Goodbye Sonos, hello ????

Forgot to clarify - when using Audirvana without iTunes integration it plays flac files from anywhere - even NAS drives - it's only when you integrate it with iTunes that it creates the proxy files and needs them both on the computer

I think Damien may be looking at this issue.

In "stand-alone mode" (i.e. without itunes) you can create multiple playlists of your music and recall them - from there you can filter the content of the playlist to refine a search.

The nice thing with itunes is that artist, album and genre categories are created automatically
- you can the create new genre's
- e.g. I listen to a lot of classical - itunes assigns this genre to a cd when loaded or a track when downloaded
- I then change the genre for a track or album
- e.g. I assign a genre of "Classical Woodwind" to woodwind tracks

Another nice thing about itunes is that it allows you to select multiple tracks to assign a genre to - even across albums - but this freedom can lead to icorrect assignment, so be careful.

I am not an Apple/iTunes bigot - quite the opposite - I just moved all my major apps back to a windows platform after a trying an iMac, which failed me miserably, but I will concede that even with it's warts - iTunes has one of the best interfaces out there for flexibility - even the Windows version performs very well and links to my iMac/iTunes and since installing Audirvana the playback is very impressive

Winamp - i tried it early on - is the closest I've seen to iTunes in flexibility, but I don't know about it's audio performance

Audirvana (native mode) would take a lot of effort to get the flexibility of iTunes - but it could be done

Windows Media Player - I gave up on after trying to import cd's - it's just not intuitive to me

Amarra seems to have a solid following and quite a nice interface - but the cost is too high and I think Audirvana has better quality playback - but if you want to taylor the sound it is probably the most flexible in that regard.

I guess now I have discovered the iTunes/iMac warts and overcome them I will stick with it - but if something else comes along I might be persuaded to change .

my requirement was to get the audio file data to my dac without upsampling - Audirvana does that extremely well

I have tried USB and Optical outputs and they sound identical - I think [this is due to the DH Labs cables, which I have found to perform the best - even better than Van den Hul - my next prefference.

hope this helps

Willie, I have a large lossless .wav music server file library. Do you know an easy way to get itunes to pick the .wav files up and auto convert files to compressed format for synching with an Ipod? Can Itunes do the conversion needed on teh fly as part of teh synch? OR even if Itunes alone (or with some freeby third party Apple plugin or add on perhaps) could batch convert the .wav files up front prior, I could live with that.

Bottom line I would like to be able to synch my .wav files up to an ipod in compressed format with as few clicks as possible. How to do that?

Thanks.

IF the converted files could be retagged as needed in real time as well as part of the itunes load/ipod synch, that would be really nice. I do not expect that Itunes will be able to convert the .wav metadata, but hey, I'll wish for that too if it can be done.

Oh crap! - you've hit the dreaded "iTunes WAV wart" right off the bat

WAV does not contain metedata so when you import tracks it puts them into the "Unknown Artist" folder and within that the "Unknown Album" folder - told you it had some warts.

HOWEVER - I just tried converting WAV to mp4 with MAX and it inserted metada into the mp4 file it created file - I then imported into iTunes and it worked! (I only used mp4 to seperate it from my aif files)

I would suggest you try with a single album first - just to test it out

iTunes can convert to mp3, it gets a little silly for some reason (another iTunes wart) - MAX might be a better choice and more direct

I convert CD's on import into iTunes to AIF - iTunes is smart enough to embed metadata at the time of import.

I know WAV was the CD standard, but it is old hat. AIF is also an industry standard and, dare I say it, as good as WAV (my opinion only - no debates please :-).

I know nothing of iPod synching - you are on your own with that one - sorry :-)

Actually, my .wav files do contain some metadata put there when ripped via Windows Media Player. Problem is that it is not truly standardized metadata tags, so its not always as usable as say FLAC, depending on system. ITs worked to date though with both older Roku and newer Squeezebox systems I have used so far. I think the basic CD identification info is there in a pretty standardized place (for .wav at least) so that seems to be enough to enable retagging later when needed, if implemented case by case.

I've also experimented with batch conveting to flac and having open source systems retag and seen that work as well.

Not so sure about Apple and .wav though.