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Dead? Nothing could be further from the truth. For example we have mounted and staffed exhibits at five major audio expos this year - AXPONA, New York, Newport Beach California, Capital City Audio Fest and Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. This does not come cheaply - there is the cost of the exhibit room, hotel, travel, plus freight charges for shipping equipment to the shows and back. Our total expenses for all these shows ran over twenty thousand dollars. At the recent Rocky Mountain Audio Fest last week we even set up and staffed not one, but two listening rooms. One might ask, where are the other music player software companies? Dead? Certainly not. But we were the only one to actually set up and host listening rooms (that is, Channel D listed as a principal exhibitor of a listening room, and contributed equipment and set-up the room ourselves) at the above mentioned shows this year, and historically usually have been the only one, ever since we started hosting our own exhibits at audiophile expos over seven years ago. Would a company with a “dead” product expend this sort of effort promoting and supporting it? As another example - Apple released iTunes 11.0.3 a couple of months ago, which broke at least three major music players, including Pure Music. However, within hours of the iTunes release we had posted a work-around involving a simple settings change that eliminated the issue. And within 24 hours we had posted an update to Pure Music that eliminated the issue altogether, without the work-around. I wonder if the other companies were equally responsive? Recent example: less than two days ago, Apple released OS X 10.9 “Mavericks.” We began downloading it within minutes, and within a few hours had successfully completed preliminary testing (finding no issues at all) and posted to that effect on our website. It has been running nonstop since then on one of our test machines without ado. We will continue to test it over the weekend on additional computers. Sales of Pure Music and our other products continue to do well (obviously, or we could not finance our continued participation at audio expos and introduce new products). I also like to think that we lead everyone in the quality of our customer support, providing free, lifetime unlimited email, telephone and Remote Support - we will call users anywhere in the world, pay for the call on our dime and conduct a Remote Support session, and have done so across all the continents (except Antarctica). The product road map for future releases of Pure Music has more than 100 items in it - including brand new features and performance enhancements. I cannot discuss specifics but there is a major new version on the horizon that will be well worth the wait. It will rearrange the landscape. In the meantime there will be one more dot release with some (but not all) asked for enhancements. Of course development of the dot releases and the major update are proceeding in parallel. We do have a broad product line (meaning not just minor, marketing-driven variations on a single product) to tend to, which does slow development of the individual products somewhat. That is the downside. The upside of a broad product line is the same as having a diversified portfolio rather than expending all efforts on a single thing, or all eggs in one basket. Also, we tend to time planned updates relatively far apart, incorporating many features at once rather than small incremental updates which I think are annoying to users who want to focus on listening to music on their systems (I still am occasionally surprised to find users who are running a Pure Music version that a year or two out of date) rather than the minutiae of constantly tweaking and upgrading. (A few users have been sent interim Pure Music releases which enhance the current feature set, that will be incorporated into the next minor release.) For others who want to see a more rapid rate of update releases, that unfortunately means waiting a bit. That said, since Pure Music 1.0, we have released dozens of free-of-charge updates bringing over THREE HUNDRED ground-breaking new features and performance enhancements, and all for FREE. This includes but is not limited to being the first audiophile music player software to provide DSD streaming support, and our patent-pending and novel use of proxy pointer files permitting playing unsupported formats such as FLAC and DSD via iTunes, that was copied without authorization by the developer of another product mentioned here. Incidentally we have just been notified regarding the initial patent office’s office action on that patent application, and it was favorable, so it should be only a matter of time until we are able to enforce our rights protecting that innovation. Incidentally, to address a point made in another post: it is not sensible to combine upsampling with integer mode playback, because upsampling requires conversion from integer to floating point (high quality upsampling requires floating point) and then truncation back to integer format. This is at odds with the putative reason for integer mode, which is minimizing or eliminating any signal processing (including floating point conversion), and merely sending the audio samples straight to the DAC / output device. And it is heartening to see that Apple has re- instated the APIs for integer support in the latest OS, avoiding unsupported methods of writing to the OS kernel, something not advised by Apple. I anticipate that this response may be picked apart and portions used out of context. I am sorry that I won’t have the time to respond to that, because I need to get back to work on the next release of Pure Music... The reason for writing this response was in case someone wandered in here seeking the answer to the question posed in the thread title, and wanted the story from the product manufacturer. Thank you very much for your time. Rob Robinson, Channel D

