Does anyone know what Music Server is best? These are all hard drive based music servers for homes. (basically you insert your CD and it copies it to the hard drive) I've been doing research on all these trying to figure out what the pros and cons of all these products. Does anyone know the low down on "Lossless" compression? How about 192KBps VBR (Variable Rate Compression)? Please help!

Well, its a different setup, but I had an Audio Request, and didn't really care for it.

Now I have (And LOVE) an AudioRequest. Wow, what a box.

You rip and store the mp3s on your PCs, and connect over the Net, but damn, its a nice box!

Ken, your not making sense. Do you like or hate Audio Request??

JJP

Whoops, I meant I love my AudioTron, hated the Audio Request.

In fact, its the reason I am wiring my house for 100BaseT. AudioTrons in every LEC!

Ken:

More info please. What did you like/dislike about Audio Request.

The whole form factor just didn't work for me.

Maybe my unit was old, but it only ripped CDs at something like 2x. Could not play while it was ripping. No Headphone jack. No Ethernet (I may be wrong here, it was a while back). Etc. I kept seeing info about using the display with your TV, but why?

The AudioTron seems much better thought out. You can rip music with any software you want. Stick it on your PC, and the AudioTron just finds it. Have it randomly play songs from an Artist, Genre, Album etc. Its wonderful! It convinced me to rip every CD I have and stow them in the close. Now I have a personalized radio station which plays only music I like, with no commercials! It has COMPLETELY changed the way I listen to music.

Since the music is on my PC, its easy for me to use for other applications also.

At about 1/4 the price, I definetly like it better.

Sounds like how I feel about the guy who took my ex.

JTschilling,

You can also have a look at the Imerge and Lansonic units. Both of these have multiple output models and RS-232 control ports. You can also have a look at
www.arrakis-systems.com

I've been looking at this kind of stuff as well and short of spending a small fortune on a fireball - I've found this;
[Link: apejukebox.com]
It runs on any PC and has a very slick interface. I manage/rip stuff in MusicMatch Jukebox, and intend to play with ApeJukebox, and modulating the video signal to all TV's in the house, while feeding the audio to the whole house audio system.

My problem with the dedicated units is that they are out of date as soon as you buy them.

I'm still searching for the ultimate media server which will allow full video and audio from the one interface.

Good luck

Check out the Entre by Kenwood Soveriegn. It's fairly cheap and can also act as a library manager for CDs and DVDs as well. It also can stream to several rooms simultaneously through HPNA.

About the compression, VBR (Variable Bit Rate) usually produces a smaller file, but it depends on the source since VBR varies the bitrate according to the complexity of the sample. Anything less than 256kbps, for me....is unacceptable. It's just not close enough to CD quality, almost all of my MP3's are 320. Since Hard drives are so cheap, why sacrifice audio quality to pack more songs onto a small drive? Bandwidth is the other side of the story though. Those of you who stream over HPNA, which boggles my mind why you'd want such a worthless networking scheme instead of pulling come Cat5...might just need to compress at 192 and 160kbps. But then again if this is the case, I doubt audio quality is a top priority. If you want audio quality, go with 256 or higher, if you don't have the bandwidth for multiple streams of 256 or 320, then stick with 192...any lower and you'll definitely notice the downside of MP3 compression.

Marantz has a new box with 4 seperate outputs using the Xiva software (Imerge).

Anyone seen this?

I love my ReQuest (Pro60).

First, great, truly great, customer service.

Ethernet ports on every machine. It does not rip and play at the same time but that's ok when you don't know any different (it takes about 10 minutes per cd). We have a rip station and I transfer songs over ethernet. They constantly upgrade their firmware.

The Zones are good machines and swappable harddrives are a really nice touch.

The graphics are great, especially the screen savers.

Integration with Elan is seamless (even though Hector preferes IMerge).

Internet syncing capability is sweet even though I've never used it.

They are very expensive, but I believe they are best of the best.

Oh by the way, they are offering a $1000 bucks off of there 130 product if you trade in your fireball, imerge etc. $500 off for a escient tunebase. Ha!

A problem with all hard drive MP3 servers is the initial ripping (or ripping-off) process of a large collection of CDs. It really does not matter if the ripping speed is 2x, 4x or higher, the process takes a long time. Having to sit and feed the machine one CD that a time for a day or two really sucks.

Actually, this is a good excuse to sit around for a couple of day doing nothing and still get pay. If anybody asks me what I’m doing, I can say that I’m ripping CDs.

Another problem is backing up a customer’s collection. The best solution I heard so far is from Audio ReQuest but it requires two compnonents installed on a home network.

Does anybody have any ideas how to solve these problems?

>>Does anybody have any ideas how to solve these problems?

Rent my Audio Request Rip Station from me. :-) And, I'm wondering, can you back one of these up with a tape backup? I'll have to ask them....