So I have a medium sized collection of CD’s, most from my youth. I also have a small fistfull of FLAC files of some music that is either sentimental to me, or is just some great music.
What is the best software to feed these to the DAC I am using on my desktop computer? I’ve been using Itunes for years, and haven’t been particularly disappointed with it. Sure, old mp3 files don’t sound all that great, but when I import my CD’s or FLAC’s I am not particularly displeased with the results.
Is there a whole world of better alternatives I’m missing?
Also, I often use youtube to find / demo new music I may or may not be interested in. How good or bad can the audio quality really be? I’ve been impressed with some of the better uploads, some claiming to be uploads of FLAC files of remasters of great classics. Again, am I really missing a world of better alternatives?
I think a lot of people here use foobar2000. I tried it out for a bit and not sure I really took the time to get the interface to look the way I wanted so moved on to MusicBee. I prefered the interface right away and kind of think of it as what iTunes should have been/ become. There are some quirks I still have not figured out but I’ll get there.
I think there isn’t any definitive software to play your music on desktop. Music is still music and if the player don’t use weird “enhancement” algorithms, they should sound the same.
Some may nitpick and tell you that you have to use asio this or wasapi that, but in the end that doesn’t really change things much.
At the end of the day, UI and functionnalities is what you have to look for. That is partly why foobar is so popular: it is very customisable, and have a lot of plugins available.
As for YouTube, the last thing I checked, audio quality was tied to video quality. I think it still is true, but can’t tell you in details about video-audio quality equivalence.
+1 for Musicbee. I used Foobar for about a year but it has a few annoyances, especially with peripheral media controls, that just built up over time into aggravation. Musicbee doesn’t give you the same level of graphical toys but those were more distracting than enjoyable or informative for me. It can import Winamp plugins too if that’s your thing.
I guess this is part of what I am asking. Between “enhancements” and just crappy bitrate, low res files I wasn’t sure if, for example, Itunes might be downsampling higher res files without me knowing it.
I just wish Linux had better players. Musicbee works ok through WINE, but the native players are either incredibly basic or unnecessarily convoluted to customise.
Have you had a chance to look at it yet, just curious? I’m not going to be able to get to it for a while and heavily invested in roon, but I am curious for the sake of nostalgia.
