Lorenzo

A very hand tool for audio file management for OS X that is missing here is MediaRage It allows renaming, moving, tagging of files, finding covers based on very flexible criteria, for example one can tag files according to the names of the directories it is in, or edit tags with regular expressions, and other stuff I haven’t tried so far.

dear friends. I have now an urgent question. recently I tested the msb analog in my highly resolving set up (viva amps and tad r1 speakers) and found this dac very fascinating, much more then other stuff I tried recently. So I decide to buy it soon. my question is related to the usb input. since somebody here wrote this input is not as good, I am asking if is worth to add one spdif input to the usb for other 1000 bucks.. I have one m2tech evo trio ( evo - supply - clock) but unfortunately i forget to test it together with the analog.. some suggestion? somebody here tried the analog dac with a high quality usb spdif interface? ps. for my ears, in the short trial time at my home at least, the analog produced excellent sound via usb.. (with mac pro /audirvana plus combo) Thank you very much for any suggestion... L

Not only is it normal, for uncompressed PCM files ripped from CDs it has to be that way: 44,1 kHz * 2 ch * 16 bit word length = 1411.2 kb/s

Hi wgscott, have you tried to do "zpool export " before removing the device? Maybe unmounting in Finder is not enough… (And don’t forget to do zpool import when reattaching the drive) Haven’t tried it yet, just skimming the man pages… btw, your zsh-templates save me a lot of time every day, thanks! @Paul: nice!

Sounds like a fun project! But given the requirements of ZFS, I wouldn’t run it on the main music player Mac… Rather I’d build a NAS which then exports shares via iSCSI or so… Paul, what is your exact setup? When building my current system, I considered shortly using OpenIndiana with ZFS, but mostly for budgetary reasons I then opted for a QNAP NAS…

The bug I'm referring to is described by myco (Pure Music developer) in this thread: Keep in mind that Apple does not require audio devices to support nonmixable integer streams and consequently the Apple hardware and OS haven't been rigorously tested by Apple in this mode. It is not necessarily guaranteed to function as flawlessly as non-Integer mode. There is a known problem involving the built-in USB ports on some Mac machines, which causes clicking on the output in Integer mode. I don't have a list of which machines do or don't have the bug. (The Mac Pro does, for instance, but this may be fixed by using a USB PCIe card; confirmed with a Sonnet Tango PCIe FireWire 400 / USB 2.0 combo card.) We have diagnosed this Gordon Rankin’s help and his USB protocol analyzer. The problem involves the built-in USB port hardware. A bug report has been filed with Apple, and it remains to be seen whether anything will come of it, because Apple doesn't require device (as in DAC) manufacturers to support nonmixable integer streams. Apple can hardly be blamed for this because they don’t require nonmixable integer support in audio devices, and may not include such devices in their testing protocol. There is nothing that the audio player developer can do about this. It is a hardware, not software limitation... the only work-around if afflicted is to turn off Integer mode. Now for my question: Has someone tried a different PCIe card, like one of those new USB 3 cards: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegrousb3pcie.html or http://www.caldigit.com/avdrive/Card_PCIex.html ? The Sonnet Tango duplicates functionality my Mac Pro already has, and costs a lot compared to similar Windows cards… Thanks!

Great, thank you all for pointing this out, I'll go with the RME then…

@all Thank you for your comments! @Chris I think Jesus meant that the Lynx, when given e.g. 48kHz word clock input, can only output signals with 48kHz. Can you confirm this? This point is really relevant for me, as I use an U-Clock as master clock, and would like to sync both the Debussy and the Lynx to it. (The U-Clock can only output 44.1 and 48kHz signals.) The Debussy doubles or quadruples the word clock signal without problems just as you said (manual p. 15), but I found no mention of a similar function in the Lynx manual, but see section 7.4.

I am currently looking into solutions for feeding my dCS Debussy via AES instead of USB, as USB accepts sample rates of "only" 96/24. Is the Lynx AES 16 currently the best way (for its price) to doing this? The RME AES-32 is a bit more expensive, is it worth it? Looking forward to your answers Cheers Lorenzo

Anyone? As a side note I'd like to add that the RME HDSP 9632 does not output 24/192 over dual wire AES, only single wire, which is a pity given that it costs quite a bit less than the RME HDSP AES-32 or Lynx AES16, even with the Word clock expansion... So the choice for internal cards so far is between Lynx AES16 and RME HDSP AES-32. Regards

Yes, IMHO musicbrainz is more accurate and consistent, but their database does not contain as much CDs as FreeDB alone does. For most pop releases it's more or less the same (well if you don't care for correct titlecasing as Musicbrainz does – I can't stand capitalized small words like Of and And). For classical releases there is a major difference - MB always puts the composer (not the performers) in the artist field and the performers in parentheses like (Philharmonia Orchestra feat. conductor: Otto Klemperer) and therefore tend to be long. See http://musicbrainz.org/doc/ClassicalStyleGuide for details. I've also noticed that XLD sometimes is only able to find a cover after choosing MB as data source...

Thanks Ruud, great advice! >HINT: next step is to see what happens when I select the output directory folder of XLD as the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder. I've tried that to basically accomplish what Ruud's hint now does for me (with the "Move to the destination after finish" checkbox enabled, according to what Apple recommends: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3832) but to no avail – XLD rips fine but then the aiff files remain in an obscure temporary items folder somewhere on the system disk...

You're right.

you don’t need to mess with MIDI Settings on the Mac as it switches resolution and bit depth automatically (i.e. no need for Amarra) (At least that’s true for the U-Clock, and I guess they have no reason to change it) Best Regards