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

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

Gripper wrote:
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)
l

Another option is

Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC, Atom 230 1.6GHz, 160GB HDD, 1 GB RAM,
HDMI, nVidia GeForce 9400 ION, WIFI, Linux
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153 - Now £144.99 inc vat

And an external 1TB usb connected drive.

That combination would be about £220 odd.

Then you can really run your own choice of uPNP server software and a
lot of other things.

--
Adrian C

"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
Gripper wrote:
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)
l

Another option is

Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC, Atom 230 1.6GHz, 160GB HDD, 1 GB RAM,
HDMI, nVidia GeForce 9400 ION, WIFI, Linux
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153 - Now £144.99 inc vat

And an external 1TB usb connected drive.

That combination would be about £220 odd.

Then you can really run your own choice of uPNP server software and a lot
of other things.

--
Adrian C

Thanks for the replies That is an interesting price comparison!.

One advantage of the ReadyNAS Duo is that it can be programmed to go to
sleep at night, and then wake up. I am not sure if any PC would do that. It
will also spin-down the disks are a period of inactivity.


--
Michael Chare

Michael Chare wrote:
"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
Gripper wrote:
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)
l

Another option is

Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC, Atom 230 1.6GHz, 160GB HDD, 1 GB
RAM, HDMI, nVidia GeForce 9400 ION, WIFI, Linux
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153 - Now £144.99 inc vat

And an external 1TB usb connected drive.

That combination would be about £220 odd.

Then you can really run your own choice of uPNP server software and a
lot of other things.

--
Adrian C

Thanks for the replies That is an interesting price comparison!.

One advantage of the ReadyNAS Duo is that it can be programmed to go to
sleep at night, and then wake up. I am not sure if any PC would do that.
It will also spin-down the disks are a period of inactivity.


If you'd like to throw a bunch of money at the solution, I think a Mac
will do it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3774

I've used a Mac Mini for a while and it works a treat. Usual digital
music caveat applies ;-)

Rob

Michael Chare wrote:


One advantage of the ReadyNAS Duo is that it can be programmed to go to
sleep at night, and then wake up. I am not sure if any PC would do that.
It will also spin-down the disks are a period of inactivity.


All PCs can be set to spin down the hard drives after a preset period of
inactivity. If running Windows, most will support waking from
hibernation at a given time on instruction from the Windows task
scheduler, and the cron daemon in Linux has similar functions. You need
to enable the option in BIOS, usually, as it's normally off by default.

Most external USB drives automatically spin down after a period of
inactivity, too.

Most, if not all, PCs using ethernet networking can be set to "Wake on
LAN" in the BIOS, so any attempt to contact that machine will wake it
up. Set it to standby at a given time, then use "Wake on LAN" to start
it in the morning. It's not totally shut down, but power draw is low.
Hibernating is a better option as far as power is concerned, but may not
reliably start in time to prevent network timeouts. Using the Wake on
LAN method ensures that the machine starts whenever it's needed, without
user input.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:44:45 +0000, John Williamson
wrote:

Most, if not all, PCs using ethernet networking can be set to "Wake on
LAN" in the BIOS, so any attempt to contact that machine will wake it
up.

That's not how wake on LAN works (except for the Mac + Airport kit
mentioned previously, which is officially Rather Cunning).

To wake a WOL-enabled machine, you need to send a special "Wake Up!"
packet to it. There's lots of tools to do this, but you need to do
that first before trying to access the machine over the network.

(With the Mac+Airport thing, the Airport pretends to be the sleeping
Mac, and then if it gets a request for the shared facilities sends a
"Wake Up!" signal to the Mac which then handles the request.)

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected
abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the
last time you needed one?" - Tom Cargil, C++ Journal

"John Williamson" wrote in message
...
Michael Chare wrote:


One advantage of the ReadyNAS Duo is that it can be programmed to go to
sleep at night, and then wake up. I am not sure if any PC would do that.
It will also spin-down the disks are a period of inactivity.


All PCs can be set to spin down the hard drives after a preset period of
inactivity. If running Windows, most will support waking from hibernation
at a given time on instruction from the Windows task scheduler, and the
cron daemon in Linux has similar functions. You need to enable the option
in BIOS, usually, as it's normally off by default.

Most external USB drives automatically spin down after a period of
inactivity, too.

Most, if not all, PCs using ethernet networking can be set to "Wake on
LAN" in the BIOS, so any attempt to contact that machine will wake it up.
Set it to standby at a given time, then use "Wake on LAN" to start it in
the morning. It's not totally shut down, but power draw is low.
Hibernating is a better option as far as power is concerned, but may not
reliably start in time to prevent network timeouts. Using the Wake on LAN
method ensures that the machine starts whenever it's needed, without user
input.



Thanks for pointing that out. Sadly, I don't think that the BIOS in my old
Dell Dimension XPS R450 supports ACPI.

I doubt that Wake on LAN would work as my HiFi looks for something
advertising Upnp. A sleeping or hibernating PC would not advertise this
service.

Just for interest, I have been trying to get my more modern PC with an Asus
P5B-V mobo to start at a particular time. I can configure the RTC time in
the Bios, but so far the PC has failed to start, even after upgrading to the
latest bios version. I have tried configuring the Vista task scheduler,
again so far without success. I really need a guide on how to do this just
so that I get it right. Maybe a bit more googling will help.


--
Michael Chare