What are your experiences with Musicbee + Airfoil + Airport Express ?

[Rachmaninoff]

I am wondering that this forum has not any thread referring to Airfoil - either there are no problems with this or noone uses this tool. However, I am coming from iTunes with WLAN sound to Airport Express (which was perfect), and since I switched over to Musicbee I had to think about another solution - so the new sound process is now Windows 7 + Musicbee + Airfoil with purchased license + AE.
I would suppose this might be a very common configuration.

The first 2 days the sound was terrible - totally distorted with annoying clicks. I found out that this noise had nothing to do with the Airport Express - it was even there when I directly connected my computer with a headphone - with Airfoil the clicks were there - without Airfoil there were gone.

It took me a while to detect a popup menu within Windows / System / Sound to downsize the audio manually to 16 Bit, 44100 Hz - which is ok for me, but perhaps it might be not the best sound to gain. I guess, iTunes did this downsizing automatically, nevertheless I am still convinced, that iTunes + AE had a more brillant and "deeper" sound than MB + Airfoil + AE.

What are your experiences and what is your preferred sound configuration with Windows 7 + MB + Airfoil + AE ?

Thx for your replies
Rachmaninoff




 

[Steven]

i cant help you with regards to this software but pops and clicks are usually when people configure musicbee to use ASIO output and have configured the ASIO buffer too low. If you are not already using Direct Sound in the player preferences then i suggest you try that. You can also set the output to be fixed at 44100 from the Player preferences panel as well.
As to differences in sound, unless iTunes is applying some sort of adjustment to the sound/ setting the volume higher then there shouldnt be any difference in sound - there really isnt any magic involved with players that claim to produce better sound and more likely to be the differences i stated or placebo effect.

[Pingaware]

With regards to difference in sound, could just be that you have an equaliser set in iTunes and not in MB.