Network Music discussion.

[Nijo]

I'd already checked out the sonos and decided it was both too expensive and a bit ott for my needs, but thought other peeps might be interested. Oh and I couldn't find any mention of sonos being able to stream over the internet either, which is the other reason I went for slimserver.

Ditto to all of that.

[charlesr]

Just slapped some pics of the squeezebox3 here: http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread...358#post793358

[charlesr]

Performance is so far better than softsqueeze, so if any of you are trialling softqueeze, bear in mind, this is far better. Same functionality, but better streaming, buffering and sound quality (unless you have some uber laptop/PC soundcard)

[Tychom]

I've been toying at work with the slimserver + softsqueeze player combination today and I'm wondering if anyone else who's done the same has found they get lots of lost connections occuring...

This is on a reasonably good development system so it shouldnt be a lack of horse power issue, nor a network problem as it's all on one machine.

Now I'm trying it at home, using hamachi for the secure tunnelling into work to get at my music. Seems so-so but the dropouts are still there.

[davidcotton]

Ooof. Well I'd left the qnap and sb3 on all day on repeat play on a couple of albums just to check things were ok. Things seemed to be fine when I got back in from work. So I figured I'd get some of the files that were on the external drive transferred across. Started off by doing an artist at a time (few albums in each) and everything seemed fine. Then toward the end of the evening I started doing things in bulk. One of the main reasons that I'd bought the thing was to store a load of audio storys (around 100 doubles so they were taking up a lot of space!). Started copying those across. Time stated 40 minutes so I went to watch some tv. Suddenly heard a "beep beeep" come from the other room. Had to stop the transfer due to the fact it kept repeating the beeps. Felt the side of the qnap and it was well quite warm. So I've stopped it for now and hope that it was due to the fact that it's been in use all day, and now had some more activity from it. FWIW the case seems to be cooling off quite rapidly now its been turned off. I had been planning on just leaving it doing a bulk transfer whilst I was at work, but now I'm not sure I want to leave it unattended for that amount of time. It didn't help that my mum decided that we needed the heat on and that put the heat of the room up by a fair few degrees as well I'll see how it goes.


PS In the time that its taken me to type this post, the side of the case has cooled quite dramatically!

[djjimbob]

Is the QNap noisy Dave?

[djjimbob]

The Slimbox does look very nice and is a decent price, but after re-reading the thread and understanding everything that is going on - there is a real problem with the storage situation.

All we really need is an ultra-quiet hard disk shell that we can slap numerous hard disks inside. Some Flash ROM that we can write a connection to our streaming box and a network card. How difficult can this be? A major gap in the market - surely the big players have got deviced in the pipeline?

Jimbob

[charlesr]

There are several alternatives to the qnap that people have got up and running. Linkstation etc. None of them are completely silent because you still have the HD whirring, but quieter than my PC no doubt.

[davidcotton]

Well its been a few days since I've had the qnap and sb3 set up so here are my general thoughts.

On the whole its excellent. I must admit that when I first switched on the sb3 and had a listen my first thought was "what the hell are they talking about, matching $2000 cd players?!? This can't even beat my heavily used 5 year old marantz 63 KI Sig player at ?400! Still I left the thing on, and happily carried on ripping cds (nearly a third of the way through, hooray!). Transferred a few over onto the qnap so I could have a play with the setup. Had a "doh!" moment half way through as I switched my external usb drive that I'm using for storage from a usb1 socket to a usb2. Suddenly the conversion to flac, and general ripping speeded up. I'd left the sb3 on all the time the last few days and things have definetly been improving. Although I've lost the magical quality to the vocals that the marantz player had, it was never all that great shakes at the more up tempo style of music. The sb3 is certainly more evenhanded, not favouring any one part of the music.

The general response of the sb3 via remote has been very good. It's a little confusing at first, but once you get used to it it makes sense. It's a snap to install (at least the wired one was!)and once done you can get on and use it. Happily as long as you are using flac or other appropriate file formats there are certainly no gaps to the music. This was the one major concern other than noise when I was planning this type of system.

The qnap. Now this is the heart of the system. On the whole its been fine. I say on the whole. Its a little too noisy to have out in the open, but fine once its been tucked away. I was lucky enough to be able to find a spot in a cupboard and route the cables (power lead and ethernet cable to link to sb3 or pc for transfers)and have the door shut. If you've got somewhere too put it away then I would definetly reccommend it. For the purpose I use it for I don't mind if any more updates are released for it or not. Just check that the place you intend to buy from (if you are planning on buying one!)has already imbedded the slimsoftware.

The only real pain that I've had has been the time it takes to rip and convert the cds themselves, but you accept that if you are going down this route



System :-

Marantz 66KI Signature Amp
Squeezebox 3 (wired version)
Qnap TS 101 500 Gig
M-Audio 2496 Dac
Mission 780 Speakers

Kimber/vandenhul cables.

Just wondering how you were getting on with yours charles? Did you find that the sb3 improved after being warmed up for a while?

