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NewsChannel D NewsChannel D Unveils New Pure Music-Player Software Designed for Apple iTunes Trenton, NJ—Channel D, developers of innovative audio software solutions for Apple® Macintosh computers—including the acclaimed audiophile-quality Pure Vinyl software, a high-resolution vinyl transcription, archiving and editing program—recently introduced a new high-resolution digital audio playback software program for Apple iTunes®. Pure Music, based on Channel D’s acclaimed Pure Vinyl audio playback engine, automatically docks with Apple’s free iTunes® digital jukebox software to handle music playback, using a high-resolution playback engine. iTunes acts as the database and playlist organizer; Pure Music leverages the user’s familiarity of iTunes functions such as track selection, music library navigation, and more. When combined with a high-resolution sound card or DAC, Pure Music delivers dynamic and detailed audio playback. The advantages of using Pure Music are: According to Robert Robinson, Channel D’s Director of Engineering, “Pure Music offers many benefits over iTunes alone. Foremost, iTunes plays all audio tracks at the sample rate detected when launched. If this were 44.1kHz (CD quality), then all high resolution audio tracks (up to 192kHz/24-bit, which can be purchased and downloaded on the Internet) would be downsampled and played in CD format, diminishing playback quality. On the other hand, Pure Music will automatically play high-resolution audio tracks at their native sample rate (if supported by the connected sound card or DAC). This capability was previously only available in costly ($995) audio playback software, but now is available with Pure Music for just $129.00.” Pure Music goes even further than previous player software, offering advanced features such as Memory Play, real-time high resolution upsampling of CD tracks, a 64-bit internal signal path, dithered volume control, subwoofer crossover, multichannel support, audio processing plug-ins, CoreAudio Hog Mode playback, high resolution audio streaming, precision signal metering, reverse play, and more. Pure Music natively plays all iTunes-supported audio formats, including but not limited to Apple Lossless, AIFF, Wave, AAC and MP3. Pure Music is designed to accommodate changes in Apple’s iTunes as that software continues to evolve. Through a proprietary high performance mechanism developed with the help of Channel D’s 25 continuous years of in-house experience developing Macintosh software, Pure Music transparently monitors user commands to iTunes. This elegant design avoids needing to reverse engineer iTunes’ library and playlist formats, insuring compatibility with future versions of iTunes. As far as the user is concerned, iTunes behaves normally via the Play/Pause, Skip, Shuffle, Volume controls, etc. and even via remote operation with an iPhone™ or iPod touch® using Apple’s Remote application. However, the connection with iTunes stops there, because iTunes no longer plays the music. All audio is rendered and played via Pure Music's low CPU overhead, audiophile quality 64-bit resolution playback engine. (Note: 64-bit resolution audio is an entirely different thing from the 64-bit memory addressing now available in Apple's OS X operating system.) Robinson continues: “The many accolades from users in Internet forums regarding the audio playback quality of Pure Vinyl’s Music Server feature has created a tremendous demand for the product. Accordingly, Pure Music was created to focus on the digital music playback features, for users not interested in the vinyl-oriented editing and recording features of Pure Vinyl.” Visitors to www.channld.com can download a free, 15-day, unrestricted demo program to try before purchase. System requirements: Mac OSX 10.5 or 10.6. The full program can be purchased on the site for $129.00. About Channel D Robert Robinson, founder of Channel D, was a research scientist and project manager at Bell Communications Research (originally part of AT&T Bell Laboratories) in New Jersey for over nine years. Included among his achievements there was designing and building one of the world's first electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopes, for examining the structure of matter at the atomic level, in the late 1980s at the forefront of what’s now called nanotechnology. Dr. Robinson is responsible for product creation at Channel D. Comments from Users of Pure Music “The sound is excellent, and the memory play with gapless files is doing well... Thanks for all your work on this... great product.” “I love the product, it destroys the competition and I'm trying to figure out the best way to diplomatically express that opinion on [an audiophile forum] without igniting a flame war.” “Historically I'm a pure vinyl user but I always wanted only the player part of this software without the overhead...” “It has an outstanding low end, the imaging is excellent.” “Congrats on having a winner — [this] had substantially improved the performance of my computer audio server setup compared to iTunes.” “pure bliss” “Never better sound... amazing clarity and soundstage.” “I have just purchased your Pure Music player and was delighted with the quality of reproduction vs. iTunes. Tonight downloaded the update that allows you to upsample -—wow —best digital replay I have ever heard from my system. Keep up the good work — what’s next?” “I gave your Pure Music program a try and I have to say I'm impressed — playback sounded noticeably better using Pure Music than with iTunes alone, for files from 44.1 all the way to 192 kHz sample rates. Interestingly, setting my FireWire/S/PDIF converter to 24/192 and allowing Pure Music to up-sample files rather than having the DAC do the up-sampling also bumped the sonic performance up another notch.” “Pure Music is by far superior to the famous player A…. High range and dimensional image are nearly perfect.” “Your software is a great achievement for computer-based music users. It sounds definitively very nicely, with a full and rich medium, detailed high and clean bass... the dimensional image is wonderful, wide, deep and opened. Globally, it's well balanced, very musical!” “I'm currently testing Pure Music 1.2 and my first listening conclusions could lead me to replace [a competing product] I currently use. [That product] is already a great improvement over iTunes, but I found that Pure Music is going quite a step further : more tri-dimensional image, much more definition, presence and "matière" (sorry, I don't know how to translate the exact word in audiophile language) on voices and instruments.” “I hope you have a lot of success with this new player. It might be exactly what the ‘pure digital’ guys need (at least the ones who can rise above the snobbish attitude that it has to be expensive to be good. Quite a few of those here where I live).” “I have been using the Pure Music player for over a month and prefer it to [the much more expensive competing product].” “[Pure Music] 1.2 is great! Thank you for your continuous support, it's been outstanding.” “Pure Music sounds splendid -—you must be very pleased with it.” “I love the product.” “The sonics of Pure Music... are a revelation.” “Today, I uploaded Pure Music 1.11 demo and WOW! That sounds freaking fantastic.” “—the program is really sweet.” “I've been a very happy user after moving from [a competitor].” “Very impressed with your product.” “—congratulations on such a wonderful piece of work.” |
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 Experienced in developing commercial application software for the Apple Macintosh platform since 1985. Copyright © 1996 - 2010 Channel D, All Rights Reserved. Macintosh, iTunes, iPod and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. |
