iPad "Remote" App for iTunes

CWLondon, M_snow is correct.

1) I use headless mac mini and play Audirvana. Majestic sound. The Audirvana manual explains the importance of bit perfect feed to DAC, which can be only guaranteed if you keep volume at 100%. Else the PC output gets digitally altered.

2) Audirvana includes settings where iTunes engine including volume control and the identification of the time that the track has played till is disabled. This is to guarantee bitperfect feed.

3) For playing FLAC files, in Audirvana Plus menu, switch to iTunes integrated mode. Then may be you need to quit and restart, use command+tab to switch to Audirvana Plus, then in same menu you will see "Add files to iTunes" option. Clicking on this will lead to a box where you can drag and drop flac files. Then press "Start" at bottom of box.

4) you can use the remote app on iPad to now play flac files just as if they were wav/aiff/mp3/mp4 files. There will be no difference in sound quality, something you can verify if your system is a highly resolving system. With Antelope Zodiac you will certainly be able to verify.

All the best.

Thanks to everyone and in particular to Mezmo, who first gave me the tip for this concept.

In my excitement to buy a newer iPad for the remote, I got a message that it would only activate if I downloaded a newer version of iTunes, which I did.

The iPad seems to be working fine, however, a few things I dont know how to work out:

1) I now seems to be "sharing" files, where many of the songs I thought I bought (downloaded) and/or owned now have a cloud icon next to them..

..does this mean they are

a) being streamed by iTunes and/or
b) not being played at the highest resolution?

2) If so, perhaps this explains why my BitPerfect app no longer seems to work?

Previously, the BitPerfect icon at the top of the screen would turn to green, and everything sounded much better.

Now, the BitPerfect icon remains black and everything sounds much worse.

Thanks for any ideas updates / on using the remote app while maintaining high resolution playback.

Heh, iTunes. Since I have accrued some credit, seems also I deserve the blame… The new version of iTunes is definitely a pain in the ass. Still trying to dial much of it in as well. Far as I understand it, yes -- if you're getting the dreaded cloud icon beside a track, that means that iTunes is convinced it is not a local copy but resident off in Apple's proprietary ether and: (a) it is streaming it from this wherever, (b) it is NOT lossless, and (c) it very well may be further polluted by Apple's digital rights management (DRM) scheme. This third point, DRM, is where you can run afoul of BitPerfect, as it can't handle DRM material. Think it is supposed to hand playback back to iTunes when it encounters one -- so that it can actually go -- but in my experience, it just won't play the DRM stuff.

The more sticky question may be why iTunes has apparently “substituted” things that you previously had local copies of (presumably lossless local copies ripped from CD, for example) with “the cloud” copies. Hopefully, this isn’t the case. I understand that there is a new “feature” in iTunes that basically moves all of your stuff onto the cloud – so that all accounts have access to the same library. Fine, sounds super, in typical Apple faux-helpfulness mode. Trouble is, these cloud-resident copies will not be lossless (think they are AAC, not sure which bitrate). So, if you’ve started with a lossless copy and then moved to the cloud, Apple has kindly down-sampled and down-graded your software. Significantly. You would prefer to avoid this. And to further complicate matters, if you actually click on the “cloud” icon beside a track, Apple with kindly download this track from the cloud to your local drive. However, it will still be the lossy version that started on the cloud.

None of this, to the best of my knowledge, should replace anything that you have locally. For example, I don’t buy anything off of iTunes. And I have placed nothing on the cloud. However, my wife regularly does, and we use the same account (which is real convenient in every other way). But, this means that my iTunes includes all of the material she has purchased. In the previous versions of iTunes, all of the stuff she purchased was not visible on the Mini, because none of it had been downloaded there (but I could access her library, which is on a separate computer, through our shares network). However, in the new version of iTunes, EVERYTHING that has ever been purchased on the account is now visible on every instance of that account – and the ones that have not been downloaded on a particular local instance are shown as being on the cloud. Thus, my new version of iTunes on the Mini is now showing hundreds of tracks on the cloud. This is a “feature” of the cloud – Apply trying to be “helpful.” Further, many tracks in my main (previously entirely lossless) library are now duplicated – with both my local lossless version and a cloud version (presumably because I have a lossless rip from CD and my wife at one point bought a copy of the same track from iTunes). Hopefully, this is all that has happened. I think there is a way to convince iTunes not to show anything on the cloud. This would – should – revert you to exactly what was there before the “upgrade.” Personally, I’ve left all of the cloud (duplicates or otherwise) items visible so far. I am just careful not to use them, unless I mean to and there isn’t another lossless copy already there.

Hopefully that made some sense and was at least vaguely helpful. (And if not, you know where to find me… ;)

Mezmo,

Thank you - you have elegantly and perfectly articulated exactly what I feared might be happening, as well as confirming previous suspicions that Apple is the new Microsoft.

It will take me some time to work out how to best address, my local / lossless copies vs iTunes copies of various things.....but in the meantime, suspect I will renew my phone contract in March with a Samsung Note II!

The new Microsoft indeed. Sometimes it seems like a full time job just staying ahead of Apple's apparently evolving efforts to break its own software. Lovely. I've said before, the new corporate motto seems sometimes to be "If it aint broke, quick break it. Apple smash." Now it seems that every time my system idles, iTunes helpfully locks all of the harddrives and crashes. Then there's no talking it out of it, and a hard restart is the only remedy. Very much the opposite of endearing. My love/hate relationship endures.

In terms of sorting, you can happily get iTunes to do that for you. May not be a default, but in the settings you can get it to show the "file type" column. If you then go to view by tracks and click on the "file type" heading, it will automatically sort everything for you. "AAC" and "Protected AAC" will be the cloud droppings from Apple. Everything else should be what you did on purpose, in whatever file type was your default for importing. Joy.