[simon wagstaff]

Just want to check in and see if I am on the right track. I am using my Mac Mini as a music server. I plug it in to my Pioneer TSX 59i via the usb input, everything works great but perhaps I am being a bit kludgy about things. I have never really taken the time to understand iTunes and 95% of my music is downloaded as FLAC files. I have just picked up on a thread about Fluke and how it will allow me to import flac files into iTunes. I think this is a big improvement as before I would have had to uncompress and then re-compress using apple lossless and would probably need to retain the flac files anyway. Not sure I want to do that with over 1 terabyte of data to deal with.

so what I do generally is just dump the files I want to play into toast and play. anything wrong with that?  I am not sure how the Pioneer handles 24/96 through it's USB, something tells me the files will get truncated so I burn those onto DVD anyway and play them that way, especially considering that the file sizes are so big.

Anything wrong from a fidelity standpoint with what I am doing?  And what about iTunes? I don't mess with an iPod and have no interest in MP#.  Is it worth the effort to figure out iTunes and convert all those files?

thanks for helping a newbie!

[avta]

I'm not familiar with Pioneer equipment but if you would like to try another software approach you might check out www.sbooth.org You can rip with Max or try the current beta version of Rip and play your flac files with Play from the same site. Another program for ripping is XLD ( http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html )  I've used both with good results. Be sure you have your Audio Midi setting at the correct level if you try any higher resolution files as it will default to 16/44 If you are not familiar with my jargon let me know.