Itunes Alternatives or Better Transport Features

Is that w/ the same playback files? Meaning comparing 24 bit Wav on each platform? I think some DSP you have to buy the ability to stream HQ Wav. Always heard lots of ppl recommend Tidal!

Is there anywhere to buy actual HQ wavs the ME made/ printed/ captured w/o DSP encoding?

Can you drag your own music files, demos, Mp3 clips into Tidal?

Not sure.good question!

Somebody convinced me to convert to Jriver on Black Friday. I use Jriver with digital volume control disabled, Sox resampling, and a good third party dither. Then Jriver can approach a daw‘s sound quality. Every other media player I’ve tried sucks soundwise even though Jriver is 64-bit float and doesn’t hand off the pcm directly to the interface like a CD player.

The dither is necessary to prevent truncation distortion.

The jriver signal path is
1. Flac, alac, or wav file
2. Decoded flac or alac in memory. This is very important because the Flac codec clips worse than standard pcm even if it’s lossless. You don’t want a clipped file to clip the codec too.
3. File to 64 bit float pcm converted by SoX.
4. Dither set to whatever your drivers receive. Usually 24 or 32 fixed bit pcm now. You’ll want to use ASIO on Windows because DirectSound is crap. On Mac you need dither too because CoreAudio is 32-bit float but truncates when it hands it off to the interface drivers. Ideally your interface drivers will let you bypass this float to fixed conversion in MacOS.

The dither prevents distortion and preserves detail. Without it, or with the stock jriver dither, you lose details.

You've always been able to buy them. I've yet to see ANY Tidal MQA that wasn't for sale at HDTracks our Quobuz or AcousticSOunds(RIP-they stopped selling digital files Jan1). I've never used them but also ProStudioMasters. There ARE places selling some MQA discs, but who has a MQA disc player? Without it--it's a CD--no advantage, so....

That said, the MQA "DSP" as you put it can be a better sound for 24/44 and 24/48 masters. As in delivering a LOT better sound using a standard 192khz DAC. Once you get to double rate content, it changes it and I don't find it as globally "better sounding"....and 192, you can't play it back without a proprietary MQA DAC, where you've been able to do 192khz on consumer audio gear at least since the DVD-Audio push of say 2001--so I've never heard it, but the only 192khz content is 1970s tape transfers anyway. While it's not "better" than actual HD--I think people get hung up on "their changing it...." as a negative. I know there's all kinds of money grab BS involved with MQA, which is wholly a bad idea....BUT....that doesn't mean that the DSP itself is a negative. 

Ok, here's a question with a lot of qualifiers:

If you have a large lossless library and use an itunes alternative (jriver, etc), BUT also have an iphone and have a new mac that doesn't have itunes (catalina/Big Sur)....are you essentially forced to maintain 2 separate music libraries?

Just powered up a new 21.5 Imac last night...Catalina and Apple Music. Since no itunes, there is no longer any way to share my library with other computers that run itunes unless I subscribe to Apple Music for $10/month (i'm not). So now I need another home sharing program/solution i.e. Jriver or ?

I also don't think it's realistic to sync our iphones any other way than using apple music, so still planning to have primary music library be the old itunes library within Apple Music.

I am not sure how to reconcile these two goals with a single library (sharing/syncing phones). Or am I missing something? Can these other players simply read the same folder that your Apple music library is in?

I forgot about itunes match but reviewing it appears all songs get uploaded to the cloud and then you stream. I'm sure they wouldn't be stored losslessly...and I don't really want to stream but simply play the actual lossless files as I always have. It also says you now need to subscribe to Apple Music to purchase "match".

Near as I can tell, the main diff between "Music" and "itunes" is that they removed the ability to share media between LAN computers with Music unless you pay them $10/month.

I organize my Hi-res files in iTunes and sync them to my iPhone with it. However I use JRiver to play them. You only have to point JRiver to the folder where iTunes stores the files: the software will create its own library in Library/ApplicationSupport without copying the files, only referencing it. When I make changes on iTunes (adding files, modifying tags), JRiver updates it automatically, without any actions required on my part.
IMO the sonic difference between iTunes and JRiver is night and day. JRiver has to be set up right thought and it takes time to set up all parameters to taste. I recommend you the pieces of advice given by Dan above: this is the configuration I got the best results with.