Spartacus

+1 on the update of remote app and tagging.

Hi Guys, perhaps one or some of you can help. I started reading this thread looking to find out if there are any audio improvements found in Mountain Lion. I could not find many indications of audio quality. I am currently running a headless Mac Mini, iTunes, into a Naim DAC and system. I decided to skip Lion so is it worth moving from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion?

I totally agree with Mike. Had the same issues using Mac Mini, Qnap NAS, VNC for control, Ipad+remote. What solved it all was to totally increase the potential throughput of my network. I increased everything to Gigabit where possible (network switch and Powerline adaptors, wifi only used for control). No problems since. If you run activity monitor and syslog at the same time you can see a huge spike in network traffic when the first track is being loaded then when the next track is being loaded before the previous track has finished (this is for gapless playback). Although it may not look like it is not exceeding your network bandwidth there may be a lot of packet resend and network protocol stuff using it up and hence BP stuttering. When I first mentioned this problem on the forum, the developer said that he had seen this problem on slow wifi networks but I was convinced that my wifi network (all apple) was working great, well it was but not for the demands of streaming music on top of the other things I do on it. It is worth looking into but be prepared to spend some money.

I was playing about with audio midi while listening to some music and notice the same thing. Interesting... Wouldn't mind experiencing the results... Perhaps discuss in a different thread if you/when you get anything coded?

I agree with wgscott. The less fiddling about with the music the better. You could try gapless playback if you can't wait for the next track.

Tim I moved away from wireless although I have found all Apple wireless solutions on 5GHz to be very reliable but when you need reliability and immunity from interference you can't beat wires. In the end I used power line adapters to get the data from the NAS upstairs in the office to the Mac Mini in the lounge downstairs. This evening I had my longest listening session yet since BP 0.32 was installed. BP had been running constantly for the last 3 days. I started experiencing glitches after about the 3rd album. Hmm... Interesting, I'll keep using it to see what happens next and keep you posted. By the way can anyone help with setting up a time capsule with a BT Home hub 2 so that I can have the home hub just give a connection to the internet and the time capsule, Giga bit switch, Belkin Gigabit power line adapters, NAS and other bits of kit can operate as a Gigabit LAN? Spartacus

As of the 0.32 update life is cool with my system and BitPerfect. Well done Agentsim for the continuing support and patience with us finicky Audiophiles. I've given BP a lot of testing & hassle over the last few days and; The glitches are gone in general but if I mess about jumping from track to track using the forward and back buttons or randomly picking tracks manually on the iPad it does sometimes glitch. But I am really messing it about. Usually I just play a whole album or build a playlist and let that play so no worries. The sound has improved and I like being able to choose how much up-sample to use. I now use BP for most of my listening. Keep up the good work stabilising BP and As I said earlier, for me it would be absolutely brilliant if BP played nice with Airplay. Is it time to get an Airport Express Tim? Edit: One thing I would point out is that about 50% of my glitching problems disappeared when I made some network changes which increased the throughput from my NAS. Glitching did not exist on my MacBook Pro using an iTunes library on the hard drive. I think the other 50% came with the changes made to help optical DAC's in version 0.32 Spartacus

I meant to say that everything works fine with multiple speakers turned on in iTunes with BP turned on or off. And all this happens "without" any strangeness with iTunes. So I don't even mess about turning remote speakers off in iTunes when using BP. I just turn BP "on" for serious listening and "off" for multi-room social listening. Sorry if I confused things by making a mess of the word "without" in my earlier reply. Spartacus.

What do you mean? I have a couple of AE's running other rooms and have not noticed anything. If I want to play multi room then I just turn BP off but if I want to play Hi-Fi only and do some proper listening the I turn BP on and nothing comes out of the AE's. This happens with any strangeness from iTunes. Airplay is the only major bit I would like to see implemented in BP to make it truly transparent to using iTunes only but with better sound. P.S. I know the sound coming from the AE's won't be brilliant but good for socials and lifestyle as I mentioned in a previous post. Spartacus

So Tim are you saying that for my situation with an optical driven DAC BitPerfect is working as designed? Spartacus.

For me it's; Snow Leopard No integer mode Tim earlier I outlined how the various volume controls works on my system. Is this how it's supposed to be?

This is interesting as I don't get any sort of panic when I use the usual volume controls. Here are my observations using BitPerfect 0.32 and iTunes 10.4.1, Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard); 1. Apple remote volume control only works if I use the main slider but if I try adjusting computer volume or dining room (Airport express) nothing happens. But still there is no panic. 2. If I use the main iTunes slider that works as well - no panic 3. If I try Bit Perfect volume control it seems to be disabled. I normally adjust the volume using my Hi-fi remote and leave all software volume controls at max. As far as I'm concerned That is exactly how I would want it to work, with my control point (Apple remote on iPad) being the main one if I used it at all. Tim is this how it's supposed to work?

When I was setting up my system I found the articles on ilounge.com invaluable in terms of understanding the correct way to setup and repoint the library to another location. This website (Computeraudiophile) also has guides on setting up iTunes for optimum results. I never switch the MacMini or NAS off. I use an application called Caffeine to make sure that the MacMini does not go to sleep. In addition iTunes and the connection to the NAS are in my startup items, Caffeine is set to run at startup. So a reboot just sorts everything out and I get my iPad out and play music. Hope this helps,

I'm with Paul on this. What I like about Apple kit (Airplay, Mac, iPad...) is that it works and it all integrates very well. Airplay as paul says depends on what you put on the other end in terms of amplification and speakers. However if you had read my post I differentiated between "Lifestyle listening" and "Critical listening". I just feel that having software like Bitperfect for "critical listening" should not break the integration of iTunes and Airplay thus removing my options for "lifestyle listening". I suppose that in the even of a social at my home I could just turn off Bitperfect and use the system(s) as apple intended because people will be talking to each other all over the music. If they weren't then it wouldn't be much of a social. In an ideal world I would prefer not to be fiddling with things all the time. I would like to setup and use to enjoy the music. So if Bitperfect could talk to Airplay it would have an option to turn Airplay on/off much like you can currently disable Bitperfect and use the native iTunes audio. This is one for the developer.

The way I use Airplay is for background non critical listening so even though Airplay is not super duper in terms of sound it is great for lifestyle type listening (e.g. music for dinner parties and other social events). I do all the real listening on the main system. I suppose it all depends on how Airplay is implemented with respect to the main audio stream. I suspect that you would need some info from Apple on how to interface to the Airplay comms layer. I think I will leave it to Agentsim if he gives in to the requests for Bitperfect compatibility with Airplay. Perhaps this will come in version 0.3x...