Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

I've been in the computer industry forever and yes raids do fail but typically it's becuase of bad batches of drives or heat problems. The raid controller and driver support are critical plus the alerting system of a drive failure is even more important and the most neglected item. Make sure to setup your email alert and test that the alert actually works. The MWARE controllers are the only ones for PC's that are even close to a good HP/COMPAQ raid controller, plus they have the ability to expand the array. If you are really concerned get the WD drives designed for Raid (Serial ATA) or Seagate (quieter). I was suprised in my home case with 4 drives and huge 120mm fans that while defragging the HD the drive temp soared to 60 C (upper limit of too hot) and I've had to crank up the fans to max to keep the drive at the 50-55 degrees... The Maxtor drives in my 2 systems run about 7-9 degrees hotter than the Seagates. HEAT KILLS.

I'm waiting for 500gig serial ata drives to drop in price so that I can do a 4-5 drive raid 5 with the Mware controller.

but I condered just using the two 400gig drives along with a cheap and portable backup solution.. periodically backup my local drives to an inexpensive external (under $700 for 1 Gig) using SynToy (free and awesome!) from Microsoft to do the backup duties fast. (only send what's changed over. Plus I would get a firewire 800 interface as even USB2.0 is slow if you need to defrag.

I am going to be doing a mod'd Squeezebox from Boulder Cables and upgraded powersupply and feed my Theta GenVIII DAC and compare as ease of access to my 800 cd's via my Table PC controling Slimserver via a web browser. Plus picking albums by album art ROCKS!! not to mention just sitting back and surfing while listening to great music.

I keep my server in another room so I don't have to deal with noise and use my wireless network to the music to my system.

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Hey guys,
I just bought an external hard drive to store all my music. When i drag my music onto it, now what? What can i erase on my itunes? How do i access the music on my hard drive to get to itunes?

>>>CAVEAT... After typing all this, I suddenly realized this assumes you have a PC, not a Mac. Similar principles should apply in the Mac environment, but this assumes a PC...

Let's see, you *copied* the songs from your main drive to the external drive, right? What format are they in?

Here's the general overview. iT has a library file that is basically an XML database that has info in it that has been read from the file tags (if available) and notes re: which playlist the song appears in, the playcount, etc. If you are OK with losing all that, you can just nuke the iT database file and then "add folders to library" specifying your external drive as the folder to add.

Here's why this might be a bad idea... You *will* lose all your playcounts and playlists. If you use a file format without tags--such as WAV--you will also lose all the album/artist/genre info, since that is *only* stored in the database for WAV files.

Here's another potential slip... iT has a feature called "keep my music organized" which will copy all the songs to where iT thinks they ought to be when you add them. So, even if you move them, if that flag is checked in iT, you will end up having all the files moved *back* to the iT default directory, which is probably *not* your external drive.

So what can you do? You can actually use the iT "keep organized" function to move the stuff for you. If you have copied the files, nuke 'em. Then reset the iTunes library to the external drive and check the "keep organized" button. That should result in all your files moving to the new external drive, organized into Artist/Album directories.

In the vein of potential slip ups... if you succeed in doing what you want, iT will have a new library where all the pointers are to a drive (specified by a letter). When your external drive is mounted, you need to make sure it appears as the same letter each time. Probably not that big a deal, but if you have a digital camera and turn that on before the external drive, you may find the digital camera memory as F: and the external drive as G:. If you turn them on in the reverse order, the external drive will be F: and teh camera G:. While you won't care, iT won't be able to find the files in one of those cases.

I don't believe it.

Believe it, or not. It's my experience as well. But I wonder if he meant that he was using a computer CD player? What I believe he may have meant, and correct me if I'm wrong Pardales, was comparing the music from CEC transport + Dodson combo, to the same music stored on a Hard Drive in WAV or lossless format going via USB, clocked and converted by the Waveterminal, and then on to the same Dodson DAC to be reclocked. It has been my experience with my own DAC and Transport (both Muse) that I cannot tell the difference from a lossless hard-drive version vs my transport. Never bothered trying the transport in the computer.

Marco

Edesilva,
How do i "reset the itunes library to the external harddrive"?