MajorFubar

No problem Bill. Just to add though, unless there was a pronounced channel imbalance that you wanted to correct, you wouldn't as a rule normalise the two channels separately in case one channel ended up louder than the other. John

I live in the right part of the world (well that's questionable...but to buy the album I mean), but with no preview option on B&W's website I'm a bit reticent to spend £15 on buying the so-called 'studio FLAC' version of an album I already own. That's the trouble with downloads: I can't exactly ebay it and get some of my money back if it turns out to be a wasted purchase.

Unless Audacity has got its features in a knot (and I don't think it has), Normalising should most definitely NOT compress any file's DR. The Normalising process scans the file, finds the loudest peak and raises the volume of the whole file to a level where that peak just hits 0db (or -0.1db, or whatever level you specify). No compression. On the other hand, Amplify will compress the file if you overdo it, by lopping the top off the loudest peaks.

Despite the fact that it sounds excellent (and I do not dispute that as a given), I do struggle with the fact that Sonic Studio are asking serious amounts of money for a piece of software which imo is too buggy to be anything beyond a beta-build. For three years now they've been charging people to be essentially beta-testers for a piece of software which is not yet bug-free enough for commercial release. There isn't one feature which really, honestly works properly as it should. Not one. Actually maybe there is just one: the FLAC->AIFF tool works fine, other than the fact there is no status window or progress indicator of any kind, so for nearly five minutes I thought it was yet another feature which hadn't worked.

Bit of an update.... I tried to use Background Manager to convert my 192k files to 96k so Amarra would play them. No joy: yet another part of it which is bugged so badly that it doesn't work. First time I tried, it gave me error messages that the folder I was saving to was read only (the folder was on my desktop!). Second attempt produced a set of files 262k in size. What a useless heap of **** So I loaded up Audacity (which is open source, ABSOLUTELY FREE and FULLY WORKS, unlike this barely-usable abomination) and converted the files with that. Afterwards Amarra was happy to play them. And in true Amarra style they sounded fantastic. I wish Sonic Studio would sack their programmers and hire some who can write fully-functioning code that is usably bug-free and which sounds as good as this does when it works.

You're absolutely right. Frustrating is definitely the word. I find Amarra is like owning an old British TVR: the potential is there for it to be one of the best cars in the world, it's fast with superb handling and looks the part. It's just that you can never be absolutely sure if it'll start when you turn the key and every morning you pray that today's the day where it will actually get you to your destination without breaking down.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I've always known the specs of my DAC, in fact I even speculated what the problem might be back in my second post. Turns out I was right. The only thing I didn't know was that Amarra won't downsample to 96k. Just about every other HiFi player I've tried will, so it was quite reasonable of me to expect that Amarra would as well, especially as there's there's no info in the - frankly, downright abysmal - manual to say otherwise. And the vague error-message from Amarra did little to clarify the situation. Just about the only thing going for Amarra is its excellent sound quality. Imo it's quite possibly the best there is (or at least, it's the best I've ever tried). But basically that's the only reason I'm even considering investing in it. Other than it's sound quality, imo it's pretty much an amateurish mess. It's about as stable as a drunk one-legged man balanced on a space-hopper, it has really basic issues that they should have sorted while it was still in beta (such as playing gapless files), and it has more bugs in it than a 50 acre ant-farm.

I have just today had feedback from Amarra regarding the incident I raised (ticket 4116). Apparently the problem is because my DAC does not support 192kHz, only 96kHz. Amarra will not downsample 'on the fly', unlike similar products like BitPerfect and Pure Music. I appreciate the feedback from them but personally I think they should seriously consider adding on-the-fly downsampling, but that's just obviously my opinion. What's less of opinion and more of a fact is that Amarra's error messages need to be improved. For example if the error message had said "Amarra cannot play the file you have selected because its bitrate is not natively supported by your DAC", that would have been infinitely more explanatory.

Sorry I can't think of a way to explain the problem better, I thought my problem was self-explanatory, clearly it's not and I apologise for not being able to explain it in a way you understand. As for Amarra itself, it sounds to me that Sonic Studio have far too may issues with this software which surely should still be in beta-test stage, instead they seem to expect paying customers to beta-test the software for them. I don't intend being one of their unpaid testers. Maybe I'll come and look at it again in a few years time when it's stable, reliable and does what it says on the tin. Thanks for your help.

I haven't tried other FLAC formats, but I suspect they will load and play. It won't load them nor play them. It seems to be the bitrate that it doesn't like, as the error specifically states that the bitrate is unsupported. Plus the fact I have also converted the files to AIFF and it gives me the same error with those. In fact if it even discovers 192/24 AIFFs in an iTunes playlist it automatically swaps back to 'iTunes' on the button under the display. It just wont touch them at all. Maybe it means that my DAC doesn't support 192kHz, which is true of course, but I wouldn't expect that to phase a premium product like Amarra. BitPerfect plays them for a tiny fraction of the cost.

My first post and sorry it's a bit of a moan (not about the great site!), just that this seems to be one of the few forums where Sonic Studio personally visit. I've just downloaded a demo of this software. I do feel that its usability and stability has some way to go for a premium-priced application at version 2+. For a start it crashes if you choose to set the player window to vertical (don't they actually have people testing these basic things??), plus it says my recently-purchased 192/24 FLACs of The Eagles' Hotel California album are in an unsupported sample-rate and it will not play them (Mac Mini running 10.8.2 + HRT Streamer II+). I have emailed Sonic Studio through the form on their Amarra website regarding the latter issue, as I seriously expect it to play 192/24 files without issue, even in demo mode. It's a lousy demo mode if it won't allow me to try one of the most important features. It will be interesting to hear what they say, if anything. Thanks for reading my moanathon, I'll now go away and browse more of this site, it's very interesting.