192 million

[tvrgeek]

Ok, time to break down and move my CD's to disk. With 192 million hits on Windows Music Player, Google is not an easy place to start.

Stopped at a high end store, and they wanted to fix me up with about $20,000 worth of mac and accessories including $600 each services to program remote controls. Sorry, not my game.

I need a music server, windows or Linux being a lot cheaper to build than MAC, but I am flexible. I was thinking about throwing a file server in the closet anyway for backups.

Do any of these things run over a distributed file system? Over a generic database? I could see Couch, Mongo, or even Hadoop underlying a nice interface. (a song with some metadata sure looks like a doument to me)

I need a user interface. It looks like the iPad is about the 800 Lb gorilla. ( I don't own any smart phone, nor do I care to) Alternative suggestions most welcome. My original thought was a touch screed PC, but they don't work like appliances. I don't want to boot my music server, wait, load apps, wait.... but the idea you could mount it in the wall and just walk up and touch
"play jazz" is what I am looking for.

So, where do I start?

 

[Pano]

JRiver Media Player. Not perfect, but damn good. Best I've found in the past 12-14 years I've been doing it. You can have zones, servers, remotes and more. Also handles images and video if you need it. I put mine on a small, used PC with digital out. Remote can be about anything.

Or Squeezebox touch. Smaller, easier, less fiddly than a PC. Also has many remote options. That's what I run now.

 

[marce]

Dont use Windows Media Player to rip your CD's, it buggers up the TAGS, then when you run Sqeezbox server (or similar) and collate the library its a mess.
I'm using EAC now, after doing 700 CD's with WMP.....

 

[tvrgeek]

I was planning on EAC for the acquisition and then archive from there. That allows conversion to flavor of the day. I might even break down and buy an iPod for my car.

I'll look at Jriver. THanks.

 

[tvrgeek]

Up and running the free version 14.

This made me think of product we need. A USB connected user interface that works like a preamp. On, volume, tone, source etc. Not some "i" thing, real knobs. Ir remote codes so it works through generic learning remotes.

 

[Redshift187]

EAC is great, you can have it compress to FLAC on the fly or whatever you like. To speed things up with that though, you need to UNcheck "wait for external compressors" on the General tab of the EAC Options.

 

[Pano]

EAC has gotten easier to use (Or is it just me?) but dBPoweramp is still my fav. Fast, accurate and tags very well. Not free, tho.

Let us know how you get on with JRiver. IMO it has the best library management of any player. Very flexible outputs, too.

 

[Dane]

I used EAC to .flac
Then I used SqueezeboxTouch using digital out to external DAC.

I can use my iPhone as a remote, because you really can't read the SB-Touch screen when sitting in the listening chair.

Now if they would stop updating the server software every other day I would be even happier.

Next option would be a NAS box that host the Linux version of the server and the content.

For appliances after that I would use the new Raspberry Pi's running XBMC as I think it will stream content from SlimServer.
Now that we have the $35 computer we need a cheap touch screen.