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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Digital Music Questions - Beginner

Since you are a Windows user I would suggest no longer listening to your friend (he/she recommened two MAc-only programs). :)

You have several projects. Since you mention SACD ripping and hirez downloads you ought to look at DSD-capable DACs. There are hundreds; I have been involved with the DSD database, so look there for candidates at any budget level.

Second, those SACDs don't rip normally. You need a hacked older out of production PS3. We can discuss this offline (I wrote a guide several years ago); send me an email.

Third, your cd collection can easily be ripped using one of several products; I like dbPoweramp. It's like $40.

Fourth, hirez (PCM and DSD) files are larger than cd/redbook and will fill up a hard drive quickly. You might want to invest in a NAS (multiple discs, RAID failover, available to anyone on your home LAN, etc). I like Synology but there are others.

Window-based software players are mostly differentiated by their GUI features, although a few are meant for hard core folks looking to squeeze the last few % of sound quality (those include HQplayer, which although great-sounding, is not a player I'd recommend for the new user, currently, until Roon integration or a few months of user knowledge/experience). Of these GUI-friendly players the two that are most popular are JRiver and Foobar (with Roon catching up). I developed two 20 minute screencast videos for setting up JRiver, if interested.

I'd stick with uncompressed FLAC (not 0 setting, that is still compressed)
which is available in dbPoweramp. It has the merits of FLAC (lossless, full ID3V2 tagging that travels well to any player in Windows, unlike Wav, which can be problematic with some players tag reading) and yet has no compression artifacts (which some folks claim they can hear).

Finally, I'd ask to move this thread to computer audio since it has more to do with that than SACD tech.

More questions but will wait on your comments....


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