It’s not a club; there is a standard procedure to follow, and it is open to all developers. A developer applies for a trusted developer security certificate and uses it in developing their application. I can’t speak for other developers but we have implemented this in Pure Music, which consequently does not require disabling any computer security settings (or the special control or right-click trick). Requiring a security certificate in an application is something that Apple has warned developers about for about the past two years. It has become part of their programming guidelines. Also, more to the topic of this thread, we posted a Pure Music compatibility update less than 24 hours after iTunes 11.0.3 was released. At the same time, a notice about iTunes 11.0.3 was posted prominently on our website Support page for Pure Music. We also have added information about disabling automatic software updates. On a music-only computer this is desirable to avoid having the computer behavior change unexpectedly; and on a music-only computer, security updates - particularly since in Apple’s case they are very infrequently released - are less critical. Thank you, Rob Robinson Channel D

I have mentioned in other posts here, that spending time monitoring forums is extremely time consuming and would detract from the one-on-one tech support that we provide.This includes free Remote support, plus free telephone support (we do not have a toll free number, but we do not charge for telephone support like some other companies either). Also, each company has their own style of doing business and providing customer support, and we choose not to use Chris’ website as our support forum (at no cost to us - that seems unfair). If anyone has any doubt that we are active in developing Pure Music and active as a company, I invite you to have a look at the track record supported by the software release notes in the Pure Music User’s Guide. Take a look at the News page of our website which includes coverage from various audio expos as recent as this month. In the near future, we will be at the New York show in April, and the Newport show in May. We get down in the trenches to talk with our users, not just at arm’s length in forums or via email. Come to think of it, aside form Amarra, to the best of my knowledge, none of the other companies you have mentioned have ever mounted an independent exhibit at an audiophile trade show (or even sent a representative to partner in an exhibit). Originally Posted by mindnoise: ***1.89 also had some loud static when ending and starting a new track, not good for my speakers. It even cut out the right channel until I started 1.88 again. Use with caution.*** The above was a side effect of further optimizations in 1.89, that only occurred on certain system configurations (and so was missed in testing). This has been corrected in 1.89g. Thank you, Rob Robinson Channel D

Many thanks to Mitch for his excellent article! Transferring LPs to high resolution digital is a LOT of fun and a nice way to enjoy one’s collection on the go (or repurpose it: anyone remember making mixtapes on cassettes?), and it does save wear and tear on expensive playback cartridges / styli; play an LP once, then shelve it. But don’t ever sell it: one will eventually upgrade one’s playback system. Then, make another transfer and compare it with the original, and hear where your money went! :-) (That said, most of my transfers made even with relatively modest gear still sound so good, that I haven’t felt the urge to redo them with upgraded gear, except for a few favorites. I’d rather spend time listening to and transferring my latest LP acquisitions.) Anyway, I’d like to respond to comments asking about noise reduction and address the often-held misconception that vinyl LPs are necessarily noisy or require noise reduction to be enjoyed. One must ask: if vinyl were inherently noisy or flawed, why would it have such a continued and dedicated following among audiophiles? Does it mean that the “all analog” devotees must suffer with bad sound, because they wouldn’t be able to use noise reduction software? Audiophile LP collectors know from experience that “noise, crackles and pops” are uncommon with a carefully maintained collection (a point of view also held by that vinyl guru, Mikey Fremer, as anyone who follows his writing knows). That’s fortunate, because noise reduction (sometimes I like to call it noise resuction) will have a deleterious impact on the audio quality. One cannot remove noise without also removing some of the music, and the goal should be to preserve the music when making audiophile quality high resolution LP transfers. The most effective solution to the odd, excessively noisy LP is to obtain a better copy via Internet merchants (GEMM, Discogs, ebay, etc.). However, if the LP in question is irreplaceable and removing noise is desired, or one is involved with restoration of antique Victrola 78 RPM shellacs (which aren’t exactly embraced by audiophiles anyway), noise reduction might be considered (a couple of our users use software called ClickRepair for this purpose). But those represent unusual scenarios, and I have never found it necessary to use noise reduction (aside from the occasional use of the “surgical” pop removal tool feature in Pure Vinyl) on vinyl transfers. Nor have Pure Vinyl users, some of whom I call “power users” that have transferred thousands of LPs. I love listening to vinyl and have tons of it in my music collection (I mean that literally: given that a single LP typically weighs about 8 ounces, and the number of LPs that I have, that comes to many thousands of pounds of LPs). Only a small fraction of those are what might be termed “audiophile” or new reissues; over half of them were purchased used, at dealers, thrift shops and yard sales. Despite this, you would have a difficult time finding any with more than the odd couple of clicks. In the used market, it’s common to find opened but unplayed copies (signified by the LP tenaciously clinging to the inner sleeve, never having been removed since manufacture), especially classical. Pristine, click free LPs are plentiful on the used market, so one need not exclusively purchase new LPs if concerned about the quality of the goods. But audiophile guys and gals that collect LPs already know this. :-) Rob Robinson Channel D

