It looks like it may finally be the end of iTunes for me – that shamble of Apple bloatware – the great mangler of files and playlists.
Let me start at the beginning with our home system and the music library, read next paragraph to skip to portable music:
A few years ago iTunes messed up our home music library for the 3rd time, so we switched to Audirvana (both Mac and Windows) which works well enough and sounds great, much better than iTunes because it supports higher resolution audio file formats. We ripped (copied) our music from CD’s at CD quality and have never looked back – even fixing the album covers that iTunes endlessly lost or mangled. All new music has been purchased at higher quality levels and on a good stereo you can hear the improvement in sound quality over various compressed MP3 type file formats. At least all of our music is in one place, consistent, uncorrupted, has consistent album covers, accessible throughout the house with a IOS remote and has consistent playlists that are mostly stable (although we have had playlists bumps along the way). Audirvana supports all common music file formats, as well as high definition listless formats (FLAC, DSD, ACC, ACCL and the greatly disputed MQA which we love). A Mac Air laptop hosts the files and software (Audirvana) and it is connected via a USB cable to a NAIM DAC (digital to analog converter) which is then connected to a top of the line NAIM Amp and finally Bowers and Wilkins 802 Dimond speakers.
So that left portable music
How to avoid IOS Apple Music which yet again had a nervous breakdown and duplicated every track – playing each track twice in a row? And then theres the dyslexic teeni-bobber user interface – best suited to ‘songs’ and keep keep an album (or multi album together).
So that brings us to VOX as a good music player for IOS and it handles all of my music formats except MQA (which I simply convert to FLAC). This then brings me back to the home system – the source of the music. I transfer my Audirvana music library directly to my phone as this is comprised of directories (either by artist or album) with associated audio files in them (ok that still takes iTunes but that just a file copy) but from there it goes directly to VOX which so far has played perfectly.
VOX also runs on Apple CarPlay so it looks like this solution will work for everything – easy to use, simple clean interface and playlists that don’t self destruct.
I included a couple of links if you are interested along with an article on replacing iTunes and high definition music.
Source Article: https://www.whathifi.com/advice/how-to-play-hi-res-music-your-iphone-0
VOX: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vox-mp3-flac-music-player/id916215494?mt=8
I hope Apple gets the hint – clean up iTunes – give me something that works and maybe I will use it. Till then I am open to other software and file formats.