Hi
I just bought a WD My Book World Edition 1 TB NAS. (my version has one
drive, there is a 2TB raid version too)
It's mainly for streaming video, but I've just checked the specs and it
supports FLAC audio, amongst lots of others.
It has an embedded iTunes server, and a "Twonky Media Server" (like you say,
where do they get the names?)
I've not bothered with the accompanying software, (although it looks OK),
and so far I'm very pleased with it- streaming HD video nicely over it's
Gigabit
ethernet connection to any DLNA device or PC.
It seems highly configurable for people who need to and most importantly,
it's very quiet.
It's always a good sign when a community develops to hack and mod a device,
and this is the case with this NAS.
PC World (spit) have this on offer at the mo.
HTH and HAND
Neil

"Michael A. Chare" wrote in message
...
I have concluded that storing my CD's on a Upnp server is very convenient
and provides just as good a sound quality as playing the CDs themselves,
if I store the CDs in a lossless format.

This lead me to wondering what the best Upnp server would be. I started
off with Windows Media Player on Vista and W7 running on my normal PC.
The problems with this is that I am prone to rebooting the PC or
otherwise disrupting it when SWMBO wants to listen to something, or the
PC has gone to sleep when I want to play something.

I have found that I can run Mediatomb on Ubuntu on my old 486 PC. This
makes quite a noise, no doubt takes a certain amount of power and so I
don't really want to leave it on 24/7. The other problem is that whilst
Windows Media Player supports WMA Lossless, Mediatomb uses FLAC.

WMP has its own ripping tool, which sometimes can't find the details of
whatever CD I am trying to RIP. On Ubuntu I have been using the Sound
Juicer Audio CD Extractor which uses a different CD database.

What I have found is that it is important to ensure that each ripped file
has the correct audio details otherwise the indexing ends up in a muddle.

Another server I have tried is foobar2000 (What a name). This runs on
Windows and supposedly supports both WMAL and FLAC. Squeezebox Server is
quite a professional product for Linux sadly it does not support Upnp.

This leads me to considering a NAS. I was quite keen on a Linksys NAS200
till I read that the CPU is slower than that in my NSLU2.

Netgear have the ReadyNAS Duo (diskless version) which Ebuyer are selling
for £140 with entitlement to a free 500GB disk. Supposedly this does Upnp
but there is no mention of what audio formats are supported, nor what
indexing is done. It does have an ssh interface, and I have read that it
is possible to run Mediatomb. Doing that might stretch my linux skills if
I have to compile it first and Mr Google can not tell me exactly what to
do.

Does anyone have an alternative suggestion for a Upnp music (at the
moment) server?















--
Michael Chare