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Digital media server/players for a Skeptic?

I have all my music on a windows pc running itunes.  I mainly use airplay to listen on my apple TV connected to my receiver.  I then often use an ipad to change tunes and such.  My receiver also has airplay and sometimes I use that but can't really tell any difference between it and itunes. 

I do hate itunes though.  Slow, crashes a lot, hard to really manage a lot of files (~35,000 songs).  My music is mostly coded using whatever the highest rates of MP3 are. VBR 320 or something.  And I've given up on the various tools that try to fill in missing tags.

My current system is Ascend Sierra 2 mains, orb sides, Marantz 5009 receiver, Rega TT, nad preamp, nad cd player.  I will probably upgrade the marantz next year.  Don't even ask me about my interconnects.  I am not a belieber in the audio hoodoo. I use good cheap wire and cables.

So how much sound quality difference and usability/convenience do some of these music servers, decoders, whatever the heck they are really offer over using apple TV? 

Thx!



wolfernyc
mahler123
3,419 posts
 

Wolf

  The Bluesound has a dac included in each one if it's units so you don't need an external dac.  It is pretty good but since the Bluesound also has digital outs I prefer to use the far superior dac in the Mytek Manhatten.

  However...Bluesound dacs are MQA compliant (or whatever the term would be).  If that is important to you, or becomes important if in fact Tidal or another Streaming Service ever actually releases MQA material, then you can just use the native DAC of the Bluesound

wolfernyc OP
41 posts
 
Hmm, RE a Pi -  I could do that. How does the scanning part work - hook up a USB type CD reader?

What do you use as a DAC?

Thx!
wolfernyc OP
41 posts
 
Re Bluesound - so I'd still need a computer to rip CD's and NAS or something to store the music?  


mapman's avatar
mapman
22,502 posts
 
FWIW,

I use older Squeezebox and newer Plex systems to stream wirelessly from my laptop music server.

dbpoweramp to rip and tag. Picard to autotag files after when needed

This is very cost effective and works and sounds great. Once you get used to it and learn how to use the tools. Not for the computer illiterate though.

I also use Seagate Dashboard (included with most Seagate disk drives) for backups. I use one live and two backup external USB drives.

Can’t express enough the importance of proper backups with this stuff though. Worst thing is to spend time ripping and tagging and losing files when the drive eventually goes.

I had my live drive go about a year back and another just this past weekend. I recovered first time but had lost a lot of album art not stored directly in (.wav) music files at the time. That was a setback that took a while to fully recover from.

This last time restore from backup went 100% smoothly as it should. Seagate was able to restore almost 1TB of tagged flac files including album art. I was back up and running as before in just a few hours.

erik_squires
16,407 posts
 
So while I do use Linux to play my music, and movies, and Hulu, etc. in my living room, I often rip with MediaMonkey because it's just more convenient.  It has better / easier autotagging than I have found on Linux so far.

If I'm ripping 1 CD at a time, I'll go ahead and have MM write straight to the Linux server.  This is accomplished by sharing the Music directory out to my PC.

However since my PC is using Wifi, for ripping large quantities of files I use a thumb drive. I just got a 60 CD classical music set, and ripped 20 CD's at a time to a thumb drive.  Walked the drive over, dragged and dropped, then had LMS re-scan.  Easy.

Best,


Erik
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