Squeezebox Touch basics.

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Dave the bass
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#1 Squeezebox Touch basics.

Post by Dave the bass »

I want to make in-roads into the world of digital music replay. The SBT is a cheapish way of 'getting in' and seems popular. No-one locally (AFAIK) has one so I've a few questions to ask before plunging into the local PC World with a wadge of notes.

Ideally I'd like to be able to stream wirelessly from the 'study room' to the SBT which will be in the main listening area without the main house computer (a fairly old and large PC running XP...) being on all the time. If I've got this right this means (I think) investing in some NAS or as our-Chris mentioned a 'fit-pc' as the size of the software required for the Squeezebox server is getting bigger and the (limited?) memory on any NAS might not be enough. I think I've got that right.

I'm a total newbie here.

The NAS/fit-pc will be in the 'study' room as is the 'house PC' and stream to the SBT which is in the separate 'main listening area', this is so fan noise and (even more than normal) clutter isn't an issue in the main listening area. Also, i don't want to have to crank up the ancient old PC everytime we want to listen to the SBT. Make sense so far? I hope so. The modern Netgear Wireless Router is in the study too.

1st up, storage of all these .flac files. At present I store them on separate portable USB 320GB HD which I also use to store precious digital photo's of the kids growing up and JTS and me growing greyer and wider. I use this USB drive ONLY when backing up pic's and music maybe 4 times a year, rest of the time it isn't connected to the main house PC. One reason is that we once lost about 4yrs of digital photo's to a virus and don't want to loose what we've got now, hence if the PC gets infected or goes wonky our pics are saved. Hopefully. From what I've picked up in conversation over the last few months it seems like a good idea to keep digi pics on the USB HD but load all the music onto another server dedicated to supplying the SBT with the music. That way I free up loadsa space on the portable 320GB HD for pics only and the music gets put onto some form of NAS. Now then, here's where things get a bit murky for me. To stream music files to the SBT I understand that a form of squeezebox server software is required to allow this to happen IF I want to listen to the SBT with the main PC off yes? There's quite a few NAS's out there that allow you to fit 2 x sata HD's in that back each other up (mirror?) so if one HD goes down the other might be OK, sounds like a good idea to me.

2nd. How big a HD then? 2 x 1TB of NAS is 200-250 quid ish. good place to start? http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Netgear-RND21 ... 855wt_1131

I've read some of the Netgear 'ReadyNAS' range comes with a basic version of slimserver software already loaded, maybe this is enough to get me going? Do you leave any NAS running 24/7? Its a small room and just the heat from the clunky old House PC heats it up quite a bit, nice in winter...toasty! Not good in Summer, sweaty!

Are there other options available to me WRT storage? What do you fella's use? SBT still the way to go? Are you still happy with yours? :-)

S'all quite new and exciting to me :-) I'm quite giddy already!

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#2

Post by Dave the bass »

Vortexbox.

DTB
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#3

Post by pre65 »

Dave the bass wrote:Vortexbox.

DTB
http://vortexbox.org/about/
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#4

Post by Andrew »

I thought you could run the Touch directly from a hard drive?

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#5

Post by Dave the bass »

Andrew wrote:I thought you could run the Touch directly from a hard drive?

Andrew
I believe you can MrL, if I've correctly read info, the Touch has a very basic version squeezebox server (TinySQ?) needed to browse the attached HD. A drawback (I think, I'm new to this so bear with me..) is that to add files I'd need to unplug the HD then rip and upload any new files on the PC in the study, then reconnect the HD to play them.

I'm spending a fair bit of time reading up on it tonight.

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#6

Post by The Stratmangler »

Andrew wrote:I thought you could run the Touch directly from a hard drive?

Andrew
You can.
But when you use the inbuilt TinySC there are a couple of things it won't do.
It won't resample of the fly - the player can cope with 24/96 files, but 24/192 is a step too far.
You can't control the player from a web browser either (I use this feature all the time).

