Using JPlay is fairly easy but be warned, it uses a very basic interface as the development and focus has been on ultimate performance rather than ease of use. While I am on the subject of operating systems it should be stated that JPlay will not work with Windows XP (or earlier operating systems) primarily because they don't have what is known as large page support. If you are reading this Mr Gates, I would suggest that Vista is so poor as an OS that it is not fit for purpose, and you should offer everybody with it a free, or heavily discounted upgrade to W7! Anyway, for this review, I copied some test tracks onto a USB stick and then transferred them on to the hard drive of the laptop. My first problem was that I couldn't get Vista to see the music on my external hard-drive. The program called JPlay has a small enough file-size to be sent by email, and installation is as straight forward as with any other software. The best I could offer was Windows Vista (on a laptop) with 2 gig but we decided to give it a try. Now life is never simple, and after corresponding with the folks who produce JPlay, it transpired that to use their software to best effect, you need a computer running Windows 7, and preferably 4 gigabyte of RAM. So when TNT was contacted by somebody asking us to try playback software that they claimed took things a stage higher, I jumped at the opportunity to try it. Generally, I have found there to be little difference between the most popular programs such as Winamp, Foobar, and JRiver Jukebox, although a lot depends on how the computer is set up, and whether it uses plug-ins such as ASIO. You will hear different play-back software touted as sounding better or worse than the competition. I improved matters with Windows XP by stripping back the operating system to the bare essentials but if you use the computer for other jobs, that isn't very practical. This may be because there are a lot of processes in a Windows operating system that can adversely affect the music play-back. In my own experience, I have found that I prefer to use Ubuntu (when I can) for music played from a computer (actually it's played from some type of storage such as a hard drive, but the computer provides the means of getting from the storage to the hi-fi). Of course, how large that effect is will depend on the quality of your hi-fi to reveal subtle changes. Apart from the hardware, it appears that the operating system, and the play-back software can and does affect the quality of the music coming through the speakers. It appears that with the arrival of computer-audio, we now have a whole new set of variables to go along with the ones in our hi-fi systems. In this review I'll step-aside from the controversy over digital cables and look at playback software. I think, or at least I hope, that we have all by now realised that digital audio is just as subject to the influences of the playback system as analogue audio. Reviewed: September, 2011 and updated January 2016 Squeezing a bit extra out of a Windows music server
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