I've had my iMac for over a week now, and have been using Audio Nirvana with excellent results, the sound quality through it is much better than what I get through iTunes. The problem with these, especially Amara, is that they're prohibitively expensive.ģ - Find an alternative that's like solution #2, but cheaper. These programs have better sound quality than iTunes and will handle changing the sample rate automatically and have good upsampling, and they have lots of other features as well. So, if you're on a Mac and want the best fidelity out of your music, you have 3 options:ġ - Use the 'close iTunes, change audio setup, reopen iTunes' method explained above.Ģ - There are a couple of highly regarded programs (Amara and Pure Music) that tie into your iTunes library but then use their own interface and 'engine' for audio playback. To get playback in the correct rate you'll have to quit iTunes, change the bitrate settings in the Audio Midi Setup utility in OSX and then re-launch iTunes, and do that every time you want to play a track with a different bitrate. This results in a degradation in sound quality. So if I have both CD rips and hi rez files in the same playlist iTunes won't change between the bit rates, it'll end up downsampling the Hi Rez files or upsampling the CD files using the lower fidelity CoreAudio driver or whatever Apple calls it. The problem with iTunes is that it doesn't automatically change the sample rate when switching between the file types. Hi Rez files can have any of a number of rates, most of my files are in 24 bit / 96 khz though, that seems to be the standard right now. Lossless CD files have a standard bit rate of 16 bit / 44 khz. I'm ignoring compressed music since it's pointless in this discussion, but lossless and hi rez files are where the issue lies. Music in your library will typically fall into one of three categories: Compressed, Lossless 'Redbook' CD, and Hi Rez. Add to that the fact that iTunes throws another wrench into things - it doesn't handle sample rate switching automatically. Your audio gets played back through the system sound mixer and (for reasons I won't go into here because I don't fully understand myself) the sound quality takes a hit. Windows is worse, but Mac users have the same problem when it comes to audio playback using your typical program like iTunes. So for those of us who are into using our computers as a source for serious music listening, we probably all know about bit perfect playback and its importance. Note this only applies to music playback directly from a computer, it would not apply to a situation where a computer is only serving up the music files to another piece of hardware like a Squeezebox or Sonos player, so if that's your primary use you can stop here. I posted this in another thread, but thought it deserved it's own post as it may help somebody or maybe somebody has even another alternative to share or can educate me further.
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