iPAD controlling Amarra Vs. Pure Music Vs. J-River
Sam -- Mon, 02/28/2011 - 03:52
So, what program is best controlled with an iPAD as a full function remote? Is it Pure Music or Amarra or J River? Based on 2011 CES most people were using one of these three programs and most using iPAD as a remote control. Any thoughts? Are there special Apps for iPAD regarding this? and if so what server softaware is controlled best by it. If there are limitations of each what are they?
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None of the above.
Amarra and Pure Music are music rendering programs, not remote programs.
Neither have remote Apps at the iTunes store.
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
Steven, is there any program like Amarra that works with ITunes on a Windows machine?
I don't use a windows machine for anything except updating firmware and running my Red-Zone First-Responder's Fire program, so I have no first-hand knowledge of PC audio programs. But, I've seen on other forums that dB poweramp seems to be a popular iTunes alternative for PC users...
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
Steven, dBpoweramp is a cd ripping software not music management or music server software. Also, what were all those iPADs doing at the CES 2011? what were those guys using the I pads for instead? I thought recent TAS had reported that iPADs were being used with music servers in some form. And puremusics website says that ipad can be used with it as a remote control/browser?????? I am confused!
Told you I'm NOT a windows/DOS/PC guy. :)
And I don't plan to go back to PCs just so I can answer questions...
They could have been running "remote" which is a free App to control your Mac.
They could have been running WiFIRemote ($4.99) which claims to be " The most feature rich wireless remote of its kind."
They could have been running the free App L5 remote which is a App that lets you develop your own custom remote control operable via WIFI.
These are the options I found in less 2 minutes of searching.
Try looking in the iTunes App store for yourself - you'll find plenty of other remote Apps as well....
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
Thank you for that info! Yea I know about remote and few other apps...but I asked you not because I am lazy or to annoy you but because you guys seem to be the experts at computer audio, you have experience with different types of computer servers and did a pretty good coverage of the CES. I thought may be there (at CES) was something that worked better then the other at the show. With all the external disks, DAC, Wires, etc...attached to a lap top its hard to keep nearby to listening chair. I think if these things can be controlled wireless by something like an iPAD it would be great given the layout, touchscreen and portability of it. May be its getting there slowly. I'll look into it myself:) Thanks
Hey Sam,
Haven't been here in a while, glad to see you still pursuing this stuff. First off, no offense to the people on this forum who have really gotten into this stuff, but this is definitely not the "go to" place for detailed questions on computer audio. Much of the mainstream high end audio community has only recently discovered that computers exist, and they're often way behind the curve in terms of understanding all of the hardware and software, and the interactions between them. I'd point you to a couple of different sites that you can learn much from. One is computeraudiophile.com - there is a lot of good information there, on the main site and perhaps especially in the forums. Some bad information, too, but that is the nature of the internets :) Another really good site, more in depth but requiring more experience to interpret, is thewelltemperedcomputer.com.
To your specific questions, the free "iTunes remote" application runs on iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and will control iTunes on either MacOS or Windows. It will also control, remarkably enough, the widely used freeware Windows app Foobar2000, which has an available extension that emulates iTunes from the perspective of the iTunes remote program. There are caveats to the iTunes remote app, though. First off, sexy as it looks, it provides a very limited set of browsing functionality for choosing music. Second, you can't change audio settings from the remote, which in the case of iTunes is important since you must manually set iTunes (actually, QuickTime) to output the correct sample rate in order to get bit-perfect output on either Mac or Windows. Third, iTunes remote, like most all Apple apps, uses non-standard "ports" for communication, which sometimes creates problems if you're using network routers not made by Apple. Go figure :) I was forced to switch network routers recently due to a change by my internet ISP, and iTunes remote hasn't worked since. Not that I miss it much, I only used it very occasionally to stream to the iPad itself.
Personally, what I find useful sitting at the listening chair is control of volume, play, pause, stop, next, previous, and information about the currently playing album/track. Lately, I use the computer monitor to do the browsing, selection, and queuing of tracks to listen to. Then I move to my listening chair, and use the J River Web Remote app on my iPad to start play and accomplish all of the other functions I just listed, except volume - I use my AlphaDAC remote for that. See the J River remote page here, and click on WebPlay and WebRemote: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Network These web apps work great on my iPad.
