My old speakers bit the dust and I decided to upscale with (for me) nice sounding powered monitor speakers and sub fed by a low-end USB tube DAC with a built-in preamp. I'm a newbie trying to create a system that is comfortable to listen to for hours each day. I'm hoping I can tap into your knowledge and experience.
I'm running Windows 7 and am trying to find software that will work with my setup. So far I have tried foobar2000, iTunes (blah sound), J River Media Jukebox, KMPlayer, MediaMonkey, Windows Media Player and XBMC.
I much prefer the sound I get when I bypass the preamp on my DAC but, except for XBMC, the lowest volume is often too loud to be comfortable when I am sitting at the computer. In MediaMonkey I can lower the lowest volume by turning on the equalizer and lowering the preamp setting but it dumbs down the sound at least as badly as the preamp on the DAC.
The problem with XBMC is that while the interface is very interesting (and in some ways gorgeous), in Windows it is not particularly usable. I cannot figure out how to rate a song using the UI (particularly the song current being played) or remove the playing song from the playlist. The XBMC online help is (understandably) almost completely oriented to XBox users. (It took me hours to figure out that volume is controlled with the + and - keys. As far as I can tell XBMC volume control in Windows isn't documented.)
If I can easily rate and remove songs in XBMC I think I could live with it. Any thoughts on how to solve this or is there more user friendly software that has also has finer volume control?
Thanks.
