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