DrJ wrote: > Well, that brings up another question. I'm obviously suggesting to > encode for a high-fidelity storage of the "master" if you will, which > would be relayed to the stereo (which is mostly background music for > the intended application -- the main audio system is in another > carefully acoustically-engineered building) and relying on local > processing power (if needed) to do any format conversions when playing > on local computers or when transfering to MP3 players.
Some of this realy depends on your usage model. The SlimDevices SqueezeBox hardware has an embedded microcontroller that can decode PCM, FLAC and MP3 in the fly, real time. So if you are streaming to one of them, you are done. If you are thinking of using a software player, such as SoftSqueeze, or even WinAmp, then the driving CPU usage is on the client machine. > I've not used iTunes or Windows music formats much. Some sort of front > end is useful, particularly for my granddaughter, but as you can > probably tell, I'm not sure I'm following you. Once the tunes are in the server and the SlimServer is up and running, you use either the remote control for your SqueezeBox or an HTML window in your favorite browser. I run Firefox on an ancient Toshiba laptop running Knoppix as my control, I rarely touch the SqueezeBox remote control. > I've not used any of them much. How fragmented is this > part of the world? Are these sorts of format conversions possible (at > least those without DRM)? The store-bought CDs I'd think would be OK, > but how about music downloads? Can these be converted? Store bought CDs have to be 'ripped' into a computer data file and placed on your server's disk. There are zillions of ripping utilities. The Apple iTunes store sells music in a DRM, and Microsoft has its own DRM. The playing of DRM's music is problematic, as most of the DRMs are aimed at controlling playback onto a specific hardware, and your Sun box is not in the top 100 list of clients. Most of the 'kids' listen to MP3s, a lot of them may never have bought a music CD. MP3 files are not too hard to convert on the fly even using software. All the cool folks use FLAC, which is free, open source, lossless, and designed to be low overhead during playback, altho it is slower than MP3 to compress and doesn't yield as small file sizes if you are willing to tolerate crappy MP3 rates. There is a separate mailing list/forum about ripping issues, help formats, etc. > No, clearly this is not SCSI, and the cost is for buying all the > components from scratch. Is SCSI speed for a lightly-loaded server > needed? No way. SCSI is not needed at all. I just mentioned it because all the Sun boxes that I've used had SCSI. Some other poster said that your Sun box uses cheap IDE drives. They are more than fast enough. IDE drives are insanely cheap. $100 will buy new 250GB or larger disks. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
