I think this is a tad OTT, and much slower than Foobar. WRT re-ripping all your discs, a number of obsessives would say that you should rip to FLAC only using EAC (Exact Audio Copy). USB is supposed to be cleaner than Coax/Opt.įoobar is a wonderful program as it lets you get as technical as you want to be, without trying to do stuff for you like iTunes. These players can cost anything from $10s to $100s, but I haven't tried any of them, as my PC set up just doesn't justify it (USB to ICON Amp with built in DAC). There are a few "High-End" software solutions, some of which were reviewed in stereophile a few months ago that might make a more profound difference: they move the music from the disc drive to the RAM to avoid jitter, and thereby improving the sound. WRT the HDD vs SSD question: as I understand it, this would make some difference, but not much. To answer a couple of your questions, re-iterate what others have said, etc: The 7520 will also be used as a pre-amp onto a Marantz PM7003 using the 'power amp direct' inputs completely bypassing the HDAM, then through some QED79 to B&W685's. Playback - I would preffer to use itunes as I can sync my ipod for 'on the go', although is there a 'better' player for lossless?īeing 'budget' I know the setup will be limited but I'd like as good a quality sound from what's available at a minimal cost. The source - Is there a benefit in using my SSD as apposed to my 'spinny' HDD for the storage?ĥ. Analogue interconnects, same as above - 2m in length, any recommedations? They need to be very cheap.Ĥ. I was planning on using the optical out from my motherboard to my DAC (Beresford 7520), I'm in need of a 2m optical cable but which one, are they all the same being digital, will any old cable do? This is a budget system so I'd rather just buy as cheap a cable as possible, prefferably one of those at a couple of quid from *bay.ģ. Compression - I have circa 500 albums on my 160gb Ipod compressed at 320kbps that took a very long time to rip in itunes, I'm guessing I need to start over with a lossless compression but what do you guys recommend?Ģ. If anyone would be kind enough to answer a few questions I'd be extremely greatfull.ġ. Re XMPlay, while it works fine in shared mode there are still bugs in the exclusive mode implementation (I'm currently trying to help the author debug and solve those issues) which may make it unusable in some scenarios.I listen to music in the office for 8-16+ hours a day and I'm rather tired of swapping countless CD's and listening to full albums, so I thought I'd go the PC + DAC route. In the meantime I'm "forced" to use Foobar2000 or XMPlay as the audio player and MM as the library manager having to switch back and forth between those applications is not much fun at all. Since bit-perfect output is definitely the way to go for any serious audio enthusiast, I think decent exclusive-mode WASAPI support is an absolute must-have for MediaMonkey however, as one of the Ventis guys pointed out, apparently programming with WASAPI is anything but hassle-free. Since the whole point of the exercise is to get bit-exact audio, this is arguably not really a problem if the sound card supports the source sample- and bit-rate. The problem with this mode is that WASAPI doesn't do any sample rate conversion at all, so if the application selects 96KHz/24-bit and plays back a 44.1KHz/16-bit wave file it must perform its own conversion. This enables low-latency, bit-perfect playback which, at least in theory, means your CDs/loseless audio files are played more accurately. The second - and arguably more interesting - mode is exclusive mode, in which only one application gains complete access to the sound device. see YouTube videos while music is playing. Vista itself runs a high-precision software mixer that handles audio mixing for all applications, and is supposedly significantly improved over the Windows XP mixer. WASAPI applications work in one of two modes: in shared mode, which is the default, several applications can output audio at the same time. Other APIs are backwards-compatible and are still supported, with the exception of kernel streaming (which I've only seen in Foobar2000 anyway). Some background: WASAPI is the new audio API introduced in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, and is not supported in WIndows XP.
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