I checked our customer records. We only have one user named “Dave” in Aurora, CO, who also has a Mac Mini and an Ayre QB9, so that must be you. (Actually, from a search, I found that your last name was revealed in a system log you posted in another thread, so it definitely is you.) You purchased Pure Music in late 2010. The last email we received from you was in January 2011, pertaining to an issue with the Remote on an iPad, and we asked for more information about your system, before seeing your reply indicating that you had found the cause of the issue. Here is the last email that you sent to us: ------- I found the problem. *I was playing gapless music and had the button "Don't Increment iTunes selected track in Gapless Play" unselected. *Turns out this was causing all of my problems. Thanks, Dave ------- It didn’t seem that this matter required any further communication from us...? I also looked over our other earlier communications, and they were all resolved, punctuated by replies from you to the effect of “problem solved.” So can you please explain what was “poor” about our customer support? As far as Rocky Mountain, if I am in the exhibit room, I take time to speak with anyone that wants to engage in conversation, and spend as much time as anyone wants (unless the clock hits 6 PM; sorry, closing time at the end of a long day, or I am needed to speak with a journalist, who only can stay a few minutes). You give the impression that you were deliberately ignored or dismissed, which would not happen. I am sure that anyone who has come to our exhibit room can attest to the attention received. Rob Robinson

The reason the Pure Music bookmark files work with Audirvana (and that fine point is something we were unaware of until seeing your post just now, but this would be indicative of the extent to which it was copied) that Audirvana has copied, without permission, the proxy technique that we created and developed. This technique makes feasible the otherwise impossible task of playback of native DSD, FLAC or other iTunes - incompatible formats from the iTunes user interface. This feature first appeared in Pure Music in 2010, and was used to play FLAC files in iTunes (DSD support was added in early 2011). A provisional patent application on the technology was filed in 2010, followed by a full application in 2011. The patent application has been published, with number US 2012/0165965 A1, if anyone wants to look it up (others pending). There are actually more ideas in the patent application than are incorporated in the current version of Pure Music, but will be found in a future release of Pure Music. The “Proxy” method only appeared in Audirvana this year (2012). True, our patent is still in the filing process and far from being granted, so legally this is not yet meaningful. Only time will tell. But I’d like to ask anyone to at least take a moment to ponder the ethical ramifications of a product built with ideas taken from others: how would you feel if you invested time, effort and money developing a creative, original idea (and if it were not creative then why was it copied?) only to have someone take it and put their name on it? Agentsmith, regarding your other comments, I understand your frustration regarding the time it takes to create the DSD bookmarks, and hope that we can assist you with any other issues you might have... As you (inadvertently) discovered, the bookmarks are portable, and they only need to be created once. We are working on improving the speed of this operation, and have made some progress that will be seen in the next free update of Pure Music, arriving soon. In the meantime, the operation will be faster if you are writing the bookmarks to a fast, locally connected hard drive, rather than a networked drive. Then, you can copy the DSD tracks and bookmarks to their final destination. You will have to delete the tracks from iTunes, and then re-add them by dragging the bookmark file to iTunes (which adds them instantly); but this will be easier in a future update which will permit re-scanning for bookmarks, or else saving them to a different location - incidentally, that was one of the claims in our patent application that we haven’t yet implemented. If you are using an NTFS formatted hard drive and one of the third party NTFS write enabler utilities, the process will be dreadfully slow. However, on the bright side, the Add... process will fully saturate all CPU cores, so if you have an iMac or MacBook Pro quad core this will be twice as fast as a Mac Mini, and a Mac Pro 6 core or 8 core 3 or 4 times faster, respectively (the latter with 16 virtual Hyperthreaded cores). If you contact our tech support we have a development version of Pure Music that uses a slightly different technique to create the .pmbmf files, that we can email to you, which may help a bit. Tagging is something that is being worked on and will be improved. The current work-around is to add the tags to the bookmark tracks in the iTunes user interface. Apologies if we don’t have time to monitor Internet forums but anyone reading this will find that you will get a speedy response if you contact our tech support directly. Thank you, Rob Robinson Channel D Support

