Laptop/Notebook for iTunes? Yay or nay...
Now that I'm completelt settled with the hardware in my system listed in my sig below and thorughly enjoying the MF M1 DAC I'm wondering about tweaking the source a bit...
Currently all music is via my iMAC & iTunes upstairs in my office and is fed via Airplay to my ATV2 downstairs and then into my M1 DAC via toslink. Thus being fed at 16/48 and being upscaled to 192...
Is it feasable to have my iTunes on a laptop/netbook that is soley used for the hifi and iTunes; if so would I need to look for one with toslink capabilities or would it be best to use the USB feed which, I think, would then be 24/96 as my MF M1DAC is the asynchronus USB as far as I know (I did buy it 2nd hand and it's a year old)
Ideally I'd be after a laptop/netbook under £150/£200. I've already got a seagate 1TB external USB 2.0 HDD which I can use to store iTunes which currently stands at about 350GB
Any thoughts?
iTunes is ok on a Windows PC in my experience but Steve has obviously tried it on both Mac and PC and it is better on a Mac.
If your budget wont stretch to a Mac laptop for this purpose or you want a Windows laptop though you should consider a media player like JRiver Media Center which works well on Windows PCs and I think offers better audio quality (bit perfect presentation to your DAC) and better functionality than iTunes. You will need to ensure your laptop has Vista or Windows 7 though. JRiver offers a free 30 day free trial and is not expensive to buy (£35 or so I think).
I bought JRiver and it's good but for free you can't beat Foobar, it's not as pretty as JRiver but I found the interface is better thought out (possibly less complicated). The issues with USB DACs is possibly less on JRiver but there's not a lot in it. By all means do the JRiver trial a go but if you are not sure it's worth the money Foobar rocks imo! If they charged £10 for foobar then I would say it's much better value than JRiver.
So long as you can bypass the window kernal mixer, and have exclusive control of the souncard, then they *should* all sound the same, so it's down to personal preference of the UI and the ease of managing libraries and tagging. J river is not the last word in album art cover tagging - I have had to go find an album cover and tag the url. Ripping best of or compilation CDs also causes problems if the file structures include the artist in the song title! I'm amazed that there is no standard way of file naming for music CDs.
So long as you can bypass the window kernal mixer, and have exclusive control of the souncard, then they *should* all sound the same.
I use a netbook running iTunes as my source for all music.
I am very happy with the quality and notice very little between this and a Cyrus CD player I used to run. Some may not agree but this has been my experience.
So long as you can bypass the window kernal mixer, and have exclusive control of the souncard, then they *should* all sound the same.
No, windows media player can't do it either. There are some programmes (J River's Media Cantre is one of a few) that do allow you to control the soundcard.
Itunes on a Mac is a completely different proposition, as far as I know, it will automatically configure for bit perfect output via the optical out within the OS.
I always thought that if you are sending the digital file via wireless, either to AEX or ATV, the computer's sound options have no bearing and everything is sent in a bit perfect state. Similarly, I thought that connecting via USB means audio totally bypasses the computer's own audio mixer and leaves the machine as bit perfect.
Am I completely wrong?
Any thoughts?
Is it simply that you want to access your library from downstairs?
If it is, an iPod and iTunes remote app would do it.
Don't worry too much about the platform, however, if you only want a computer for iTunes and music playback/streaming capability, why not get a well looked after, second hand Mac mini?
Swap out the HDD for something larger and you have a nice compact and unobtrusive streamer that will fully integrate with the rest of your system if need be.
I am sure that a netbook would be fine also. It worked for me.
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Now that I'm completelt settled with the hardware in my system listed in my sig below and thorughly enjoying the MF M1 DAC I'm wondering about tweaking the source a bit...
Currently all music is via my iMAC & iTunes upstairs in my office and is fed via Airplay to my ATV2 downstairs and then into my M1 DAC via toslink. Thus being fed at 16/48 and being upscaled to 192...
Is it feasable to have my iTunes on a laptop/netbook that is soley used for the hifi and iTunes; if so would I need to look for one with toslink capabilities or would it be best to use the USB feed which, I think, would then be 24/96 as my MF M1DAC is the asynchronus USB as far as I know (I did buy it 2nd hand and it's a year old)
Ideally I'd be after a laptop/netbook under £150/£200. I've already got a seagate 1TB external USB 2.0 HDD which I can use to store iTunes which currently stands at about 350GB
Any thoughts?
Itunes only on a Mac, otherwise it's not that great.
JRiver MC17 -> Cambridge Audio DACmagic+ -> Roksan Caspian M2 -> ProAc D18