streaming formats

Adam Zielinski posted:

dave marshall posted:

 

I simply want a laptop which performs faultlessly over a period of years, each time I turn it on, one which simply works.

I would guess that that is what Adam means by stability...................though, each to his, or her, own. 

Exactly - I just want it to work. Every day, every time I open it....

One day, the World will be Apple.............gamers and coders excepted! 

NAS, Servers, etc, etc, all great things! But I suggest you to start enjoying your new kit without spending more money.

Rip your CD's using XLD a free software for MAC. Is very easy to use, provide a good log with the rip results, compares with a data base, allows you to include and image, edit or enter metadata, ...

Rip to AIFF format which is MAC and NAIM  friendly, good SQ and metadata, and in the future, if you go with a NAS,  compatible with most if not all the software,

Put some file in a pendrive, insert it in the front type A USB socket and replay.

Next, get Audirvana build a library, connect your iMAC to the Uniti via an Spdif cable and replay using Audirvana. It also allows you to integrate Tidal.

After you have a good number of CDs ripped and have enjoyed your music for some weeks, understood format, connectios, etc, take your time researching the best solution for you and make the decision to spend money in what you consider is the best for you.

 No need to networking, you are not going to have multi room the first day!

Actually I think OSX is quite good for programming (for me 'coding' is machine code and assembly which is very specialist and niche these days) .. and Apple offer quite a good free development environment. As I say I like OSX .. I think it's great for laptops where it's apparent simplicity is good. 

However on my iMac 27, I have found OSX lack of sophistication and polish on such a powerful machine a little frustrating and so I have set it up as dual OS machine, and if I am honest Windows 10 runs beautifully on the latest iMac and I much prefer to El Capitan. My opinion is Apple hardware is nice.. The app and operating systems have fallen behind MS. My perfect combo for more powerful home computing is Apple Hardware with MS apps... nice and the best of both worlds  

dave marshall posted:

My own experiences with Windows, up to, and including, XP where the dreaded "blue screen of death" seemed to feature increasingly as time went on, led me to move to a Mac.

I don't really understand the criticisms of Apple's various operating systems, other than from folks who are serious gamers, or maybe folks who code.

I have also found that using Apple's applications seems much more intuitive than Microsoft's where one often first had to learn how they worked.

I simply want a laptop which performs faultlessly over a period of years, each time I turn it on, one which simply works.

I would guess that that is what Adam means by stability...................though, each to his, or her, own. 

You moved to Apple just as MS solved their stability issues!  Incidentally the BSOD was very often caused by 3rd party device drivers or hardware issues, not by the OS itself.  The main problem with Win NT, 2000 & XP was the computer progressively slowing down due to accumulation of redundant data - stuff still hanging around after it's use by date (mostly this was application and UI config information).

Vista itself was quite stable but had significant UI limitations, however for backward compatibility it still allowed unrestricted access to most XP device drivers - the remaining stability issues were almost entirely due to legacy drivers being used.

Windows 7, 8 and 10 are all very stable (they normally don't allow 3rd party legacy drivers to be installed).  The UI of 8 was one of the worst ever produced - it tried it's very best to downgrade even them most powerful PCs into an oversize overweight tablet; but the other UIs are both OK.  And yes these OSes just work; month in month out they just keep going.

For a very few people, the forced install of updated MS drivers in Windows 10 has caused problems with older machines (typically anything made in the last 5 years won't be affected though).

Well Huge,

After several laptops gradually slowing down, together with the BSOD scenario, I moved to Apple, just as, it seems, Microsoft finally managed to resolve these very issues.

I do recall though that setting up my first MacBook pro for the internet was simplicity itself, compared to Windows machines, and I can't recall any piece of external kit refusing to function until I download the required drivers, per Windows.

It's probably unfair of me to criticise Windoze, as I've never used it post XP, and by the sound of things, it has improved greatly, but I'm quite happy to remain an Apple convert, as are several friends who became fed up with the problems mentioned. 

Sorry to interrupt this nice discussion,

is the AIFF and WAV lossless or only FLAC and ALAC belongs to the "lossless world"? :-D

All are lossless. WAV & AIFF are uncompressed formats. FLAC is lossless but unlike WAV & AIFF can be compressed to different levels & it takes up a lot less space. ALAC is similar to FLAC.

FLAC, ALAC, AIFF and WAVE are all lossless

AIFF and WAVE are uncompressed

FLAC, ALAC, are losslessly compressed

Ok, thanks for an info. I thought only ALAC and FLAC - compressed formats are named lossless.

my mistake...