Newbie

[audiophile65]

Hi!

My name is Meredith, and I hope to start full-blown experimenting with computer audiophilia about September 2011.

I currently own a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.6.7 (Snow Leopard). I plan to purchase a Mac Mini (500 GB) late August or early September and get started with this hobby full steam.

Though I really love Chris' 9 minute YouTube video on how to get HDTracks 24/96 downloads into a Mac/iTunes using Max and, I think, XLD (it's a simple, concise, and to-the-point presentation), I still have many questions about this hobby and will need to ask questions ever so often.

So I hope that you guys can help with my first adventures into this.

In the meantime, I think I want to use my MacBook Pro for a single experiment to tide me over till September. I would like to download (from HDTracks) Steely Dan's "Gaucho" 24/96 FLAC file and then port it into my iTunes. Before I buy and download "Gaucho", do I need to download BOTH Max and XLD into my MacBook Pro, or do I just need either Max or XLD (not both)? If I need Max, which one do I download (stable or unstable, as well as either Max-0.9.1.tar.bz2 or Max-r1438.tar.bz2)? It sounds quite confusing!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please welcome me to the forum.

 

Thanks,

Meredith

 

 

[flatmap]

Welcome!

 

First, you may be completely happy using your MacBook Pro for your music server. So unless you want to completely dedicate one computer as a music server (perfectly reasonable), you may get on quite well with just your laptop.

 

I generally just use Max for converting, but you don't need both XLD and Max. Of course you may want to experiment with both options. So far as I know, either works fine.

 

Should you find that you don't need to invest in a second computer, that would be nice as you could put that money into an external DAC. That will make a (hugely) significant difference over just taking the signal from the Mac's built-in sound card.

 

Since you are planning to use MacOS, there are several EXCELLENT music players including Pure Music, Fidelia, Decibel, Amarra. All of these make demos available and they offer a big improvement over iTunes by itself.

 

If you aren't already set up to do backup this is a good time to get started. As you develop a large music library, you don't want to lose it outright to disk failure. And disk failure will happen to all of us at some point.

 

Glad to have you onboard.