Mac Music Players

I would agree with Fidelia but haven't tried Decibel and Pure Music. I also think that Bit Perfect is very good to,especially with its background integration with iTunes, and its the cheapest!

I wholeheartedly, too, recommend Bit Perfect!  It is inexpensive, easy to use and it does make the difference.  Integration with iTunes is a good thing for those who rely on iTunes for music management.

Bobby

Has someone tried the sound quality of the "JRiver Media Center" on Mac?

It seems to be very popular amongst the Win users and is available for OS X by now...

http://www.jriver.com/download.html

I couldn't get past the appalling windows looking interface and the fact it seems to be some sort of java applet or something, the menus are terrible to work with and its very much an alpha release.

I'll try and give it a go tommoz, its come on a bit since the last time I tried where is simply crashed on startup.

Agreed and prefer Audirvana +

Tog

I recently tried J River for Mac, but I found it pretty diabolical.  I'm sure it'll do lots of clever things but for playing music it's mediocre, even ignoring its lousy interface. Very good iPad app though.

I've finally settled on Amarra Symphony with iRC room correction software. Expensive but really excellent.

Hi, I use Jriver on OSX. Agree that the UI is not the best, however does seem to offer direct media access as well as controlling the Naim network player via UPnP including loading the Naim playlist buffer. The direct media playback does offer some interesting DSP options.

Simon

My experience, is here https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...35#34652896691788035

 Audirvana works well. The play list mode needs a computer to operate but I can use it well enough via an iPad mini and Moca VNC Lite.  The SQ from play list mode is amazing, too

Does it make any difference which music player you use if you have Asynchronous USB?

Regards,

Nick

Good question. If the data stream received by the asynchronous USB input is BitPerfect then it's all down to the DAC isn't it? It's then only a question of which user interface you prefer.

Dave

Hi Simon

Are you saying Jriver can act as a UPnP server, or are you connecting it via USB .?

Graeme

I see no options for connecting to network music or playing to network devices, all I could find in the utterly utterly dreadful interface was media network but the interface is so terrible that the 'setup info' button does not work.

I find it amazing anyone could use this day to day, clicking on things constantly results in the window behind coming forward as if it didn't exist.

It looks like that will be the interface moving forward, I see no reason they would have java style menus etc unless that was what it was built upon. For my money I would far prefer something built for mac such as plex. Or dare I say it in this instance, itunes.

It actually reminds me a bit of songbird, which is another terrible cross platform abomination, at least jriver is not using 100% cpu like songbird does lols.

Nope, hang on, hold the fort some servers have appeared. Lets have a play then.

There was a problem retrieving files from the selected DLNA Server.

Moving on, lifes to short haha.

Garyi, you've lost me there. Are you saying it can act as a UPnP server but your having trouble getting it to work. Looked at this before but have to say find computer audio way too confusing

Graeme

An awful lot of UPnP servers are either dreadful, require serious bug fixes or some hacking to get working well. The only ones I have found remotely usable are

miniDLNA (aka ready DLNA) 

Logitech Server (latest version is excellent)

minimserver 

Plex - brilliant for Video - rapidly improving for audio

Many for the Mac are terrible and yes I'm talking about those venerable PC servers currently in OSX beta. Asset for PC works very well if you are prepared to put up with Windows which for a whole multitude of reasons I'm not. 

Currently I'm using Logitech Server to stream and Squeezelite via async USB from my Vortexbox powered TogServer. Incidentally the latest version of VB - 2.3 is excellent and very stable. 

Tog

Foxman my upnp servers appeared, none of them worked with jriver even though they work with everything else I have tried them with. 

Please be assured my interest is not high, I was not looking for a renderer, which is good because jriver is shite on osx.

Are the mac software renderers, if thats the term, that act like a UPnP streamer. I use minimserver on my Synology, and i know that the likes of itunes and Jriver can play via USB but is there software that can act as a streamer over ethernet. Thats any good that is

Sorry confusing my own terminology I meant to say I was not after a control point for UPNP.

I think its a sad situation for OSX that this software is even considered by the likes of simon who clearly has a lot of experience, its one of the down sides of mac, itunes killed music reproduction in all its forms on mac and consequently we are around 6 years behind PC.

To accept jriver as a viable application is because, put simply nothing else exists. Songbook had promise but seems to have died, seriously what else is there? Kinksy seems to be about it.

Foxman, JRIver can do both when running on my MacBook Pro. However I tend to use Asset on my Raspberry Pi as my Naim UPnP server. Its always on and costs very little to run. 

Simon

Sorry i think what i was actually asking is if it can act as a software streamer (get so confused with all these terms). Basically to do the same job as the NDX into a DAC via ethernet

i tried the PI but couldn't get it to go into sleep mode, wanted this so it would let the NAS sleep as i didn't  want the disks running 24/7

So use iTunes. Works "perfick!" Bit perfick.

ATB from  George

I thought, going by what people say, they all sounded different, i haven't tried any by the way, which is why people prefer different software. God i thought streaming was hard to get my head around but computer audio seems worse.