[charlesr]

I tried the sb3 through an optical digi cable and it sounded different. Couldn't work out if it was better or not. It was certainly a little louder. However, my setup isn't er... set up at the moment (due to house rewire), so I need to try my proper analogue interconnects and a coax digi cable so I can compare the DAC in the sb3 with the DAC in my marantz amp properly. I've just received a second sb3 for the bedroom (again from multitaskcomputing - ordered it on Sunday, so fast), so I could plug them both in and data-sync them and then switch between the 2 to compare easily.
I'm looking forward to putting all the CD racks in the spare room so the lounge is clear. It also means not having to traipse downstairs to find CDs when I want to listen to something different in the bedroom.

I didn't notice any difference after extended use with the sb3, but the firmware upgrade ironed out some glitches I was having with wireless connectivity and it works perfectly at all times.

[Nijo]

In case you're interested...

I've just set up my home SB3 to connect to a Slimserver running at work. I had to fiddle a bit with port forwarding but it's connected now. I've configured the server to downscale everything on-the-fly to 128 bits before streaming and it works great. Browsing is very snappy, playing takes a couple of seconds to start but once going it's smooth. Obviously I can hear a difference with the 128 but that's far outweighed by the benefit of not having to buy a server here.
On top of that I've got Pandora and internet radio, plus I bring home my laptop at the weekend for some higher quality goodness.

Great stuff.

[davidcotton]

Nice!

Unfortunatly I had to send the qnap back in the end. It locked up twice over the space of the bank holiday weekend. One time I powered down the unit as normal and the hard drive kept spinning, the other time the status changed from green to orange.

Let the company that sells them (cooltopia, main supplier of slimdevice in this country)and got told to send it back to em so they could swop the hard drive over. Sent it back last thursday and still not got it back due to the guy going on holiday for a week! Ah well at least I should get it back by the end of the week hopefully.

Tell you one thing though. Having all the music on tap without having to get up to actually change a cd like doesn't half make you lazy!

[kernow]

I'd just like to say I've been interested in doing something similar to this, and I've been doing a little research, maybe into making my own mini-ITX based device, but it seems so much work when I could just get a squeezebox. I like the sound of the wired one so I don't have to rely on an external wifi access point. ( I guess relying on a wired switch is no different, but several things use that ). uhh, so is everyone still using their boxes?

Hows the sound quality using FLAC when compared to a real CD? I will most likely be using the 24bit DAC inside my cd player (it has 6 digital inputs) to get the most out of it... am I kidding myself thinking it'll theoretically be no different to my CD player considering its even using the same D/A gubbins?

I'd rather have something that was 'fixed' and didn't require countless firmware and application updates to operate correctly, but I guess that does mean they are supporting it at least. I don't like the sound of relying on some server side software either, I'd like a big directory of flac files in subdirs or whatever, and just point the media box to that.

hows the build quality? I hope it doesnt look tacky, looks nice from the pics.

it does really sound like a nice piece of kit, I remember being very interested in this topic when it was originally created. I feel building a sleek black ITX case myself with just a power LED on the front, (not too interested in a screen, this could be done via a web frontend).. but the initial cost, software development time, and getting the suitable parts together would outweigh just buying a squeezebox.

I am getting a toslink cable so I can at least try playing some FLAC files on XBMC via me xbox, set to digital out, will it use my 24bit dac or the xbox sound hardware I wonder?

[Nijo]

Yeah I'm still using mine all the time. It's still setup to stream from the office so I can't comment about FLAC quality. Here's what I can tell you:

- Build quality of the SB3 unit is great. I know somebody else that managed to scratch up the metal on the front, but tbh you shouldn't be doing stuff to it that would cause that in the first place.
- You don't have to mess about with firmware updates all the time. I just installed whatever was the last stable release and have stuck with that ever since. I guess I should check what the new builds give you....
- No problems at all using the wireless version of SB3.

The main issue I have is down to the remote streaming. From time to time the VPN settings at work get changed so I lose my access, or the internet goes all slow, but that's not SB3 related. After that the requirement for server-side software is probably the biggest hassle.

To solve the access problem I'm still thinking about getting a NAS drive and/or computer here in my flat. I'm dubious about the QNAP so am currently leaning towards a MacMini with a big drive. I could stick it beneath my telly and have it run all the time: music wirelessly delivered to my SPB, with the DVI out (somehow) plugged into my TV for web browsing and movie stuff.

Here's my question: I have a drive of music (and work stuff) on a PC at work. Can I set up something like a robocopy script to automatically sync changes from that work drive to the drive on the Mac? Kind of like a weekly offsite backup.

I'm not keen on dual booting XP as it goes against my tidy instinct. For a media box I'd prefer OSX I think. I'm just not sure about syncing between PC and Mac drives....

[kernow]

You could use something like RSYNC (unix/linux/bsd/macos/win32) written by the SAMBA team. it is an excellent file synching and mirroring tool and is used via scheduled tasks like cron.

I'm pretty sure macos has crond, and rsync even if optional, its easy to setup a job so that files from one mirror are synched over SSH (encrypted too, nice), to another remote server somewhere, or vice versa.

thanks for your opinions by the way, seems a squeezebox is a very solid choice. I might try get one off ebay so the missus still lets me use her squeezebox also.



(robocopy could do the same thing on a scheduled task too I guess, but you're better off with rsync over SSH using cron)