates really quickly later on. On my older MacBook, the rotate feature works just fine.
 
Jan 22, 2013 at 3:55 PM Post #1,709 of 3,499
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A new version of Audirvana Plus is out. It fixes the preferences window being out of range of the screen boundaries.
 
And Integer Mode is back.

For me Audirvana Plus is the best. It has some kind of sweetness in the treble that no other player can (min. for my ears) This is easily detectable with classical music, furthermore with violins.
 
What are your impressions about it folks ?
 
Jan 23, 2013 at 11:34 AM Post #1,710 of 3,499
Second your impression on Audirvana Plus. Not only it sounds more natural (particularly when compared with Amarra / Amarra HiFi) , the layering, imaging and sound stage are excellent as you can sense the location/tone of individual instrument in an orchestra. Further more with direct play and integer mode turned on, unnecessary software layers (for various audio effects and sample rate conversion) such as Apple Core Audio are bypassed all together, thus settings in Apple MIDI Setup utility do not have any effect on Audirvana Plus. For pure music appreciation by audiophiles, any additional audio processing has adverse effect on sound quality.
 
Audirvana Plus requires certain amount of memory (buffer size is adjustable) for track preload and processing, scheme for sample rate conversion is adjustable as well (according to capability of your external DAC). It doe not modify any setting in Apple MIDI Setup at all (see above), thus no audio setting should be affected once Audirvana Plus application has been quit (does not matter it ran in hog mod / direct play / integer mode). So if you never set these parameters properly according to your Mac and DAC hardwares and the application keep crashing and audio system never work properly for other applications, then blame yourself instead of the application. With Audirvana Plus, crappy software such as iTunes and all unnecessary software layers can be bypassed completely, thus it should be more stable than Amarra HiFi and Pure Music and even standalone Amarra.
 
By the way we are talking about paid commercial software Audirvana Plus but not free open source software Audirvana. The free version has some critical components (particularly good sample rate converter) missing.
 

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