Naturally, I am aware of the concept of “fair use,” having been of legal age during the time frame when that doctrine was established. There is also something called DMCA, which is at odds with the notion of fair use, and so copying SACDs is a quite different matter than copying LPs and video tapes. Are you a lawyer? Because what you are saying sounds like legal advice. I really would like to have some concrete legal assurance or case work showing that the matter of copying SACDs has been conclusively settled, instead of having to pay our legal folks thousands of dollars for an opinion on the matter, which may be proven worthless by the courts anyway, should it come to that. So my opinion and anyone else’s about whether I have the right to decrypt and rip SACDs doesn’t matter until it has been settled by the courts. Do you expect us to place our company at risk to do this? I know about these sites, having been involved with the DoP / DSD over PCM specification from the very beginning, and having the first music player software that supported native DSD playback (which Playback Designs demonstrated in early 2011). But as I said in a reply to another comment above, we can’t rationally purchase and download all the DSD albums out there to find one that is gapless... however, if you know of a particular title at one of those labels that is gapless, we would be happy to purchase it. Anyone who has come to Channel D for assistance with products knows that they should not expect robotic, sterile and uninformative responses typical of most companies. We go out of our way to treat customers personally, patiently, fairly and curteously, and all we would like is the same in return, so I am taken aback in seeing my post (or the information on our website?) characterized as being “inaccurate and gratuitious attacks.” I would like to ask you to back up your assertion. Can you explain in detail what is “inaccurate” (I take it you mean the information on our website), and why, please? If you take a look at the pertinent topic on our website, it speaks in general of the issues revolving around Direct Mode, particularly kernel panics. Nowhere is Audirvana mentioned. As evidence of the risk of Direct Mode, we did indicate a thread on a popular website that contained numerous reports of kernel panics in software employing Direct Mode. It is a testament to the nature of the risks involving Direct Mode that this one, single, focused issue (kernel panics) hasn’t been resolved in over two months of work (counting from the first post in that thread), in the product that you cite. This is not an “attack” on anyone about this. We just want to be sure that first-time computer audio enthusiasts won’t encounter a serious problem that could cause them to walk away from computer audio. Regarding your comments about “improving [our] product,” then should I expect a similar degree of indignation regarding companies that copy original ideas from others? If not, then might that be how such companies (legitimately and ethically) should go about seeing how their product is “improved?” Please see my recent related post in another thread. Thank you, Rob Robinson

Then you used a different email than the one you used to purchase Pure Music and an upgrade to Pure Vinyl (why?). Can you send us a support message then please, referencing this thread, so that we can put two and two together? Please re-read the topic on our website. We do not name Audirvarna. The topic pertains to any application that would use Direct Mode. However it so happens that Audirvana does have a thread about Direct Mode, and that the issue of kernel panics comes up frequently. And it is simply our position to make people aware of the risks. Some folks will be lucky (perhaps because they have a combination of computer, OS and audio device that happens to work without issue), and some will not. But since you haven’t offered proof of why the information on our website is “BS,” and as this amounts to a public attack on our integrity, to be fair, I would respectfully ask you to retract that statement. There is a reason that Pure Music has a slight delay with Hybrid memory play while the others don’t seem to, and unless you are a programmer you might not understand the reasons. The instant response is due to using some UNIX sleight of hand involving hard disk memory mapping, instead of specifically loading the entire contents of the track(s) into RAM, which Pure Music does. So, maybe you aren’t getting the memory play that you think you are. But I am unwilling to say more to elucidate this, lest I be accused again of “attacking” something, when I might only be responding with clarification to a comment that you made. We can’t purchase and download everything out there to find something that is gapless... however, if you know of a particular title at one of those labels that is gapless, we would be happy to purchase it and use it as a test case (which should cover it). If only it were that simple... one would have to carefully rewrite the headers for the snipped files, for it to work. That is, unfortunately, easier said than done. Thank you, Rob Robinson

Hello, It's impossible for us to monitor all forums on the Internet, because we focus our support efforts on customers who contact us directly via email or telephone. kennyb123, yes, it's true that we have no record of you ever contacting our tech support. But what is "misleading" or "BS" about the information that is posted on our website? What is the basis for saying this? Can you explain in detail, please? If there is something that is in error, we would want to correct it. I thought this thread was supposed to be about Pure Music and DSD gapless playback? Since I was alerted to this thread (and everyone reading this, if you contact us directly for customer support, you will get the best information right from the source), Pure Music does not support gapless playback for DSD format tracks, because we are unaware of any commercial DSD downloads needing this, and unfortunately we would not have access to "ripped" SACDs for testing this, because as a company located in the United States we operate within legal guidelines. If someone can suggest a way to test gapless DSD playback without needing material ripped from SACDs, we would be more than happy to implement it; please contact our tech support at the email listed on our website's CONTACT page. Thank you, Rob Robinson Channel D Support

