I've just replaced the OS on my Dell laptop going from XP Pro at 32 bits to Win 7 Enterpise at 64-bits. Much new-ness to negotiate. So while I was at it, I thought I might as well use the license I bought a couple months ago from JRiver and download the latest Beta version of MC 18. Results were pretty good----after a few hiccups. MC 18 played my first choice, a 24-bit 96 kHz file, instantly, but then balked at a 16-bit 44.1 kHz file! But all went smoothly thereafter. I now use the WASAPI Event-Style setting to feed signals to my HRT Music Streamer II DAC via a USB 2.0 port.
So noting that my WAV files sounded noticeably better than those encoded in FLAC, I began in earnest to convert the latter into WAV using my dBpoweramp program to do so. Once I had converted an album, though, I found that it sat in my music folder in an odd way----with each "song" in an album now represented by *both* a FLAC file and a WAV file. So I took care using Win Explorer to "clean up" each of these converted albums. First, innocently, I moved each one in FLAC to another folder altogether. But when I opened MC to play the new albums in WAV format, I found that they (the albums) still had the FLAC versions of each song right alongside the WAV ones. So I moved the FLAC versions of each of these albums to an exterior hard-drive hoping to remove them from my computer altogether. It didn't work. The albums I converted from FLAC to WAV still had both versions of each song sitting insolently one alongside the other. So I'm learning that Win 7 stores files automatically "everywhere" and Win 7's Explorer cannot reveal all the "places" in the tree where these FLAC files still exist (even when I think I've deleted them). I tried manually in MC 18 to delete the FLAC files in an album (and leave the WAV files), and while the files do seem to be deleted, if I close MC 18 and then reopen it, they reappear. Is it that JRiver keeps backups of these files in its libraries and MC 18 automatically goes there and retrieves them? Or is it Win 7 that keeps them in the virtual folders of its libraries? There must be a way to convert FLAC to WAV in MC 18 and Win 7 without all this grief? Right?