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squeezebox and home network

From reading about Squeezebox, it seems such a good idea. However, my computer knowledge is very limited and I hope fellow Audiogoners can help me out a bit.

My home is a recently constructed and it is wired with Cat-5 cable and I can see wall plugs in every room where I can plug in a network cable. The sales manager told me that I can set up a network down in the basement where the cable and telephone wire come in.

If that’s the case, ie, I set up the network and any computer plugged into the wall can join the network, then I can just use Squeezebox Ethernet connection rather than the wireless connection, right? Would that improve sound quality somewhat?

Also, if I rip cd and store them on a hard drive, using EAC, no compression, what’s the size of the hard drive I need to have , say per 200 cd.

Thanks
ddl24
coffee_nudge
120 posts
 


I've tried Squeezebox both wired (CAT 5)and wireless. Sound quality was identical as far as I could tell. The only real world difference was that with the wireless, everytime I used the Microwave, I would lose the signal. I've heard that with some wireless phones, the same thing happens. So I switched to wired.

I use EAC, but I compress using FLAC losseless compression (which is supported by Squeezebox) and 200 CDs takes about 65-70 gb. So if you wanted to do it completely uncompressed, I would guestimate that it would take about 35% more space -- close to 90 to 100gb per 200 uncompressed CDs. If someone has actually ripped 200 uncompressed, hopefully they'll chime in with the actual HD space used.

Good Luck.
mimberman
299 posts
 
If you figure 700 Megs per disk for 200 disks, you get 140 gigs. If you really want to be safe about it then you want to provide for the fact your music collection will grow, and that the computer's HD will probably die at some point (simple fact of planned obsolesence). There are some pretty fancy home server systems here using raid storage and backup devices, but I think if you want a cheap and simple way to protect yourself against growing music collections and data loss, then you could get like a 250 gig hard drive, and get a backup drive of the same size and keep your collection backed up.
ddl24 OP
9 posts
 
Thanks Coffee_nudge and Mimberman. If using FLAC lossless compression will save disk space without negative impact on audio quality, then I am all for it. My actual disc collection is around 600-800 which I hope will continue to grow. So I need quite some storage space. I have no idea what Raid storage so I will do some research.

I have an 4-5 yr old spare Notebook in storage and I planned to use that and get an extrnal storage hardware (harddrive or Raid) thru USB connection and network the whole house. So I can connect Squeezebox thru Cat5 that way. From computing stand of view, will this work? Since all I need is storage space and minimum processing power, so I figuered a old notebook should work. right? Thanks again.
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