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June 20, 2007 - 9:19am
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There goes the weekend!!
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Hi Mchale,
Excellent post and very useful for this forum. I think that you'll find that the Stereophile is sadly behind the times when it comes to "computer based" music. While they are several members here who really know their stuff when it comes to computer audio and various computer based digital audio tools, on the whole computer audio has not been considered a "high end" source and so is not that well represented on this forum.
There have been a few worthwhile discussions on the topic in both the "Computer Audio" and "Digital Sources" sections but otherwise this forum lags behind several other forums such as headfi.org and the Slim Devices forum.
Over the next few months I will be making good use of EAC and FLAC since I will be attempting to put as many of my CDs onto an external hard drive before my wife and I move to The Hauge, Netherlands for a few years. I own a Slim Devices Transporter and a couple of Squeezeboxes and am planning on using these devices along with my computer, several external hard drives and a wireless router as the "software" for my audio system rather than trying to transport my rather large CD collection. Of course I'll be giving up my LPs and turntable but at least I'll still have plenty of music. Any suggestions or comments are most welcome.
Jazzfan
Mchale, An excellent idea and a superb list! You put a lot of work into this.
Jazzfan, your plan is great in my opinion. My only suggestions are to be sure to carry a complete backup with you (I am sure you are already planning this but I hate to contemplate the misery of a music lover with his music gone) and to fully and carefully tag your files.
The only criticism I have of having music on my server is that I often find that the list of albums and list of artists/composers isn't really enough for me to find music to listen to. Of course, it is easy to find things I am thinking of, it just is not nearly as easy to find something that inspires listening as it is when looking at a group of CDs or albums. My thought is that a lot more tagging and ways to search might help.
And thank you for your recommendation to listen to "Conference of the Birds" and other free jazz. I am really enjoying it!
As far as external storage goes I've been eying the Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx) this seems like a perfect solution for the audiophile crowd.
From the point of view of a technology tinkerer this is alot of fun... From the point of view of an audiophile this move is nothing but practical. It's time to start learning the ins and outs of configuring a linux based hi-def audio source. The next step for me will be to configure a recording setup, I've been following the progress of ardour(http://ardour.org/), and it's looking pretty good.
I'm going to have a run at using Mythbuntu as the OS in my media server. http://www.mythbuntu.org/ . If it works well it would be a perfect hardware/media interface, especially for those using Slim Devices products because there is a Debian/Ubuntu firmware download available on the slim devices site(http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html) that should work right out of the package
Microsoft's Windows Vista was a slap in the face for anyone who uses their computer for enjoying/creating digital content. Apple is just as bad, they're just better at hiding it from the public.
Hi Elk,
Thanks for the suggestions and kind words. I did try to follow your suggestion regarding backing up my music files and with that very purpose in mind I bought a 1.5 Terrabyte (as in 1500 gigabytes) external hard drive and configured it as a RAID 1 drive, which means it was operating as a fully mirrored 750GB drive. In other words, two 750GB drives, with each drive an exact copy of each other.
So far so good. The drive I bought was a Maxtor One Touch III Turbo Edition and I was able to find it at Best Buy (online) for under $500.00. Okay, so I get the drive, install it via USB 2.0, configure it for RAID 1 and start ripping my CDs onto it. I'm merrily ripping away and after about five or six days of ripping I have just over 50GB of music on the drive. I'm using Exact Audio Copy and converting the WAV files to FLAC, so 50GB is about 125 CDs worth of music.
Then disaster stuck. I needed to do some reconfiguring of my computer's physical setup, you know, move things around on the desk, clean up the wires, etc. - I did not change any software or any of the drives - and when I turned the computer back on the Maxtor drive reported that it had no data on it. I had a mild heart attack or at least it felt like one. I rebooted the computer and this time the computer would not even recognize the drive. I tried the drive on several other computers but to no avail, the computers would not recognize the drive. I then checked online to try and find some information about what I could do to get the drive working again and all I found were user reviews for the Maxtor drive, the vast majority of which stated that the Maxtor drive was a complete piece of garbage. Needless to say, but I should have checked the user reviews before buying the drive.
I called Best Buy and they told to return the drive to any store for a full refund. I did exactly that and picked up a 1TB Western Digital My Book drive which I know works very well since I already own a 500GB My Book drive. While at Best Buy I asked if there was any way that the data could be recovered and I was told that the only way to do recover data from an external drive would be to pull the drives out of the unit and that would void the warranty so I just handed back the drive (with my 50GB of music on it) and went home with the My Book drive.
So now I'm back in business but I lost about five or six of ripping because of this nonsense. In the end I don't think that Mchale's suggestion of a Drobo drive unit is all that outrageous albeit still somewhat expensive.
Ouch!
You were even behaving and doing exactly as you should.
I hope the new drive works out better!
Thanks!
However, this time I'm quite behaving as well as I should. While I'm still ripping the CDs onto the new hard drive using EAC/FLAC, I now have the drive set as a RAID 0 drive, meaning that I'm using it as a full terrabyte drive rater than as mirrored 500GB drives (RAID 1). The way I figure it is if one the drives fails it still has to be removed from the unit and the warranty will be voided. So as long the drive fails while still under warranty I get it fixed and my data back (I hope) without having to pay. And if the drive fails after the warranty runs out I have to pay either way, i.e. RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. The only question is whether or not I'm willing to go without 500GB of music, which is all that I'd have anyway if I went with RAID 1.
I know it's a rather silly argument but after being burned once doing everything right I feel it's time to live dangerously.
Iomega has some nice 1 Tb drives fro cheap, they are always running specials