samirevah

I have an Aries feeding an Auralic Vega DAC. Not long after I got them, I asked an Auralic employee I saw at the T.H.E. Show in Newport Beach which interface he recommended to connect them. His response was, "if you don't need or care about DSD, then AES is the best sounding". I have tried both AES and USB in my system and I have to agree with him, AES does sound better than USB, as long as you use a high quality AES cable. You also get the added bonus of not having to deal with "USB enhancement" devices.

Mp3tag will do exactly what you need. It's free and available for download here: Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)

Unfortunately, this feature has not been implemented in the Lightning DS Tidal UI. I only see it in the desktop app and the web interface. One of several Tidal features I think are missing or poorly implemented in Lightning DS. I'm hopeful it will be added at some point, as it's a feature I use often.

Marty, I agree completely with you about the quality of Tidal's playlists vs. Pandora's artist stations. Fortunately, it is really quite simple to play Pandora through the Aries. The Songcast app (not soundcast) is free and very straightforward to use. You can download it here: Linn Once you have installed and enabled it on your PC, go to the Lightning app on your iPad. In the left hand column there are 6 icons and the bottom one is for Songcast. Once you enable it there, whatever sound is coming out of your computer will be streamed to your Aries. Fire up Pandora in your browser and you're good to go. For accessing iTunes playlists, it's also possible and not too complicated. Unfortunately, it's a one way export and I don't know an easy way to synchronize your playlists between the two. In iTunes, under the File menu there is a command for "export playlist". Select this choice and then save the playlist in "M3U" format. This is a (fairly) universal format that almost any server software can read. Once you've exported the playlists, go to the server software you're using with the Aries and make sure it includes the location of the exported playlist files in its scan. If you make changes to your playlists in iTunes, you'll have to repeat this procedure and re-scan the folder in your server software.

That's an excellent list you have compiled. I would add one more: albumartexchange.com The good news, very high quality scans. The bad news, cover art only, no liner notes.

Using bit torrent and a bit torrent search site (e.g. kickass.to), I've been able to download scanned liner notes for a good chunk of my jazz collection. Saved me a lot of time. Not sure how well this will work for pop or classical music, but it's worth a try. Of course I'm not advocating illegally downloading music, but I see no harm in downloading the cover art and liner notes.

I, too, just got an Aries a few days ago and I'm having a similar problem. The Power button on the Aries remote is also sending an on/off command to my Marantz home theater receiver, which is nearby. Every remote that is made uses a certain frequency and code for their device. However, there are only a finite number of codes and so there can be overlap if two remotes use the same code. Unfortunately, I don't know how, or if it's even possible, to change the code that one of the manufacturers use for their remotes. I have a Harmony universal remote that I haven't yet programmed for the Aries. I'll be doing that next to see if anything changes, but I doubt it since the Harmony just uses the code assigned for that manufacturer's remote.

This is an exciting development indeed, but it is still definitely a work in progress. I've been trying without success to get ickstream to recognize my Logitech Transporter for 10 days now. There are many posts on both the Logitech and ickstream forums about endless loops of accepting terms, then deleting preference files, restarting LMS and trying again. I've lost count of how many of these cycles I've done, to no avail yet. I sent ickstream my log files 9 days ago, but haven't received a reply. I'm hoping this is just a small bump in the road and that I'll soon be enjoying Tidal on my home audio system, but for now it's a word of caution to others.

I've been using Synchredible for about 6 months now to sync between my ripping/tagging PC and NAS library with very good results. It will give you the options you're looking for in terms of timestamps and file changes...and it's free.

There's a great little free program called "Cathy" for doing exactly what you want. Google for it and you'll find it on all the popular download sites, Cnet, Softpedia, Majorgeeks, etc.

I got the same announcement. After digging around in the FAQs, I found that that browser-based desktop streaming will still be at 320kbps, while the IOS and Android apps will offer either 64k AAC or 320k MP3. You can also choose to stream the higher bitrate on your mobile device only when connected to wifi.

I've been down this same road, with many false starts and expensive detours along the way. Here's what I finally settled on. I use EAC to do the original rip in FLAC. The I use Media Monkey for music and iPod management. Media Monkey allows you to do format conversion "on the fly" when syncing to a portable device like the iPod. The good news there is you don't have to convert everything up front and then deal with two complete and separate libraries, one FLAC and the other in some other lossy format. The bad news is that the conversion on the fly can be quite slow. I have a 60GB iPod and if I want to download a whole new set of music to it, it takes about 12 hours to convert the roughly 5000 songs. Not the way to go if you decide on a whim to change out the music in your iPod and you want it NOW. After experimenting with several different bit rates and formats, I settled on 256K VBR MP3 for the iPod. For me, this was the best trade off between sound quality and song storage. Since you're talking about syncing to an iPod nano, obviously the time and storage equation is much different for you. Hope this helps.

This was several years ago, but a friend of mine who knew I was into audio told me his church had upgraded their PA system from "some old tube stuff" to a more modern system. He asked if I had any interest in taking that old junk off his hands. I said sure, why not. It turned out to be a pristine Marantz model 7 preamp and model 8 power amp! I got many, many years of enjoyment out of that "old tube junk"!