I use Audivarna on my MacBook and Pure Music on my Mac Mini. I like Audivarna better in terms of ease of use, but it doesn't run on my Mini for some weird reason. They both sound excellent. I doubt I could tell them apart, although I've never done an A/B comparison on the same system.
What's your favorite Apple-based music program?
The J.River Media Center comes highly recommended and was at or near the top of most of TAS's sonic evaluations in their 4-part series about computer-based audio (Dec'11-Mar'12). However, looking over their website and some supporting forums, it appears that it's really a PC-based program. According to what I read on a JRM user forum, JRMC works on a Macintosh if you use Bootstrap to install Windows 7 and run it from there. That runs into a bunch more money and I'm not all that enamored of running the music software in a non-native mode.
OTOH, there's ChannelD's PureMusic. It's $129 vs. JRM's $50, but it's very Mac-friendly.
Any other insights, recommendations, or warnings? I just got an AQ Dragonfly asynchronous USB DAC and want to feed it the best data stream without spending several more hundreds of dollars. I also want to be able to download some 24/96 and 24/88.2 files from HDTracks, so the music-handling s/w has to be comfortable handling FLAC files on a MacBook Pro (OSX Mountain Lion).
OTOH, there's ChannelD's PureMusic. It's $129 vs. JRM's $50, but it's very Mac-friendly.
Any other insights, recommendations, or warnings? I just got an AQ Dragonfly asynchronous USB DAC and want to feed it the best data stream without spending several more hundreds of dollars. I also want to be able to download some 24/96 and 24/88.2 files from HDTracks, so the music-handling s/w has to be comfortable handling FLAC files on a MacBook Pro (OSX Mountain Lion).