Nice work on the measurements, Chris. Very interesting... Juergen, also nice amplification of the above. - Rob

Hello, This is unrelated to 128 kbps... the tracks you mention must be DRM “protected” iTunes store versions (not ripped directly from CD). Pure Music (any version, not just 1.83) was never able to play DRM protected 128 kbps tracks from the iTunes store. They will be skipped; only iTunes can play these. The solution is to update them to iTunes Plus tracks (256 kbps) which do not have DRM protection. There is no problem playing 128 kbps tracks that don't have DRM protection. (I just happened to see your post by chance in this forum; if you have any questions, it is usually best to contact Channel D Support directly.) Cheers, Rob Robinson, Channel D

The Synology products are wonderful. We have a few fully loaded DS1511+ (5 x 3 TB RAID 6) plus an expansion unit on one of those (with 5 x 3 TB also set up as a separate RAID 6 volume). They are well engineered and pretty easy to set up as far as a NAS goes, and are relatively fast, delivering 80 - 90 MB/s continuous on our LAN. I think that Synology was the first serious NAS vendor that has delivered good Mac OS support and continues to do so. Have had occasion to use the hot swap feature to replace a failing drive mechanism, and it worked perfectly. Have had a DS1511 dropped from knee level onto concrete. A few of the drives popped out and the corner was dented. Ouch! Later, it fired right up as though nothing had happened. I think this is the hot setup for future-proof (expandable) music storage, and also works well for transferring vinyl. - Rob Robinson, Channel D

Enrique, you said you tried: ------------------- 1) Screen sharing on, Audio Midi to 192k, only ITunes and controlled via Apple Remote App: DAC's front panel shows 192k and I get clicks 2) Screen sharing on, Audio Midi to 96k, only ITunes and controlled via Apple Remote App: DAC's front panel shows 96k and I get no clicks ------------------- The above proves that the DAC is having trouble with the 192 kHz sample rate. This sort of thing has happened in the past with other DACs; a specific example is detailed on the Support page of our website (look under “Getting clicks or noises in Pure Music in the middle of playing tracks”): http://www.channld.com/support-troubleshooting.html I suggest contacting Esoteric and letting them know that you are getting clicks with iTunes at 192 kHz. There is no need to mention the other player apps you tried; the bottom line is that you get clicks in iTunes, and this will help keep the discussion focused. Thank you, Rob Robinson, Channel D

barrows said: "and now Pure Music is working on supporting DSD playback for the Playback Designs DACs..." (July 15) A minor correction: as of the date of this post (July 30), this feature has already been available in Pure Music for two months. :-) Starting with Pure Music 1.8, the ability to stream native DSD (2.8 MHz or 5.6 MHz) to the Playback Designs DSD capable DAC has been included. We actually began working on it many months ago, and now it is a fait accompli. Those without a DSD - capable DAC also can play DSD files with Pure Music 1.8 and later. In such cases DSD is converted to PCM on the fly at a user defined sample rate - e.g., 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 or 352.8 kHz. (I think 88.2 kHz is a nice place to start.) Thank you, Rob Robinson, Channel D

“When activated, PM would only pass 16bits to the Audiophilleo2 in this mode whatever the sample rate / bit depth of the original file, so there still might be something not working properly here. This is easy to monitor in the AMS properties panel (I choose to show the device properties, in my case AP2) while playing 24/88 files with PM1.8 for example, where it will show only 2ch-16bits. And I can change it directly from the AMS panel on the fly to 2ch-24bits and indeed did notice change in sound (for better). Integer mode was supposed not to mess with bit depth, so I am really surprised here. Maybe my device do not support it?” Not exactly. This is apparently a cosmetic bug with the Apple AMS panel. It is actually in 24 bit mode despite what it says, and changing the Format in AMS while the device is in Integer mode has no effect (only the “owning” application is able to do that, the definition of Hog mode). Please see my comments here for further explanation: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Updated-integer-mode-capable-device-list#comment-83656 Thank you, Rob Robinson