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"a library tool that will not handle Flac and Mch, is rather puny these days"

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Chris from Lafayette

In Reply to: RE: One thing I've noticed in transferring CD's to iTunes. . . posted by Fitzcaraldo215 on July 22, 2017 at 16:08:16

Maybe so, but remember that the vast majority of listeners (unlike you, Kal, or me) are not into multi-channel at all. Most listening today is through headphones and earbuds. So I don't blame Apple for sizing up the market and acting accordingly. As for FLAC, that format is very easy to convert to other formats if necessary.

In any case, I played around with the Audirvana database a bit more earlier today. It seems equally at home with multi-channel, 2-channel, FLAC, AIFF, etc. I still need to see what it does with DSD.

If I do start to rely on Audirvana as my primary database, I'll be sad to lose some of the capabilities of iTunes, such as the count it keeps of how many times I've listened to certain tracks, the last time I listened to a track, etc. - fun things, rather than make-or-break things. But fun things can still contribute to making life worth living! ;-)

Follow Ups:

RE: "a library tool that will not handle Flac and Mch, is rather puny these days" - Fitzcaraldo215 09:04:59 07/24/17 (1)
Chris - I have zero actual experience with iTunes. So, my opinion is superficial at best. And, yes, we can exist using different specialist tools for different formats. But, I prefer a single library tool that handles all my formats - including video by the way - both now and in the future. I prefer a single method of tagging and maintaining my entire library, and a single user interface for album/track selection for playback.

iTunes strikes me as both lightweight and oriented to Apple's own proprietary pop music market aspirations and concepts, regardless of what my actual needs may be. Sure, Roon and many others are the same.

And, for me it is a must that any tool I use also handle classical tagging and cataloging in depth. If my needs do not conform to what is popular in the marketplace, then I need to move on to find the niche tool is that does best meet my needs.

MusiChi is designed from the ground up for classical. If all I played were CD's and downloads in stereo, I might be satisfied with that. But, I need much more than that, since 99% of my music collecting over the last 10 years has been Mch SACD, BD-A and BD-V. So, JRiver is easily the ticket for me, and it has allowed me to streamline my audio/video system in the process.

BTW, JRiver automatically maintains information about previous plays by track, including the date you last played something. Agreed, that info is not crucial, but it is handy sometimes.

My only major disappointment with JRiver is that it still offers no easy scheme to tag at the chapter level of Blu-rays, and it also does not have access to the BD disc menu. Most all available tools do not, because the BD format is so difficult to deal with, but it sure would be nice.

But, I am approaching the 4,000 album mark in my library with JRiver, including many multi-disc albums. No CDs, just SACDs in DSF, Mch downloads also in DSF at DSD64,128 and 256 plus Flac from 88k-384k, BD-A and -Vs with LPCM, DTS-HDMA, Dolby THD in PCM 48k-192k. Handling all these formats in Mch is a minimum requirement of mine.
- I've been playing around more with Audirvana today - Chris from Lafayette 00:58:29 07/25/17 (0)
  It was more capable than I remembered and it too remembers your track playing history. And it turned out that most of the files converted over just fine, without too much hassle or "damage" to their fields.
  
  Unlike you, I have not ripped DVD-A's, SACD's and blu-ray audio discs to the computer, except for a few DVD-A's. As you may remember, native Mac support for blu-ray is non-existent, although there are some third-party utilities which can be used. (Steve Jobs famously called blu-ray "a bag of hurt"!) So almost all of my MCh files on computer are directly from downloads, and most of my rips are from plain old CD's. I'm at the 2,500 mark right now in terms of number of albums available, but I have plenty of discs still to be ripped (including almost all my MCh discs).
  
  I may still give JRiver another shot at some point.

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