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diw

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  1. In addition to the companies you mentioned, Mjolnir Audio in Iceland is a highly dedicated one-man band called Spritzer ( on the forums ) who works with Kevin Gilmore to produce a range of tube and solid state amps for electrostatics at various price points. Also a great source for pre-owned amps, headphones and accessories, as well as a great read
  2. Selling these after upgrading to UltraRendu...two available but will sell seperately....$315 each including shipping in original boxes...no power supply, recent upgrade to OS 2.7IMG_0484.heic
  3. I recently transferred an edited version of my music library to WAV and FLAC and then to a Samsung 1tB Portable SSD, to be connected to the Infotainment system in my 2016 VW Golf R. The system didn't like AIFF files, or 2tB drives, or more than 30K files but it all plays well and is accessible thru the Car Infotainment interface. I can also stream Quboz or Tidal thru a Dragonfly Red plugged into the phone but the phone interface is a little sketchy on the move. I did once try Roon on an old Mac laptop with an iPad mini as remote and that was OK but somewhat fiddly. Next step will be CarPlay as used by others. Putting the transfer library together reminded me how few CDs or downloads I buy these days but it does encourage me to listen to stuff I already have. Listening to 30K tracks will take some time........
  4. I am a happy Roon user but am now trying to use my music library on other devices ( car system, Chord Mojo/Poly etc ). This has involved transposing the library from AIFF to WAV and FLAC via dBPoweramp which works very well but has exposed a number of album files which have been mistagged as Compilations. They play fine but are difficult to access via the player menus so I need to retag them under the artist name. Roon does an excellent job in sorting these files out so that you are totally unaware of the problem while using that program and in the days when it was all an iTunes library on a Mac mini it was an easy job using Get info. I have tried using MusicBrainz and Yate but the operating instructions for those are somewhat obscure. Sometimes you can move them manually if the artist already has a folder in the library but not otherwise. I have heard of a program called TuneUp which will do this but it is unclear if it is still operational. Any thoughts from anyone?
  5. NO, I remember that article but it also said that the Nano was a geek challenge....accordingly to the Darko post the Chromecast now passes 24/96 so maybe there is a new version....it also gives you some options...at its simplest it passes an analog output from wifi, at its best rate it passes 24/96 via Toslink from an ethernet connection....and sometimes life is too short to geek about saving $20 in favour of plug'n'play. Still , lots of choices!!
  6. Thanks to Darko Audio, I found out that the Chromecast Audio now works as a Roon endpoint with a reasonable sound quality for the $35 it costs. Another post on Darko outlines how the SQ can be improved with a high res setting for the Chromecast, an IFi 5v power supply and a connection cable that has an internet cable connection as well. The outcome is pretty good so for $100 you get a good Roon endpoint with some flexibility as well for future applications. Thanks Darko !!! darko.audio The adaptor comes from UGreen, Ethernet adaptor for Chromecast with power supply, available on Amazon for about $18
  7. Some resolution finally and maybe it will be helpful to others to recount the journey Kumakuma...it wasnt dB Poweramp that caused the mess, it was my operating it!! In the end I went back to recoding the original AIFF files with dBPoweramp but played around with the settings before doing the whole lot...the various artist\album\title combos that first spring to mind for file naming fall apart when compllations and multi-artist albums are involved. You get lots of individual artist files with only one or two tracks in each. There is no doubt some file naming convention that deals with this but I couldnt work it out. An easier solution is to use the original file naming that comes from whatever library software you are using and in dBPA this is possible using "dynamic naming " when converting. You have to upgrade to the Reference version of the software for this as the free one doesnt do it, but this upgrade is well worth it for the speed advantages. The free one does batch conversion but with encoding rates between 30 and 100 x, while the paid version encodes at between 100 and 300 x. My reluctance to recode the whole lot stemmed from the 3 days the trial version took to encode 25 K of files, and it ended up a 5 hour task with the proper program. You just use [origpath]\[origfilename] in the dynamic coding box and it just reproduces your original folder structure. For simplicity I read the files off one external harddrive and exported them to another one. iTunes isnt perfect but I ended up with more respect for its capabilities that we take for granted! Undoubtedly there are other library programs that do a better job but its not bad. With those settings the batch conversion with dBPA was a set and forget operation. It is worth taking the time to tidy up your library or hard drive before you do this so that you dont waste time coding movies and other stuff that has been parked there for reasons long forgotten It is impressive that you can get a 2000 CD library in Flac on a solid state harddrive the size of a fat credit card ( Samsung T1) but sadly the Kenwood head unit doesnt deal with it terribly well. It has a limit of 1000 folders and doesnt like bitrates higher then 16/44 much. Sometimes plays them, (and sounds spectacular), sometimes not. It does a good job with the 1000 files within its limit. But I now have a Flac library that I can use to make up smaller drives for the car while I work on the Roon solution... many thanks to all members who contributed to the thread for their advice...thats what these enthusiast forums are all about
  8. diw

    Car audio?

