I have owned many music players over the 50 or so years that I have been buying records, tapes and then CDs. I no longer have any records, my few remaining cassette tapes have been consigned to a box in storage in the garage, and I have replaced almost everything track or album ever owned with a CD or a directly purchased download from Apple or other sources. When music players would only hold so much music, I converted tracks to MP3 format and sent them to various music players over USB cables, sometimes directly and sometimes using iTunes. I have owned more than 10 portable devices over the years, including a player once holding a whopping 20 MB of\u00a0 MP3 files and an iPod classic holding 160 GB of files (a 30 GB version sits in my office at work hooked to a Radio Shack amplifier\/speakers).<\/p>\n
As hard drive capacities went up and prices down, I couldn\u2019t resist exploring alternatives. Simply put, although many believe most humans can\u2019t hear the difference between a 3MB track saved as an MP3 file and one ripped to a different\u2014and lossless\u2014format with vastly larger file size, my experience says otherwise. There\u2019s something about the ambient quality of the music when played back using a computer with a decent sound card and sent through a mostly priced stereo speakers (not ones designed for computers though the quality of some brands has dramatically improved).<\/p>\n
So last year, I spent many evenings re-ripping my CD collection and saving the files in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format; Apple has its own lossless format, so I could have used that, but chose not to. Having read many reviews about error recovery from often-played CDs (even though my collection is relatively pristine), I decided to use the dBpoweramp software suite to recreate digital tracks in my music library, and I use MediaMonkey as my music manager of choice (though I still use iTunes to store\/sync tracks on my iPods and iPad).\u00a0 Because I use network storage at home, I can also play the music from my desktop PC, another one my grandkids use, or my laptop (equipped with an add-on headphone amplifier that connects via USB).<\/p>\n
Using an application called Audiogalaxy, as long as I am in range of a wi-fi network (you can do it over a 3G cellular connection but the speed is generally too slow) I can also play music from my library on my Android phone, on a Color Nook converted to an Android tablet, and on my iPad.\u00a0 My music, my way, as they say.<\/p>\n
Having accomplished the goal to play high quality tracks on my portable devices, I decided one more change was in order. I bought a new sound card for my desktop PC (bypassing the motherboard\u2019s built-in sound card that uses Realtek drivers that many music enthusiasts and most audiophiles find simply unsatisfactory).\u00a0 The modestly priced Juli@ card\u2019s installation took less than 5 minutes, and another 3 to install the software drivers. Initially, I sent the output through two RCA jacks (via an adapter) to a Logitech 5.1 computer speaker system that has relatively good sound reproduction capabilities. But a better solution was to connect the card to an older (and faithfully used) Pioneer receiver driving two Polk Audio bookshelf speakers. I am very satisfied with the sound, which rivals a higher end stereo sound system.<\/p>\n
Here are links to the resources used in this project if you want to explore as I did:<\/p>\n
iTunes – www.apple.com\/itunes\/<\/a><\/p>\n FLAC –\u00a0en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FLAC<\/a><\/p>\n dBpoweramp –\u00a0www.dbpoweramp.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n MediaMonkey –\u00a0www.mediamonkey.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n Audiogalaxy –\u00a0www.audiogalaxy.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n