Decibel App Reviews

I finally made the switch over from V0 / 320K mp3s to FLAC (for the most important albums) last week. I have a NuForce Icon HDP as my DAC and Grado 325si for headphones, so the setup has demanded exploring lossless for quite a while. Im really happy with Decibel. VLC does not cut it and is not optimized for sampling lossless files proper. The design is no-frills. I hope it receives some n updates soon, but at the same time the simplicity of it reminds of Winamp classic.

Does what it is suppose to, incredible sound. No frills but none needed. However if you need support good luck. This software sounds really good and holds up to software by Amarra in my opinion. But there is no real support. It takes you to a forum that you have to register to and be accepted to join. Well its been over a week and no email confirmation I can join the forum. I guess someone is on vacation. My problem is its only letting me access some of my Itunes library. Out of 1200 plus songs it is accessing 500 songs. I have deleted app and reloaded to no avail. Some day I will get a answer.

Decibel has a noticable improvement in sound quality over BitPerfect, which is also available on the Mac App Store. However, the lack of media management in Decibel is really a deal breaker. So for ever time I want to change a song I have to get up and switch it, unless I build a playlist in iTunes first and then load it up in Decibel. That is not ideal for me. Also, for large libraries of music it will take over a minute to load (I have a mid-2012 Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM…not a slow computer by any means). In the end, after trying both BitPerfect and Decibel, I bought Audirvana Plus (not available on the Mac App Store). It is far superior in sound quality to both BitPerfect and Decibel and integrates with iTunes. The developer will reply to support questions & it is a little bit over two times what I paid for Decibel, which was $30. Don’t even waste your time with this app. You’re best off just spending a bit more money and getting a higher quality app that integrates nicely with iTunes.

Went from 5 stars to 1 star. After a couple months messing w/ 1.3 & 1.3.1 I realized they had completely messed it up during the "upgrade" and minimal support is devoted to this product. I reported 1 of many bugs in 1.3, which they immediately confirmed as a bug, but that was 2 months ago and no fix or update has been offered. Thankfully, with Time Machine restoring 1.2.11 was as snap. That version works like a charm. Sound quality for FLAC files is great and it works seamlessly with my USB DAC. Problem was that in recoding for 1.3 they introduced so many bugs, and response time is terrible - it can take upwards of a minute to load songs from the server, and nearly everything you do results in the spinning beach ball that goes on for 30-90 seconds.

I’m using Decibel to take very high def music off an outboard Thunderbolt harddrive (7200) than out with USB to the asynchronous input on my DAC connected to my sound system. Decibel works without a hitch, once you set up its export preference, it works great and sounds fantastic. I highly recommend it.

When you update to 1.3.2?

Outstanding app! Originally there was an “issue" with Apple updating Decibel in a timely manner so I emailed Decibel and receive a personnal response from Fiesty and we were able to address the “challenge” quickly.

the sound was much more detailed and analogue like over iTunes. however recently i have been unable to open the app and have found this very very… extremely frustrating. macbook pro.

The player was great, but now with latest version of OS, the app keeps crashing.

The review below is how I felt when it was working. Unforutnately, under El Capitan, all it does is crash :( When it starts working again, my review will return to being: I tried the various hacks to play lossless music on my Mac like Fluke etc and none were satisfactory. Free stuff like VLC can work in a pinch, but its not optimized for performance nor sound quality (playing from memory, sample rates, processing quality). Decibel does what it says it will do and it does it very well. Quality sound, reliable playback and the key lossless formats that iTunes doesnt support. Whats missing? Media management. Im not looking for something too fancy, and even a hook into another software program would be acceptable. Right now, there is nothing like that from what I can see. And ripping would be cool too. Of course, if both those were added, the price would likely double. Get it now. Its a bargain and does what it says it does and does it well. (And use an external DAC. The quality of decibel means that the weak link will be the Macs own DAC. You can still use your Macs DAC of course, but youll be even happier with something better and decibel can make use of it.)

Purchased App to play DSF music files. Will not play these files. Error message every time I try to play a DSF file. Reported problem and requested support. No support given, email ignored. Don’t buy this App.