If you run Squeezebox Server on a computer then will quite happily to both of the above.

If you run Squeezebox Server from a more capable NAS it depends on how much processing capability it has as to whether the resampling works or not.
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#7

Post by andrew Ivimey »

and it takes ages for the Squeezebox to read a hard drive. I'm only using about 400meg of about 1000 albums and it takes severasl hours at the least.

1Terrrrrabyte is more than enough, I am of the 'umble opinion.

I do run my touch off a hard drive most of the time - its a pain to load on a few more albums and let the Touch rewrite the drive's data all over again.

On WiFi it is smooth creamy and fassssssssssssssssssst!

It is still an amazing device compared to other musicmachines.

Oh and 7.6.1 still doesn't work totally properly - maybe the Touch is faulty. - still sounds good though (and that's without all this £300PSU stuff and without all this external DAC business)



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#8

Post by Tony Moore »

Hi Dave,

As far as I'm aware, if you attach a USB drive to the Touch it'll share that drive on the network so you'd not need to remove the drive to rip files to it - just copy them over the network from your ripping PC.

I'm behind the times, I used SB3s and an SB Receiver (much butchered and hidden in my DAC case) together with a small Linux PC running SqueezeBoxServer.

I'm currently using HomePlug units for networking though I am convinced they degrade the sound with their RF hash on the mains. About to move house though and then I'll have cat5 once more. (Renting at the moment)

Cheers,
Tony
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#9

Post by andrew Ivimey »

copy them over!???? Bliss & Joy - How?
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#10

Post by Dave the bass »

Ta for replies Gentlefolk.

£199 buys you a 'CD ripping 1TB NAS' with Fast Dual Core Atom D525 1.8GHz and 2Gb RAM with SQS already installed. Simples! http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1Tb-Vortexbox ... 3cbb9d190d

Low power consumption so 24/7 is no prob's and small too.

Wireless between Touch and NAS/Vortexbox/whatever appeals though running a length of cat5 from study to where the SBT is going to go isn't a big problem luckily.

So many options.

Summat that has totally knocked me for six how large 24/96 files are. 1 album of 12 songs.... 1.65GB Kerrrrrikey :-)
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#11

Post by Ali Tait »

Tony Moore wrote:Hi Dave,

As far as I'm aware, if you attach a USB drive to the Touch it'll share that drive on the network so you'd not need to remove the drive to rip files to it - just copy them over the network from your ripping PC.

I'm behind the times, I used SB3s and an SB Receiver (much butchered and hidden in my DAC case) together with a small Linux PC running SqueezeBoxServer.

I'm currently using HomePlug units for networking though I am convinced they degrade the sound with their RF hash on the mains. About to move house though and then I'll have cat5 once more. (Renting at the moment)

Cheers,
Tony
Yes, you can, but because of the small processor in the Touch, it takes ages to upload an album, so not ideal. Having tried it myself, I'm convinced the Touch sounds better running from a network rather than a NAS/HD directly connected.
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#12

Post by simon »

I had been thinking about getting an Acer "net top" and running SqueezeCenter on Linux but at a couple of hundred quid for the Vortexbox I'm not so sure now. I rather like the thought of feeding in a CD and it doing the rest. Then again the net top would allow me to stream to the tv...
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#13

Post by Ali Tait »

Aye, I've been looking at the Acer Revo. Yes, a bit pricey, but a nice bit of kit and a cool remote too!
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#14

Post by Dave the bass »

Anyone one here use/used Vortexbox at all?

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#15

Post by simon »

Ali Tait wrote:Aye, I've been looking at the Acer Revo. Yes, a bit pricey, but a nice bit of kit and a cool remote too!
Hadn't really thought of it as expensive Ali, not sure what that says :lol:. A couple of hundred quid for a Linux box to run SC and have the ability to sit next to the TV and serve up whatever I need seems quite interesting. Didn't know about the remote though - what does that do?
http://www.ebuyer.com/279898-acer-aspir ... -semec-036
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