I don’t think there will ever be a piece of software to fix the essential incompatibility between ID3 tags and classical music. You’re right that the current tagging schemes (which aren’t really specific to any particular piece of software) were designed for pop music and are a poor fit for classical. If you’re curious, here’s the system I’ve used to generate sensible tags for my (too large) collection of classical music. Basically, I put a lot of the information that there’s no tag for in the Album field. So when I ripped the Karajan 1967 recording of Shostakovich’s 10th, the tag for the first movement looked like this:

Artist: Dmitri Shostakovich
Album: Symphony No. 10 (Karajan/BPO 1967)
Song: Andante Moderato

In iTunes, this lets me use the “artist” view to get a view of my collection organized by composer. When I double-click on a composer, I then get a view of all of the albums, with the conductor and orchestra included in the album name. I can’t search by conductor or orchestra, but I find I never really want to do that anyway. When I have a disc on which the conductor is the main point of interest (i.e., a Toscanini recording), I go ahead and make the conductor the artist and put the composer’s name in the album title.

Thanks for the review, very cool! A quick clarification…With “Sonic EQ” enabled as you show in the preferences screenshot, Amarra’s EQ has quite a few more types than just parametric. Personally, I’m a fan of Amarra’s shelving filters.

OMas

Unfortunately, for my purposes, Amarra doesn’t appear to get over a major obstacle – the format of the metadata is as per i-tunes which is hopeless for classical music. Metadata based on an ASA format ( artist, song, album) doesn’t work for classical as there is no field for composer and you usually end up with individual track details limited to ” Herbert von Karajan, Symphony 5 andante”. Whose Symphony 5? Which orchestra? Which performance? etc. There are other issues but I won’t go into them here for brevity.

One day I hope to be able to move to mac or pc audio. Sadly it seems not yet (unless anyone can suggest a piece of software of which I am currently unaware).

Sorry I missed that! I reread the entire post several times looking for it. Oops.

As for using a parametric EQ in a digital stream, I’ve got to say I think it’s nonsense.

Here’s why: why would you want to rip something Apple Lossless, or use FLAC, WAV or any other pristine lossless format to then alter it with some “EQ” prior to sending it to your DAQ?

That’s ridiculous (to me) and defeats almost the entire purpose here. Plus, altering the bits with “EQ” adds distortion.

Not wanting a debate/argument here, just one guys opinion.

Dacs and connections are described in the post directly above yours.

As to using the parametric eq in Amarra, it’s great for taming room anomalies and is quite clean.

Regards,

JQ