Now I'm confused......
If you can't use a USB drive to feed it hi rez music, how do you feed it hi rez files?
If you have a StreamPlayer with a built-in drive, you don't need a USB drive to store music. If you have your files on another computer or a network storage device (NAS) of some kind, the StreamPlayer mounts that "shared" drive via an Ethernet connection to your router as if it were internal to the StreamPlayer. (The Ethernet connection can be direct to your router, or through a power line extender or a wireless extender.)
While you can use an attached USB drive to store music (as Ern Dog is doing), we don't recommend using one for DSD playback because it would be using the same USB circuit to both read files from the drive and output the files to the DAC at the same time. There is only so much bandwidth available. It would work, but you would likely experience some drop-outs.
(I am constantly playing with different hardware platforms, some more powerful, some less so. If we ever release a new version of the StreamPlayer, it will likely have multiple USB circuits, so this would not be as much of an issue. Of course, it will probably have a built in drive as standard anyway.)
You might ask, how do you get the files onto a built-in drive in the first place? That is easy. If you download the files (or rip them) on a computer on your network, the StreamPlayer shows up as a network drive on that computer. So you simply store the files in the StreamPlayer's music directory as if it were a drive on your computer. It would show up in your "Network" on a Windows computer and in the Finder on a MAC. You would work with it just like you would work with any drive inside your computer.
I use dbPoweramp (the best) to rip CD's on a Windows computer. In the dbPoweramp set-up, you specify where the files will be stored and how you want the storage set up. I have it setup to store them directly onto the internal drive in my StreamPlayer as if it were a local drive. I insert a CD, hit "rip" and my files are automatically compressed (flac by choice) and stored in directories (folders) by artist name, then by album name under that and finally the music files themselves, including cover art. As far as dbPoweramp knows, the StreamPlayer it is just another drive in my computer.
I should note that there are some very nice Linux programs that can rip CD's as well. But that would require a CD drive in the player and with the StreamPlayer, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. There is no limit to what you can add to a player, but you pay a price in cost, complexity and stability.
I hope that answers your question.
- Jim
