Other touches I love are the iTunes like interface, the ability to sidebar an album in the window with details such as sample rate and bit depth displayed – amazingly, so many packages neglect to offer this, only showing the parameters of the track being played) you can click and drag tracks out of the window onto the desktop (something Audirvana+ can’t do) it will search and download album art and fix metadata (but only if you tell it to, it won’t screw with your tags on its own, which is a pet hate) it handles multiple discs and compilations logically it’s very light on RAM usage it loads up in a second it scans your external library HDD disk and updates the library accordingly on startup and offers a decent variety of display options (personally I like to organize by date added and by order of artist and album). The first few pages of Google make almost no mention of this software for Mac and I wasn’t expecting much, but this package is lightweight, it remembers all your settings, plays most file formats including DSD, offers EQ bypass and auto sample-rate and bit-depth setting (I understand this allows your DAC to detect the appropriate playback quality so the Mac doesn’t downsample to 24/96 or convert DSD to PCM, so long as your DAC is DoP ready) and offers very simple and intuitive selections for sorting your collection. I dabbled in manufacturer-developed software (such as that from Fostex) but again, these work fine but are not geared to manage and remember libraries.įinally I tried Swinsian. It also couldn’t parse all metadata which presented no problem for other packages, so I ended up deleting it. This worked well for me for a while but failed to remember my preferences for sorting, audio playback device, and interface on each startup. I tried Amarra and Colibri and discarded them not for any strong reason (Amarra is, from memory, a US$100 purchase, which was a bit too much for me after losing that on my Audirvana license). I deleted this trial version after a few days. I also found it to be geared more towards streaming. VOX was unreliable, failing to detect my DACs and jumbling up library. Not for me.įreeware such as VLC is fine for single-album drag and drop playback of almost anything, but it is not designed to manage libraries. I dig the concept of trying to deepen the digital listening experience with multimedia, but in the end, if you’re working and listening on a PC, most of the time you are doing other things as well and don’t really have time to focus on reading up on the artist while you listen. The concept of a “magazine-like interface” is interesting, but it was out of my price range and didn’t end up adding much to the experience in the end. I trialed Roon, but that package is really geared towards supporting whole-home audio systems and is ludicrously expensive with a lifetime subscription of US$700. I didn’t test everything available, but I did get to several. It remains the best sounding for purists, in that it interferes least with the signal.īut I became really browned off with it for several reasons (they lost my license key and I couldn’t reinstall it, and second, there is no longer an Exclusive Access mode, which is kind of how it built its rep as a purist software package, although to be fair there is still Integer Mode and a lot of debate about whether a difference can be heard with or without Exclusive Access lastly, I was getting pinged with error messages frequently saying System Optimizer had to install, which made me not really rue the fact they lost my paid license) and so started a mission to find an affordable replacement that could: (a) handle lossless PCM in most popular containers as well as DSD, (b) not mess with the signal too much, or make its influence on sound quality felt, (c) pick up and remember external audio devices, and (d) provide a beautiful and intuitive interface dedicated to large libraries. is very cool too, if you have headphones in your collection that need EQ for whatever reason. Being able to side-load professional grade. The idea that it supports most lossless formats including DSD and is configured to bypass the guts of your Mac and feed (as I understand it anyway) a bitstream output to an external DAC really appealed even if the interface was boxy and ugly and its ability to sort and arrange large libraries not so hot. Are software reviews OK in r/headphones, too? I wanted to share my experiences searching for an alternative to Audirvana for Mac users (Windows users have a huge wealth of lossless software to choose from, Mac users, less so.)įor several years, I’ve been a loyal and generally happy owner of licensed Audirvana software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |