Music Server now bane of my existence

Celtic66's comments resonated with me -- I was just thinking this evening, as I tracked down a glitch in my music server setup, that the whole music server "thing" is still way too glitch-laden, complicated, unstable, and involves way too much fiddling around. I use a Mac Mini with an outboard CD drive and a USB connection to an outboard DAC, and I have to troubleshoot SOMETHING about once every two days. I have tried all the major music server software packages for the Mac, including both those that integrate with iTunes and those that don't. I have used hard-wired Ethermet connections, the aforesaid USB, coax, toslink and wi-fi. I have downloaded music In a variety of formats and resolutions. And still the damn thing isn't truly stable and reliable. Sooner or later someone, somewhere, is going to come up with an elegant and reliable solution, but it hasn't happened yet. Or at least I haven't encountered it. And heaven knows I've been looking.

I've found Audirvana to be the most stable of the lot. I also try not to update itunes until I am sure the developer of (Audirvana or Puremusic or Amarra) has fixed any possible issues/tested the new build of itunes.

Timrhu, my post does require some understanding of the interfaces and acronyms used in DAC technology.

TB - thunderbolt
DSD - codec used for SACD aka Direct Stream Digital which uses single bit sampled at very high frequencies (MHz instead of kHz)
GoFlex is a range of hard disks from Seagate that allow you to change the interface to the computer from USB to Firewire (FW), Thunderbolt or even eSATA

USB-SPDIF boxes are external boxes that provide a way for your computer to talk to a DAC, particularly a legacy one that has no way of talking to your computer otherwise. It provides usually a SPDIF (coax/optical/BNC) to the DAC.

If you need any more help beyond that, perhaps computer audio shouldn't be something in your radar :)

Thank you for the responses. Ciao

Why don't you contact Mojo and use their customer support?

My disappointment was with the low computational power of the mac mini. Using a VNC connection (VNC server capability built in to the Mac Mini - use something on a laptop like GTK VNC Viewer on Linux, or Chicken of the VNC on an apple laptop as the client) the response is b.a.d.

You have to be patient. Give a command and wait.

I have also switched to Clementine as the music server as it allows me to point to media locations rather than a single library. This way I can plug in multiple USB drives and point to them all and they all show up in my music library.

If using a DAC from your MAC Mini - I can't recommend enough the sonic benefit of a USB to SPDIF converter and then plug in to your DAC's SPDIF input instead of the USB. There is too much they've screwed up on the USB interface of DACs to allow that in between.

The benefit of creating a playlist (genre=jazz for instance) and having the player on shuffle is fantastic. Allows you to listen to all your stuff randomly and you will be surprised at stuff you like but didn't know you had. My buddy ripped all his 2000 CDs and gave them all away.

BE SURE TO RIP TO LOSSLESS FORMAT!!! FLAC best, ALAC OK but a pain for the rest of the computer world.

Windows seems to have the best high sample rate players (for free to boot). Wish there were on Linux. If they were - I'd put Linux on my mac server and be done with Apple's BS.