Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Help me build a music server!

I'm with you on that. I like the idea of the Squeezebox Touch, but I'd hate to spend hundreds of dollars on a player that feels so cheap. I think Logitech charges too much for what they're offering, and I'm not even only talking about build quality. It's just crazy that some of their Harmony remotes are more expensive than game consoles with much more meaty hardware inside. Economies of scale, perhaps, but it's hard not to see it simply as a greedy gouge. I suppose there needs to be more competition to make the prices come down.

Streaming is nothing more than playing or running a file that is located on one computer on another. You can stream media by doing nothing more than sharing a folder on one pc on your network and then accessing and playing it via another pc. Most people associate the word streaming with buffering. Buffering pre caches a certain amount of data so if there is a hiccup in the data transfer it is unnoticed.
I run a windows home server where I store all my data including music and movies. I have a client HTPC at each tv in the house so I can access my media anywhere. Windows home server also does some other cool stuff like performing daily backups of each pc on my network and allowing me to stream the files on my home server over the internet when I’m on travel. For not much more then the price of that logictec device you can build an entire HTPC.



Apple has there own version of flac its alac.

Terry, I'm not sure how it compares to the earlier model you linked to, but Logitech is still selling the Transporter SE, albeit at a jaw-dropping $1499.

Sounds like I'm basically in the same place as Charles relative to music. I just have a computer hooked up to the main HT installation. It holds all my FLAC content, which can then be accessed by other computers on the network. I'm not cursed with golden ears.

I think you can break it down into pieces.

1. Get the music on a hard disk. You'll have to decide on the codec, ripping process, etc. I totally agree about storage being cheap. FLAC gets you SOME compression, but honestly, if I had it to do all over again, I'd probably just buy more storage and not do any compression.

2. Decide where, when and how you want to access the music. I gather that you're not really concerned with portable devices. That makes things a little simpler. This is where Chris' advice about DLNA v. Windows share comes into play. Part of the decision here relates to what you decide for...

3. Software to manage the catalog and listen. iTunes, Media Monkey, WinAmp, etc. You may need more than one utility.

It seems to me that you can swap around various hardware bits (DAC, network, etc.) with some flexibility at any point in the process.

We've been mostly focusing on how to hack this together, because it's fun, geeky, inexpensive and you can do it.

There ARE integrated commercial solutions, however. In addition to Sonos, the following would love your money.

The Olive products Mike mentioned earlier look pretty great, but they are expensive.

The stuff from Escient is also pretty sexy.

How about a Sooloos color touchscreen jukebox from Meridian?

IF you can make a Mac Mini and Squeezebox solution work (it's not that I don't believe you can, I just don't spend much time on Apple stuff), that seems like a good direction.

Oh, and Back Up, Back Up, Back Up.

Yep, if you're looking for a compressed format, then FLAC is my recommendation, but I do, indeed, keep my music stored as Wave files. The only real problem with this is: there's not a very detailed metadata format for Waves. I don't need to know the year, BPM, genre, etc. So it suits me. I organize my disk structure to provide everything I need to know.

\Artist\Album\##. Artist -- Track Title.wav

My current setup i use right now is a wireless DAC from Opera COnsonance and my laptop (iTunes). It actually run very well and since i do like iTunes, i have acces to all my music via my laptop and sound quality is top notch. In fact, directly compare to my Arcam CD23 player, i can't tell a difference.
Here link of my DAC : http://grantfidelity.com/site/consonance_DLinear_8_Wireless_DAC

Btw, Rachel and Iam from Grant Fidelity are very kind.

Yeah, metadata is one reason I keep it in a format like FLAC, though its metadata options aren't as deep as WMA, which I had it in before. Not that I needed all of that data, but it was cool.

I personally keep artist folders but not subfolders for albums, since I like having all of that info in the filenames to make it easier for me to keep track of it all when transferring individual songs to wherever.

Tom, your post is the best advice thus far for someone just starting to get into setting up a music/computer playback system.

You clearly and coherently explain what I've finally figured out myself while pondering this issue. Kudos!




Brilliant advice and this will keep me busy for a while! I definitely should purchase a dedicated drive just for this purpose. I will probably burn it out with such intensive use.

I only want to do this one time!

I'm very excited about digitizing my vinyl collection though...




Amen!

That is a subject unto itself.

How do most of you back up huge music/video libraries? Raid array? Software applications that mirror hard drives?

Right now I have my music collection (and videos and documents) on a WD Green drive which sits in a hard drive dock connected to my eSATA port. The data is mirrored by SyncToy at 4am every day to my Synology NAS. I really consider the WD Green drive on my computer the backup now.

I think aiff has more metadata than waves. I'm still not sure if I should rip to .wav or .aiff (for music on 16/44 cd format). I might want to share or make "portable" the files at some point and wave files seem to be the standard.

As someone that has seen the evolution of digital audio, I cannot believe how many formats that have come and gone. But the dust seems to finally be settling...

By the way, us music professionals have finally decided on a "standard" file format for recording/archiving. Broadcast Wave Format (BWF). Bit rate and sampling rate are still "variables" (grrr ) but the storage format is set. BWF also has very detailed metadata.

What any other encoding of the files using software and the decoding (surround formats specifically)is up to the delivery device/mechanism that will be used. Thank god/allah/zeus!

Terry, you are too kind. I REALLY enjoy and appreciate the enthusiastic way that you patiently share YOUR extensive professional knowledge with the rest of us. The opportunity to learn from people like you, Chris, and others is what keeps me coming back. Every. Damn. Day.

I'm listening to some John Entwistle that I transferred from vinyl some years ago. It sounds like crap. Maybe my ears aren't that bad after all.