In Reply to: What written reference(s) do you use to set up your Mac(book Pro) for music only posted by Frihed89 on July 23, 2016 at 00:49:02:
You can live with the built-in dac if you have to. It's not great by any means, but a few cuts better than the dac's in most laptops. If you do that, take the audio from the headphone jack.
Much better to pick an external dac that you like. Either USB or Firewire can be good. I love my Metric Halo ULN-2, but that has a couple mic preamps most people won't need.
My signal path is:
file playback via Vox or Protools ---> DAC via FW or USB ---> line-level input on preamp ---> power amps ---> speakers
Once you have your dac set (internal or external) then put music files on the MBP and play them with the software of your choice. I use Vox software, but there are lots of others that do well.
For file formats, any lossless format should be fine: WAV, AIFF, or FLAC. I've not been able to hear a difference between WAV and FLAC, but with disc space so cheap now, pretty much anyone can afford enough disc to store WAV files, which gets you out of the data compression/decompression business. I use WAV rather than AIFF as it is the most widely used format and has no data compression. (AIFF can support some data compression, and it's Apple-centric, so I picked WAV just to keep everything simple.)
Organize your file folders so you can find stuff, and keep records of your purchases so you can re-download if needed, and of course keep multiple backups, preferably with one backup kept physically off-site.
WW
"Put on your high heeled sneakers. Baby, we''re goin'' out tonight.
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Follow Ups
- one approach - Bill Way 12:23:15 07/23/16 (1)
- RE: one approach - Frihed89 14:08:09 07/23/16 (0)