Another option is to make the iPad into a "virtual screen" - have the iPad interact with media PC/Mac just like it was a touchscreen directly connected to that computer, for instance from this developer for Windows: http://www.jaadurdp.com/ or this one for Mac or Windows: http://www.iteleportmobile.com/
Finally, if I haven't already made the point clear, looking to the CES high-end vendors for direction in the rapidly developing computer audio environment is mostly looking for where computer audio has already been, rather than where it's going. No disrespect at all to those heroes of hard goods, but their daily lives haven't revolved around what's the absolute best in computer hardware/software/control solutions. Like all audiophiles (and humans) they're going to gravitate toward whatever resonates with their preconceived notions of aesthetics and coolness. They're trained to be sophisticated judges of what people want to hear - and thank god for that - but not necessarily what people want to interact with. In fact, the assumption in high-end audio is often that ease of interface is inversely proportional to sound quality. When it comes to computer audio, there is simply no reason to accept these kinds of tradeoffs.
Bravo Scott. I love your last paragraph.
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
Welcome back Scott,
thanks for the web links I'll surely go take a look. since we are talking about remotes/displays the itunes downloads come with album art that looks amazing on the iphone. But some album art that I am inserting is not looking too good. what image size or resolution should one choose when manually inserting album art in dbpoweramp to be put with files. dbpower amp settings say max album art 750pix or 700x700. So what I started to do is try and search for images that are large and look good on my computer screen and then save those or copy and paste those. some people are saying to search amazon for cd's and copy and paste its album art. Is that the best way to go? what is too big or too small for album art?
The remote solutions seem to be limited at this time. I just started toying with jRiver and its very very impressive. computer audio is jaw dropping and I was amazed to see some of the displays, album art, tracklists/info, loads of information and an amazing layout. reminds me of using LP's and all of its beauties but in a very convenient and massive package with whole collection at one place potential. I just started ripping my cds' have done only a few since even on dbpoweramp although it rips but the tagging for a lot of my cds is missing, wrong or not good so it will take patience and time. I followed the computer audiophiles advice on the ripping settings but it was taking way too long even though I had not selected "ultra secure ripping". The thing was taking a long long time to even rip one cd or getting stuck again and again or re ripping and reading 4000 frames. So I went to the settings and under "Secure Rip Abort" settings I selected : Abort after unrecoverable frames: 1 frame; abort when have to re rip: 100 frames; and Abort After Ripping a track for: 10 mins; Now with these in place the ripping is happening much faster. But did I do the right thing?
From what I understand:
Acurate rip: is just a 100% confirmation of the rip based on others and their DATA BASE. right? even if its not accurate, it could still be a good rip right? because all cd's are not in acurate rips data base.
Secure rip: is reading the disk twice and secure means that it is a good rip. right?
Insecure rip: may mean its not secure but it will still play or no? I tried to re rip some of the insecure rips but it keeps doing that even with a different drive or multiple attempts. Is having an insecure rip much to worry about? It generally happens with a track here and there or older CD's and some new CD's. But It gets frustrating to keep going on and on and on.
Scott, am I on the right path with the ripping? or can you suggest some other pointers?
My immediate goal right now is to correctly edit meta data and insert the correct high quality album art on my CD's and rip them as best I can on a hard disk using dbPoweramp. So far getting stuck here and there and confused about the rips. Are they correct or not? I don't know. Also once the meta data is edited etc....I am assuming its "embedded" with the Data music file and will stay with it no mater to what music server its taken to? right? but if one does want to make changes to meta data after the rips will that not be "embedded" and will that not transfer to a new music server?
I also played with batch converter where you click the folder and all the FLAC files can be converted to AIFF or anything else. I am doing all my ripping on a PC in FLAC format. Lets say I want to now convert all the FLAC to AIFF and attach the disk with AIFF to an Apple computer....how will that work? some hard disks say that the disk needs to be reformatted in a special way to work with apple. How will I move this collection that I am ripping on a disk attached to a PC to a MAC?
Confusing stuff but lots of potential in the end. The only problem is if you get too far or too deep into it and have been making mistakes....going back and re ripping will be painful to say the least.
Hey Scott,
Good to hear from you again. I'm about to invest in a BlueSmoke computer server. If I remember correctly you use one right?
The standard music player and interface on the BlueSmoke is Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. Do you use these or do you use J. River Media Center as your main music player? Does it sound worse than using the standard Windows options which are recommended by BlueSmoke Systems?
Right now I play with Devialet, xxhighend and it sounds very very good, I'm really happy I did not invest in an expensive CD player. The interface sucks though and there are too many settings which ruins some of the fun. So I'm looking at the Bluesmoke.
