I WAS able to hear differences between PCM and flac decoding in blind tests. (no it was a not a full blown scientific test). But that was with the old firmware, the latest firmware has new flac decoding code, I don't know how that sounds. Its probably not going to get tested in the immediate future either. (health problems are radically restricting what I do right now)
A sheevaplug will be a big step up from running the internal server and is probably the cheapest possible way to do it. As has been mentioned a vortexbox appliance (which includes disk and optical drive) is probably the easiest way to add a server known to mankind. It DOES cost more than he sheevaplug though. If you already have the USB drive you are going to use for the music, the shevaplug is quite a bit cheaper. If you have to buy the drive as well as the sheevaplug its starting to look like the vortexbox appliance might be a slightly better way to go. One of my servers is a FitPC2 with vortexbox software, this works very well, and is exactly the same as the vortexbox micro appliance. (I already had the FitPC2, the vortexbox software was free so it didn't cost me anything) My recommendation: if you can possibly swing it an external server is a good thing, for many reasons. IF you already have a good USB drive, the sheevaplug is the cheapest way to get an external server. You DO have to be willing to do some simple linux command line stuff to get it up and running. Its not hard and there are detailed instructions on how to do it. If you don't already have a drive, or you want the easiest thing known to mankind, get a vortexbox appliance. The vortexbox appliance IS a faster computer than the sheevaplug. You will notice this when using the webui or doing things like searches on a large library. Only you can decide if thats going to be important to you. As far as using the Touch interface itself you will probably not notice any difference between the two. IF you plan on running cpu intensive server plugins the vortexbox appliance will be a significantly better platform. Remember you can't run the webui or server plugins at all on the builtin server ANYWAY, so if you are happy without them, it would not be a determining factor. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80430 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
