Hello all, I just bought my SB Duet (haven't received it yet) and was hoping some of the experienced users here could help me to get the most out of it. Here is my current (pre-SB) setup. I have all of my music stored on a Dell Poweredge 2650 sever (running Win 2K3 server) with external SATA drives configured as RAID5. I also have a simple WinXP box in my home theater running a custom app (written by a freind) which is just a simple mp3 player/jukebox. The video output of that PC is just another video source to my home theater and the audio output is also handled this way. So when listening to the "jukebox" the systems video source is switched to display the PC video while the audio is coming from the PCs sound card. The jukebox app is then controlled via a standard windows user interface with a wireless mouse. This setup has worked fine for several years but has its limitations. First (and most importantly) I have no way of including new music. It has a database which holds the actual path to all tracks in my library but the database is limited to 999 CD artist per alphabet character (ie. 999 CDs by Artist starting with "S"). Over the years my collection has outgrown this for many letters. Second it is only capable of playing mp3s. I have my entire library stored in flac. To support this player I have to store a second copy in mp3. The Squeezebox's support for flac was my primary reason for buying it. Third there is no way to control the thing from a remote (must use the mouse). This means you must actually be in that room to chage tracks or playlists.
I bought the SqueezeBox Duet because out of the box it seems that it fixes all of my issues. However, there are a couple of features of the old jukebox application that my wife says she simply must have. First, the old jukebox app has a screensaver (the display, in the home theater, is a plasma so static images are a big no no). This screensaver is two sprites that bounce around the screen. The sprites each show a thumbnail image of the album art as well as the artist, track title (as text). One sprite shows the info for the currently play track while the other shows that info for the next track in the playlist. Also, the sprite showing the info of the currently playing track includes a progressbar indicating the tracks current play position. The second is not really a feature of the player but a rather a feature of the mp3 files. I have all of my mp3s volume normalized (via Mp3Gain). The problem is that when I switch over to the Squeezebox I plan to point it to my lossless (flac) library not the mp3 library. The flac files do not have (and I do not want them to)the audio info altered in any way (ie. volume normalization). They do however have the ReplayGain tags. So after that long explanation here are my questions. 1) Does the Squeezbox have any means to show a display on a PC on the network? 2) If yes, are there any nice UI's for it that include some type of screensaver that would include the same information (curret track, next track) 3) Does the Squeezbox handle ReplayGain tags in flac files for volume normalization? Thanks, -- sredmyer Steve Redmyer www.RipitDigital.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ sredmyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=23527 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=59023 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
