satkinsn wrote: > Well, I don't want to drag the thread too far afield, but let me ask you > guys (and whoever else wants to play) about workflow and V'box > hardware. > > When I ran it I just grabbed an old Dell that was a 3 gig something or > the other (probably a P4) and let it chug away in the corner of my > rather noisy office. If I'm gonna do this at home it's got to be smaller > and quieter, without breaking the proverbial bank. > > Also, if I'm going to use Windows to rip, I'd probably do it on my Win 8 > laptop and use an external cd reader (I'm guessing I'd go through a > couple over the course of the project and there's no point in wrecking > the unit's internal drive) and...then what? Move everything over the > house network to the V'box? How do you keep your files and folders > organized? > > Finally, if I'm going to the trouble of using a Win box to rip and tag > in the first place, is it really then sensible to move everything over > to V'box instead of leaving it on the Windows system and playing out > from there? > > s.
As I've documented here before, I use a dedicated tiny PC as my music server, on 24/7. It's a FitPC2, and is the size of a cigarette package (they may no longer sell this particular one, but there are others at www.fitpc.com). It's worked really well for me for three+ years, with absolutely no technical problems. I bought it diskless and installed a 500gb drive with XP; just ran out of space and am upgrading to 1 TB. It has no fan, uses the thick aluminum case as a heatsink, and is virtually silent (aside from the hum of the drive). I originally ripped all my music to my primary computer (using, I'm ashamed to say, WMP), before moving all the music to the Fit. Almost three years ago I converted to dBp for all ripping; I now rip using my primary computer (I can always replace the drive if not the whole computer, if necessary), and use the dBp multi-location capacity to simultaneously rip flacs to my central archive (an external drive on my primary computer) and to the Fit (across the network) and simultaneously a 320 MP3 to a "compressed music" folder on my primary computer. This latter serves as the source for any music I want to take on flash drives to play in the car, or to give to my kids, or whatever. I back up to another external drive more or less weekly, and periodically to a small drive that fits in the safety deposit box at my bank. So at any one time I have three copies of all the current music, mainly flacs (on the Fit, the main archive and the additional external backup), one copy in the bank's safety deposit box of the music current as of the last time I did that backup, and one copy of all the music as MP3s. I'm not sure I could make a conceptual case for a Vortexbox -- the Fit running ancient XP has worked very well. R. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98057 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
