The Well-Tempered Computer, an introduction to computer audio

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Decibel music player for Mac OS X


Stephen Booth,  developer of the excellent Max CD ripper and Play, has relaunched Ayrewave as Decibel.  It is free to try , but will be the first program that Stephen will charge some money (full version US$33) for his effort which I think make sense given that Amarra and Pure Music retails for quite a bit of money.
  
Decibel was developed with inputs from Charles Hansen of Ayre and Gordon Rankin of Wavelength audio - the leader in asynchronous USB implementation for audio.  I think the reason for the new name is that other audio equipment manufacturers may not want to recommend using it with "Ayre" and "Wave" in its name.  


Decibel supports all popular lossless and lossy audio formats including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, WavPack, Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3, WAVE and AIFF. 
For lossless formats such as FLAC and WAVE, and for Ogg Vorbis and specially tagged MP3 files, Decibel supports gapless playback with seamless transitions between tracks.  Decibel has an intentionally minimal user interface designed to be instantly intuitive and non-intrusive. 
Decibel processes all audio using 64-bit floating-point precision, providing the highest possible playback quality for files sampled at all bit depths.  (Best to boot your Mac in 64-bit kernel, by holding down "6" and "4" keys while booting, or use the nifty little StartModeSelector program)

For audiophile users desiring more control over their audio, Decibel can take exclusive control of the output device (using hog mode) and send audio in the device's native format. Additionally, Decibel can automatically adjust the output device's sample rate to that of the playing track, preventing audio quality degradation associated with software sample rate conversion.  Finally, Decibel can load and play files entirely in memory, eliminating audio glitching associated with disk access.