Lossless audio with asus xonar

Zombine

Hi guys, not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but here goes.....

Ive recently just stuck in an asus xonar D2x into my pc, (I7-950, evga gtx 560 super-clocked, asus sabretooth x58) and its damn snazzy. makes games like star craft and civ 5 sound amazing.

up untill now ive been using itunes as my main media center ( I don't tend to use my pc for media anyways, my ps3 is my baby) but my cd's sound amazing now with the card, I used windows media player to listen back to a few albums on CD, some tool, dream theater, some mastodon, and a bit of frank zappa. as a result my i-pod really sounds bad in comparison.

(oh, im using sennheiser px 100-ii's)

now, to get some kind of lossless audio quality sound what form of file must i use re-rip & save my c.d.'s in? flac?

also can I continue to use I-tunes and get the same higher quality or is it not suited for that kind of sound? also either way, is there a way to play lossless audio from an ipod?

i understand that lossless audio will take up way more space than wav's or mp3's, storage isn't a problem.

if i tunes isnt a good choice for hq audio, what would be?? power dvd came with the sound card, i'm not a fan of it.

.....id totally recommend the xonar. its awesome. (there are probably better cards out but, i'm happy)

cheers.

cnocbui

You can continue to use iTunes. Just set it to rip using Apple Lossless audio compression (ALAC), which will give you about the same level of compression as Flac, APE, etc.

However, not many 3rd party (non Apple) software packages will play back ALAC. Flac would have a bit more support. ALAC would be fine if you were playing the rips from an iPod or iTunes.

Zombine

cheers mate, i actually re-ripped most of my library into wav's, and they sound great. even death magnetic sounds class. and people are always complaining about that disk.....

superleedsdub

Zombine wrote: »

cheers mate, i actually re-ripped most of my library into wav's, and they sound great. even death magnetic sounds class. and people are always complaining about that disk.....

How do you play your wav files? I`ve ripped some CD`s to wav and have tried obtaining artist and track info and organising this information but have had difficulty doing so - no such issues with FLAC.

I use EAC to rip the CD`s and media monkey to play the files on my laptop (will be buying a NAS and Marantz na7004 next month to play my files over my ethernet network) and want to convert my music collection in the best way possible for playback.

Zombine

I use itunes to rip and play the wav's. they sound pretty good. and a fair bit nicer than what they were on my ipod. they are massive files though. I never used media monkey. is there an advantage using EAC or media monkey? a nas would be frigging awesome. that would be a great way set up an archive alright. especially since the files will be huge. I'm just running of a 1tb hdd internally on a relativley new build. hopefully i'll get another drive to dedicate to wavs, when hdd prices recover that is.

I reckon you're set up will be dead convenient. i imagine your network speed must be pretty nifty.