Silence is Music
Sam,
I'm surprised you're getting that many insecure rips. I ripped close to 2000 CDs, and I'd say no more than 10 had any issues ripping, and with most of those I eventually got a good rip by switching CD drives or just waiting out the long reread process. Some CD drives are not so great at reading audio CDs, which are you using? In particular, I've noted that some drives have trouble reading very well-filled CDs (60-70 minutes plus).
Your analysis of secure ripping on dbPowerAmp is correct - if it finds the CD in the accurateRip DB and it matches, it is considered secure. If it doesn't find a match in the DB, it will read the disc twice and compare, and assume a secure rip if they match. An insecure rip may or may not be significant - the only way to tell is to keep track of the insecure rip and listen to it all the way through.
Cover art is typically 256x256 pixels. Higher res than that is very inconsistenly available. Amazon is a good source, so is AMG.
Metadata, including cover art, is embedded in each track by default with dbPowerAmp. Any editing you do to that metadata, in dbPowerAmp, mp3Tag, J River, etc. will remain stored with the track. Later on, if you create a custom library field in J River, make sure you check the "save in file tag" option to keep it stored with the file.
If you later convert your files to AIFF or Apple Lossless, the simplest way to transfer them to a Mac is simply to connect the Mac to your network - Macs have a very simple network setup. Then you share your music drive on Windows, and simply transfer the files over via the Mac file/folder manager, the name of which escapes me right now.
I think you're doing the right things in ripping; we have to figure out why your hardware doesn't like your CDs, though.
Slicken,
I use the Blue Smoke with J River, primarily because I had already invested quite a bit of time optimizing JR for my use, and because JR offers some unique tagging/browsing capabilities that are useful for deep-in Classical listeners like me. But for you, I would definitely use the recommended Windows media players first, and see how you like the interface. The "theater mode" is particularly nice for use with a touch screen monitor.
One of the nice things about using the Blue Smoke is that it's been designed ground-up as an audio server, with proper electrical isolation of the audio path, and thus doesn't require tweaky software work-arounds to avoid the hardware-related issues you can get with conventional consumer oriented Mac/PC solutions. As far as I can tell, there is zero audible difference between any of the bit-perfect playback software options I've tried on the Blue Smoke.
Scott,
My drive is HL-DT-ST- DVD Rom GDR8164B. I used this drive for ripping. The second drive sometimes works sometimes doesn't especially if I open 2 dbpower amps windows to rip two cd's at the same time it doesn't work or freezez. The second drive is: HL-DT-ST- DVD+-RW GWA4164B. I checked on their website with the full list of drives and it was showing the the GDR816B has around 97% good results....not as good as their favorite drive that gives 99% but I would think 97% is good. Im using a Windows vista Ultimate, 32 bit, 2.8GHz processor and 4GB of RAM.
computer audiophile did not say anything about "abort rip" settings. I changed those because it was taking too long even on brand new CDs. Should I uncheck the rip abort settings and leve everything as computer audiophile has set it up as?
I played with multiple folder/organization settings and settled for the Default (Save in Dynamic Artist Folder) for naming. i.e. [IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[IFCOMP]Various Artists[][IF!COMP][artist][][]\[album]\[track] [artist] - [title].
This way....it makes a folder of artist, then anotherfolder inside it of the album name, and when you open that you have the tracks the image and info file about the cd in that. I noticed that doing this naming imports things very nicely to jriver. Otherwise with other naming j river imports them as like 10 different album covers showing with one or 2 songs under it. Now with the defult setting it imports one album and then when I click it everything is under that album. The problem is if there are volume 1 or 2 then the import mumble jumbles it. Also I imported 2 different HRX recordings. per HRX guys...I made 2 folders named them and copy and pasted the wav files to these 2 folders from their DVD. Whats happening with the import button is that All HRX are being put in one untitled file on j river. the album art/tagging is lost obviously because its wav....
Can you describe what "Naming" setting you use for ripping. I am sure you are not re organizing all these things again in J-river. There must be a way to rip/name in an organized fashion on to a hard disk and then one click of import should get things nicely displayed on jRiver. what do you think?
Thanks for your reply Scott! I look forward to use the Bluesmoke black box in my system! Everybody who owns one raves about it!
Silence is Music
Sam, back to your original question about using an iPad as a remote. You got off-track when you asked about using it to "control" Pure Music or Amarra. Both of those programs integrate into iTunes and can be thought of as replacing iTunesr music-rendering "guts" with something of higher quality. You can use an iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch, with the Apple Remote app, to control a Mac to play iTunes. Whether the version of iTunes being used has been "upgraded" with Pure Music or Amarra is not relevant. It's still iTunes that is being used.
I hope that this helps, and if I'm wrong of course I'll be corrected shortly :)
-B