Software - Music Player

[dave2010]

John

Dave2010
Hmm, I would love to hear your justification for this
“Even the low end ones beat the heck out of most PCs”
regarding Mac v PC.

Both are equally capable of producing bit perfect audio.

I have experience of Macs, PCs and other workstations (Sun etc.), and Unix and Linux machines . During the last 12 years I have largely used PCs and found them to be so full of problems that I have several times thought of jumping off a cliff, or otherwise going to remonstrate with the perpetrators of the dreadful software which runs them/on them.

Until very recently I was also wary of Macs - and I have been using iMacs since the first "lampshade" iMac came out. Last year I bought a new iMac which I have only recently got working. It's a real treat compared with the PCs. Arguably new PCs should do as well, but at work we have both. The PCs I've used don't compare. On a network iMacs do not do as well as the one I have at home. My experience with PCs is generally pretty negative, though there is more software, and some of it is good. I should also mention that at work there is support for PCs, but Mac users are often left to fend for themselves. Despite the lack of support most of us still find fewer problems.

Re music on the iMac, actually there may be some problems due to buffering as I discovered when running from my network drive, and indeed from files stored on the machine itself using iTunes. Even my Asus eee (PC/Windows) running Squeezebox server generally manages to avoid problems with the transport stream. However I didn't get the iMac primarily to do music, and I think I can fix the issues anyway. My current fix for the iMac is to use VLC rather than iTunes and set the buffer latency to high, though I'd be glad to know of other methods.

Some guys at work also benchmarked iMacs a few years ago versus PCs, and the opinion was that they were significantly faster - though benchmarking obviously can be biased by the program mix.

I'm not saying that Macs are perfect, but that they generate significantly fewer problems for most people than PCs running Windows. For me, as I said previously, I now have to think more about what to do than how the heck to solve the next, and the next, and the next ... software problem. This of course presents a problem - which I call the blank sheet of paper syndrome, but in some ways I feel that I've got my life back.

To get a PC with similar performance, style and display etc. to my iMac would probably cost about as much - though I did manage a discount.

[Clive]

Is there a simple to automtically download artwork for a large batch of FLACs?

[Welder]

Clive.
If there is, I haven’t found it yet.
I think a lot depends on the music player you use.
With foobar2000 for example the only way I’ve found of doing it is to manually place a jpg in the cue sheet using Album Art Downloader which is a bit hit and miss.
I believe Media Monkey and Songbird may have easier options but Songbird doesn’t support ASIO.

[Clive]

Thanks John, this is what I feared....I'll make do without the artwork.