    Obviously a sign of a mis-spent youth...I do a fair number of long solo road trips across the US and those wouldnt be possible without some audio stimulation...but driving across Death Valley listening to Hilary Mantels " Wolf hall" or up to the north rim of the Grand Canyon listening to a CD of Navaho flute music I bought in a Reservation store...those are powerful memories....
  9. diw

    Car audio?

    Since the original post I have changed the head unit in the car to a Kenwood one which plays Flac files and am generating a copy of my home library in Flac so that i can play anything...I did find a very small 1tb Samsung solid state drive which will contain it all...main problem is going to be navigation ( of the library not the car ) as the screen is v small and its hard to find what you want. Same problem with the Pono player, which otherwise sounds excellent. Tidal via Dragonfly Red from the iPhone is also convenient and sounds reasonable...the best solution though may well be Roon...I rigged up an old Macbook as a Roon Core ( connected to the AUX input) which lives under the front seat and operates with the lid closed ( an app called NoSleep does that ) and the iPad Mini is mounted on a dashboard bracket and acts as the remote. Unlike any other car interface solution I have seen its easy to navigate the library without problems in navigating the car. You can either connect the iPad wirelessly to the Macbook or use Duet for a wired connection. I used the Macbook because I had it and it seems tricky to power a MacMini in the car without power supplies that deal with starting and ignition issues ( the car not the computer) Battery power and a car charger seemed simpler. Whats the cheapest laptop that will run Roon Core? or do any of those little Intel computers run off batteries? Although a car is a challenging acoustic environment, if you treat it like a big headphone that you sit inside and optimise it for the driver then it can sound good.I have found that the better the source the better it sounds, even without dsp manipulation. Maybe you also dont want it to be too engrossing as you are actually in the car doing something else.......
  10. Apesbrain........Tried your suggestion with a couple of CDs worth and the files disappeared somewhere Searchlight cant find them...I put the destination as the hard drive the FLAC files are on but they arent there!! Mystery , eh?
  11. Is the creation of folders and subfolders a library function rather than a tagging function? Am I going to have to go back to the original AIFF files and convert them retaining the existing folder structure ( and how do i ensure that dB Poweramp or whatever does that?) Or do I have three more days of nursing MusicBrainZ? Or do I change to Plan B for the car and use Roon on a laptop under the front seat and selection via a MacMini on the dashboard ( that works really well by the way ) and bypass the FLAC playing capabilities of the car head unit completely? Thanks for all the suggestions, I am sure the answer lies somewhere close....
  12. What both of these suggestions seem to do is rename the files but not create folders..the screen shot shows the before ( with all the track information ) and the after ( with not so much. My first attempt with ZLD just named all the files with the exact words of the format I typed in rather than using the content . The second one was attempting to use the format shortcuts from XLD in a dropdown menu that is only available for two milliseconds .The Mp3Tag suggestion processed the files fairly quickly saying it was renaming them but clearly didnt and just locked up at the end. Dont know why because Mp3Tag managed to re-order the original tags very efficiently. Maybe the problem is that there is no folder structure for the FLAC files at the moment so keeping it isnt an issue...Music BrainZ was able to impose a folder structure but very slowly. Is there a problem with how I am naming the files or is there a second step to move labelled files into folders, assuming the labelling is correct?/Users/diw/Desktop/flac 1.tiff/Users/diw/Desktop/flac 1.jpg Not sure if these images are added.....
  13. I am sure it can but as with many of these programs the instructions are absent or impenetrable...i thought I could do that on the initial conversion but it didnt happen...I could just rerip all the files from the AIFF source but thats a three day job and I cant work out what the settings are to give me the same folder structure as an iTunes library....Artist folder, album sub folder...so what settings should I use to acheive this? MusicBrainZ is doing my head in and I know its slow because its encoding all sorts of derailed information that I will never use in this application....Roon does that fine for me on the main system So....I can go back to the original AIFF library which has the right folder structure, I can use the FLAC files which are now all tagged in artist and album or I can plod on with MusicBrainz....best way to proceed ( and any detailed instructions truly welcomed !! )
  14. Need help here....I need to convert my 2000 CD AIFF library to FLAC so that I can play it in the car...I first converted to FLAC using dbPoweramp...that took 3 days to happen but just produced a list of files arranged by track number...used mp3Tag to tag files with artist and album data but that just gave an alphabetical list of artist and album tracks with no folders to enable easy searching. Trying to find some way to get files into artist folders and album subfolders has led me to MusicBrainz but I am finding that very slow and over complex, as well as having a tendency to lose albums if you are not careful....so after a week of solid time on this i have only got to Johnny Cash and have lost Dr John completely on the way ( I have backups so loss is a relative term ) I never realised this could be so difficult...if I connect the harddrive of FLAC files to Roon it takes five minutes to produce a nice library with album art and everything. I now realise that MusicBrainz is a very nice sledgehammer to crack a small nut....Anybody got any advice on the best way to do this on a MAC? The harddrive has to be formatted in FAT 32 for the car headunit. When I first got involved with computer audio it seemed then to be more about data management than music or acoustics...I am getting that feeling again.....
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