Now, before you mis-interpret me, I want to be very explicit and state that this is NOT Tidal’s fault. Admittedly, the tracks that were in the lower-quality format were versions that I would not listen to anyway – so, to be honest, I don’t really care too much.
#AUDIRVANA PLUS PLAY ONE SONG FULL#
So, for this sampling, roughly 9% of the available tracks were not in a lossless format, and were not even full bandwidth. The results of this “test” was that, in the first 66 “Ode to Billy Joe’s” listed, 6 of them were 96 kbps AAC files, 60 of them were FLAC. So, I pressed “Play” on the top hits in my search, one by one, and checked the file format displayed on the screen. So much for “lossless high fidelity sound quality”. Notice that I am now listening to a 96 kbps AAC file with a 16-bit word length, and a sampling rate of “22.1 kHz” (actually 22.05 kHz – half of 44.1). IF I press play on this version, and look at the top of my Audirvana window, I see the information in Figure 3. One of my less-favourite renditions of “Ode to Billy Joe” is performed by The Stadium Saxophone Players on their album “Timeless Sax Instrumentals – Volume 2”. In fact, it’s what I expect, since my Tidal subscription promises “lossless high fidelity sound quality” – that’s why I pay extra for a Tidal HiFi subscription… Notice there on the right-hand side of the screenshot above, that we’re listening to a 16-bit, 44.1 kHz FLAC file. One of the nice things about Audirvana is that it tells you a little technical information about the track to which you’re listening. If I press “play” on the Paul Cole version, and I look at the top of the screen, I see something like the screenshot in Figure 2. One of them is by Paula Cole (the other is by Patty Smyth). I have two favourite versions of this song. So far so good…įig 1: There are many “Ode to Billy Joe” covers in Tidal I don’t know if this is because there are 300 covers of that song on Tidal (I doubt it) or if 300 is a limit on the number of tracks either Tidal or Audirvana will report in a Search function (I suspect that this is the case…)Īs you can see in the screenshot in Figure 1, all of them are 16 bit, 44.1 kHz files. If you use Audirvana to search Tidal for tracks called “Ode to Billy Joe” You will get 300 hits. I mention all of that just as background information… I also drive an 11-year old base-model Honda Civic (that will come up later in this posting) and I wear Ecco shoes (which is completely irrelevant…). Now, just to be clear, this posting is not an advertisement for Apple, Audirvana, Teac, or Tidal. The reasons I choose to use Audirvana are (1) that it can play all of my files (I have some DSD stuff on my hard drive), it can stream directly to my external DAC without routing the audio through Mac’s OS, and it can also see my Tidal account.
#AUDIRVANA PLUS PLAY ONE SONG SOFTWARE#
Usually, I use the “Audirvana” software on my Mac, with an external Teac UD-501 USB-Audio headphone DAC (which does the digital-to-analogue conversion and the amplification for the headphones, all in one box). When I’m sitting at work, typing on my computer, I listen to music a lot.
This error is an easy one to discuss – but an important one nonetheless… I like the fact that there are many questions and few answers – and life just goes on anyway…īut we’re not here to talk about songwriting, we’re here to talk about typical errors in digital audio – specifically today – streaming services. And who, exactly, did Brother Taylor see with Billy Joe? What did they throw off the bridge? It starts on a 7-chord, so you know it’s going to go somewhere… I love how Papa, when he hears that Billy Joe jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge just says that he “never had a lick of sense”, and asks for more biscuits. I’ve always liked the song “Ode to Billy Joe”. I was out choppin’ cotton, and my brother was balin’ hay It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day