Hi @Doudou, Thanks a lot for your splendid answer, I was wondering how to find these Windows Hacks, could you perhaps point me in the right direction, please? 
I know I’m not Doudou but I can’t be quiet. It’s a shame that you need “hacks” for a commercial player. IT’S NOT A FREE OR CRACKED APP, you gave your money.
Hi @Tippe , I tried AS on macOS, so I did not participate to these threads that were related to the PC version. I just read some of them by curiosity, because Windows users had many problems. I don’t really remember very well what people were doing. And I don’t remember the names of the threads to point you to them. They were active in June.
Try the search feature of the forum with key words like “analysis”…
And maybe some PC veterans of the early days of the trial could help you more than I can.
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Hi,@Doudou, thanks a lot for your kind & helpful post. 
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You’re welcomed.
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There’s one advise that I can give you.
You have a very big musical collection. If you did not upload all your music tracks to AS, and by doing so submitted all of them to the analysis, you should split your music to smaller batches. Load a batch, let AS analyze it. Then load another one, and so on. Do it by batches of 10K, for instance.
Many people proceeded this way.
EDIT
And make regularily backups of the database. If for some reason, it will get corrupted, you won’t need to start the analyses from the beginning.
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It’s better to own the app.
I have A2.5 that I bought… I don’t even remember how many years ago. I can still use it with all my Macs. But I use it almost exclusively with a 2008 Intel Duo Core MacBook Pro. It runs under El Capitain, and A2.5 plays in “Direct mode”. The sound in this mode is very good. And I have this old Mac in my bedroom with a DAC and headphones. In this way, I can still use it for 10 years, and more.
I don’t remember how much I paid for this player, but if I had to pay a subscription fee for it, it would have cost me hundreds and hundreds of euros.
I bought HQPlayer, a more expensive player, at least four years ago, maybe five. It runs perfectly on all my Macs without need to upgrade it. For the moment, I don’t see a real advantage in upgrading it, so I continue to use this old version.
If I had to pay a subscription for it, during four or five years, it would have cost me much more, and the day I stop the subscription, I remain with nothing. While by owning the app, I can still use it for years, or pass it to my son who has an older Mac, etc…
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Interesting. This Direct Mode is hard to activate on M1 for AS? I’m interested on it.
I don’t know if it’s possible to activate “direct mode” on a M1 Mac under Big Sur with hacks. And in September, we’ll have a new macOS, Monterey. But all my players sound great on the M1, much better than my Intel MBP. I don’t why it is this way. Maybe because the electronics of the M1 are much more modern. It’s a system on a chip.
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I’m not very curious about techology. I look at my needs first. And I think my very silent M1 with 100% native apps will be very cool for at least few years.
Even the non-native apps run very fast. And the non-native, Intel version, of the players sound great.
But what I told you about the players is valid for all the apps on my computers.
The only apps for which I pay subscription are some professional apps that I may need for my work for short durations, and that it’s not worthy to buy them.
Macs are not like PCs. They keep their value in the second-hand market, even when they are old. The reason is that they remain very capable computers during many years. Your future M1 will remain a useful computer even in 10 years.
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After listening to my new Roon ROCK setup for an entire week, I felt like switching back to Audirvana Studio. I felt that Roon ROCK via Ethernet/WiFi input sounded much, much better than my previous setup (Mac mini/Raspberry Pi/USB), switching back to AS (UPnP via Raspi 4B/USB) clearly beats Roon with respect to sound quality! AS’s sound is more natural, more balanced, less treble driven than Roon.
AS wins, at least regarding the sound quality!
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You were annoyed with the updates of macOS, but you are not forced to install them on your server. If you have a stable configuration, just leave it as is as long as you can.
@Doudou
I have finally tried AS on a M1 Mac. Direct Mode is not activable. It sounds not as good as my actual MOJAVE / Direct Mode configuration. As per today that’s how I get the best result all configurations and softwares combined. But I’m still not very happy with the UI of AS even if it is acceptable.
Hi Alain,
Did you find a hack to make AS to play in Direct mode or are you using A3.5 for that?
True!
There are even users who run their server on Mojave. Updating and upgrading continuously macOS is not forcefully useful for the music server.
@Doudou
Yes there is a well known hack that allow to enable Direct Mode up to MOJAVE OS version.
Historically Apple stopped that possibility after El Capitan, but it is possible to re-innstall El Capitan audio extention until MOJAVE.
It is exactly what I do !