ericsound

I don't think it is important to hipstone anymore but it's easy to have read and write access to NTFS from a Mac with a little free program called ntfsmounter, see http://ntfsmounter.com/. Works flawlessly for me.

If any program uses more RAM than availabe the operating system starts using the hard disk as an alternative. And harddisks are much slower than RAM. But any decent Mac shoud have at least 2GB RAM which enables you to load at least one single WAV rip of a complete CD in memory so I don't think that this is a real problem. Not if you quit other programs' while playing.

I've spent a few hours comparing Ayrewave, Audirvana and Amarra on my system. Here are my findings. The usual disclaimer applies: these are my personal notes on my system; I certainly do not claim any "thruth" or "verdict". The music I've used for this: Jen Chapin, You haven't done nothing from Revisions (24/96 flac) Janis Ian, Ride me like wave from Breaking Silence (500 MB 16/44 single wav rip) Nils Lofgren, Keith don't go from Acoustic Live (16/44 flac) Tracy Chapman, 3000 Miles from Where you live (500 MB 14/44 single wav rip) Ayrewave version 1.0b6 Audirvana version 0.4b Amarra version 2.1.1 (demo, I can only hope there are no audible differences!) My system consists of Macbook Pro (10.6.5 in 64-bit mode) coupled with a TOSlink to a Beresford TC-7510 DAC, Musical Fidelity F25/F15 pre/power driving B&W 804s. To be honest I was a bit surprised the "El Cheapo" Beresford DAC was able to produce differences at all but they were definitely present. Ayrewave was in genereal the lesser player, a bit muddy in the lows and significant less imaging of voices and instruments. Ayrewave was rock stable though. Audirvana produced a better soundstage and a thighter bass. The overall sound was very close to Amarra with 16/44 resolution. I had some initial issues after changing settings but they vanished after rebooting. Some quirks but perfectly acceptable. Amarra IMHO excelled in the higher resolution track from Jen Chapin but the difference was not big. For me at least not big enough to motivate the price for Amarra. Amarra did ocassionally crash and produce clicks. From a software point of view this is the lesser product. It's good to see these programs are competing and getting better with every version. Probably the ordering wil differ with upcoming versions. It's definitely a compliment for you open source guys to be able to be in the same league as Amarra. BTW: a better DAC is already in the works; I've ordered a Metrum Acoustics NOS Quad mini (made in Holland) which had a rave review at hifi.nl. Eric