I downloaded Slimserver and took a look at it. It has a handsome interface with lots of white space which is easy on the eyes. The available information is nicely laid out and easy to read. It can browse by various categories such as genre, artist, track name.
It doesnt show who are the musicians and what they are playing for each track, which is kind of an important topic in jazz. There doesnt seem to be any way to customize the information so as to add notes about the CD, or the record label, or URLs that have information about Coltrane and his Giant Steps album, for example. It doesnt appear possible to correct the data provided for the CD. It gives you good, fundamental information, but I think you are stuck with that. I dont want to sound like I am carping or finding fault with SS. I am not at all and it looks very nice and presents good information. I am only noting the limitations and regretting that theres nothing more the user can add. It looks like we all get the same information. At a minimum, it seems as though I could use Squeebox for the pleasure of listening through my home audio system to all of the music stored on a hard drive. I can continue to store the information I want about the music in my choice of software, identify those songs I want to hear and then open SS to find the artists, titles and tracks and create a playlist. Ill just use two applications to accomplish the task. Someone here already suggested that idea and I can see how it would work. Erland offered some encouragement. It sounds as though developers may already be thinking and implementing ways to make external software work through SS. Maybe in a year my problem will have been solved. I really havent been ripping much music at all. I havent been interested in listening to music on the computer and until about the day that I first posted, I hadnt explored whether it was even possible to listen to music stored on a hard drive through a home audio system. As I am sure everyone noted, I dived into this forum with my original post knowing next to nothing about this process, but I learned a lot (learned enough to know that I dont know nearly enough, which is a good start) in short order. The music I have ripped has been through Nero which doesnt seem to access a very complete database and so I have manually added artist name and individual track names, which has been fine for the few CDs I have entered. Now the idea of manual entries with so many CDs is daunting. On this laptop I have been using to communicate with the forum, I dont have Nero and so for the first time used Windows Media Player to rip a CD to this hard drive to check out how SS would show it. WMP seemed to do an adequate job and saved the information in the way I have done it, by artist name, CD title and individual tracks. It saved the files in .wma format, which I think is okay. I originally thought I would save them in .wav format, but jeez those are large files, and I have read that .wma format is pretty faithful to playing the music as it would off the CD directly. I almost think I know better than to ask this, but is there a better program than Windows Media Player for ripping? And is there a file format that is preferred over .wma? -- JSharp ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JSharp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13675 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39597
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