I have been a Pure Music user for a couple of years now and just recently downloaded demo of the latest version of Amarra for comparison. I am interested in other opinions who have compared these two playback softwares that work in tandem with iTunes. My initial impressions are limited. The most important of course is the audio quality and here I find little significant difference between the two. I strain to hear a difference. Do others hear significant differences? One small function I enjoy using in iTunes is the Coverflow view with full screen expansion mode (I have my Mac Mini connected to my HDTV). In Amarra this feature works fine but in Pure Music since the introduction of 1.86 after each change in song from an album or playlist the view collapses to standard view from full screen. The other area I noticed is playback of Gapless albums. In PM you simply tag the album in iTunes as Gapless and when you select play PM loads the tracks into memory and plays them properly. There is nothing else to do. However in Amarra to playback a Gapless album you must first load that album into an Amarra playlist (not iTunes) and then it will play Gapless. The problem I see there is you must remember which albums you tagged as Gapless (I have some I tagged as such because two or three songs within the album are Gapless) and with PM this is a seemless operation. I am also curious about the functionality difference between Amarra's allocate memory and PM's Hog Mode
At this point I don't see or hear reasons to spend the additional $189 but I don't want to dismiss it out of hand without further investigation. Any opinions and insights are welcome.
Thanks
