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For a while, that was Play and one or two others, but then Amarra came on the scene.

Offering higher-quality playback, it has become famous among audiophiles, alongside its biggest competitor, Pure Vinyl (and now Pure Music).

As those two have fought it out in the commercial arena, the developer of Play came up with a free program, AyreWave, in conjunction with Ayre, which combined the simplicity of Play with high-quality 64-bit playback.

This now leads the pack of the free players (after the association was dropped and the program re-named Decibel) if you want a simpler program and potentially better sound than you get using iTunes.

Many people feel that using the audiophile-oriented music players improves the sound with their equipment.

Dsd Player Osx Mac OS X

At the very least, they offer features not available in iTunes, such as upsampling and access to the audio filters built into Mac OS X.

The latter is especially useful as Mac OS X has a built-in 31-band equalizer which is very handy for learning about frequency response.

However their main advantages over iTunes for improving the quality of the computers output is a dedicated playback engine different to the one in Mac OS X or iTunes, as well as the ability to switch the system output to the sample rate of the track being played, which is important if you have a mix of high-resolution as well as CD quality music and wish to have bit-perfect output every time.

Feb 2019: Removed Decibel, Nightingale and Fidelia as they havent been updated in years.

Amarra Luxe by Sonic Studio Commercial, demo available for download.

Amarra sQ for Mac, Amarra Play for iOS and Amarra Luxe for Mac and Windows.

The latter is a fully-fledged player which supports DSD, FLAC and MQA and includes up-sampling and EQ options.

They were one of the very first companies to come out with a player focussed on improving sound quality and have changed their offerings over the years.

Apple and Windows.

Aimed at the high-fidelity crowd, contains a plethora of features ranging from iZotope or SoX-based up-sampling (with comprehensive options) to device integer and exclusive access modes.

It can also suspend Spotlight and Time Machine for dedicated music servers and either directly play DSD files for supported players over USB or on-the-fly convert them to high-res PCM.

Playback can be via its own playlist, iTunes library sync or using an iTunes Integrated Mode.

The latest versions include support for TIDAL, quobuz and HighResAudio streaming.

Great if you want a simple and cheap solution while still using iTunes.

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