Idea on APE music server

EchiDna · « **Reply #20 on:** 29 May 2003, 05:01 am »

hi guys, most of what you are discussing has been done before by numerous people, including the touch screen remote, wireless PDA remotes etc etc...

My system is similar to what you are describing, but no remote yet.
I've got a server containing the HDD's with the APE files (RAID for backup). This thing is NOT quiet thanks to the noise of the hard drives themselves, so I stream the tracks from it (in my study) to my listening area across my home lan. This means less noise in the listening room and less heat in my equipment rack. There is no advantage and lots of disadvantages in having the hard drives closer to the DAC IMHO.

I'm not sure why you guys want firewire drives, it is an added cost with no gain apart from portability if you want to go pirate a friends CD collection or share your own collection - which is illegal so you wont be doing it right

A small RAID array is cheaper, and provides you with a backup copy of your files in case of drive failure. Once SATA drives become more common and cheaper, adding extra disks will be even easier than now - but this needs a modern motherboard. Any old PC can run this kind of setup, mine is currently an old pentium 2 350 and it works like a charm for file serving.

If you want the option of multichannel, then the pc in the listening area needs something like an M-Audio revolution or better sound card. The bonus with these is that the inbuilt DAC is of very high quality indeed and can replace many external DAC's and preamps in one hit.

As you are also talking about external USB DAC's, you should consider the M-Audio sonica theater which is an external, USB version of the revolution, as recommended by nOrh actually!

nOrh is also bringing out some kind of external preamp for the m-audio products as I understand it....

anyway, GL with your projects

see you in the square circle!

JoshK · « **Reply #21 on:** 29 May 2003, 01:48 pm »

Quote from: Brad

One more idea:

I have a Casio E125 Pocket PC w/802.11 CF card that could be used as a controller.......

Brad,

Do you mind expanding upon that? I am not sure what you mean or how you mean. I am interested.

JoshK · « **Reply #22 on:** 29 May 2003, 02:10 pm »

EchniDNA,

Somehow I am not sure I like the thought of streaming over a LAN as audiophile grade sound for my hi-fi rig. Maybe it is no worse than the internal transferring of data from drives to audioboards. One question I have for you though is where do you put all the drives if not external? I have a board that supports IDE RAID (ABIT KT7-RAID) but even with my large ATX case I still can't fit more than 5 drives.

I already have a LAN network setup so if streaming over the LAN works solidly then a very simple PC like a silent server plus an outboard DAC might be the ticket. Then just add the remote capability and voila!

Brad,
What is a CAT6 cable? LAN?

JohnR · « **Reply #23 on:** 29 May 2003, 02:46 pm »

Quote from: JoshK

Somehow I am not sure I like the thought of streaming over a LAN as audiophile grade sound for my hi-fi rig.

Why not, I think it's a great idea! You've already got (or should have

) a LAN, why not use it? As long as the data is buffered before being sent to the DAC, it's fine.

Actually, I was just trying to convince Ben Williams (from Aspen/AKSA) to put an Ethernet card in his DAC design for just this reason... hopefully there'll some followup discussion in the AKSA forum. No need for a whole PC if you can get away with just a little extra circuitry in the DAC

Brad · « **Reply #24 on:** 29 May 2003, 06:01 pm »

Josh - CAT6 is just ethernet cable.
It's rated for Gb speed. In a home LAN, there's no practical difference between 6 and 5 or 5E. I just happened to have a roll of CAT6.

On the PocketPC, since it has an 802.11b compact flash card, I was thinking about writing a program to run on it that would control what got played on the PC in the audio rack. It already has a touch screen, even though it's only 3.5"

It looks like there are about 50 ways to do this project. We just need to figure out the right combination that works for each of us

JoshK · « **Reply #25 on:** 29 May 2003, 06:27 pm »

John,

The ethernet input for the DAC is a wonderful idea! As you said, as long as it was buffered. So you will have to buffer the input of the ethernet I imagine.

Then all is needed is an IR receiver that communicated the IR commands from the remote to the server.

Rob Babcock · « **Reply #26 on:** 30 May 2003, 01:48 am »

I'm not married to any one technical approach, just whatever will achieve our goals as inexpensively as we can do it while maintaining respectable sound quality.

Certainly this isn't a new idea, but implementing it is new to me. Eventually I imagine the majority of folks will have a rig that does this. Listening to a 'CD' needn't mean the actual disc anymore.

JoshK · « **Reply #27 on:** 30 May 2003, 01:50 am »

In my initial post I remarked that this needant be a PC. I think JohnR's suggestion shows how the PC could be eliminated from the equation (audio end that is) and I thin this is a good thing. Now the question is will it provide as good of sonics as the PC on audio end solution.

EchiDna · « **Reply #28 on:** 30 May 2003, 03:01 am »

Quote from: JoshK

EchniDNA,

Somehow I am not sure I like the thought of streaming over a LAN as audiophile grade sound for my hi-fi rig. Maybe it is no worse than the internal transferring of data from drives to audioboards. One question I have for you though is where do you put all the drives if not external? I have a board that supports IDE RAID (ABIT KT7-RAID) but even with my large ATX case I still can't fit more than 5 drives.

I already have a LAN network setup so if streaming over the LAN works solidly then a ...

Hey Josh, this is great, the project is gaining momentum! on to your questions: I don't know why you are worried about streaming the files across the lan, but you do realise that playing files that are on your firewire drives is a form of streaming right? Try it out and see if you can tell the difference, personally I'd be amazed if you can!

Regarding the RAID thing, I have a fulltower in my study, bought for this purpose that is housing (currently) 8 HDD (effectively 4 drives as they are cloned backups - I'm not repeating the ripping of my disks to APE again, that took hours and hours!!!) Each drive is 120 gig so I've got 480gb of space to play with. There is mid/fulltower cases by chieftec, antec and others that hold 8 or more drives or You can buy secondhand server cases which can hold more than 10 drives cheaply too look here for an example... I've got a PCI RAID card which allows all 8 drives to be connected to it, not like the onboard RAID your current motherboard has, just a bit in front

SATA motherboards are coming out with 8 disk RAID controllers onboard though, so they are looking good for six months time... too many $$ right now.

Johnr, This DACSA with integrated ethernet thing looks awesome, I gotta keep my eye on that one... only problem would be track selection etc. I've got about 20k files right now (mp3, cd, video files etc...) that I want to be able to control, so the mechanism for working with these has to be great for me to consider it over normal pc use, maybe a wireless tablet pc or a wireless connected PDA would be the most viable option there... hmm lotsa food for thought. keep it up guys, this is looking mighty interesting

JohnR · « **Reply #29 on:** 30 May 2003, 08:55 am »

Okey doke! I went back and read the thread from the start

Some comments/questions:

1. Erm, what exactly is "APE"?

2. Diskless clients are no big deal in the Unix world. Microsoft have fucked up a lot of things, if you ask me. Anyway, maybe this nOrh thing really is quiet enough to be located on or next to the listening rack.

3. The Ethernet thing on the DACSA was just my take on how to make a world-class DAC sell like hotcakes

Hopefully Ben will start a thread on the DACSA over there.

4. Failing a unique and innovative solution like the above (heh), a (silent) PC in the rack seems like the only solution (?). Personally, I would want a separate disk server, for various reasons (heat, noise, size). In which case, I'm not sure why standard file server technology wouldn't work just fine. (Why not?)

5. Some numbers. 16/44 stereo, assuming 20% overhead, works out to 2 * 16 * 44100 * 1.2 = ... um... 1.7 Megabits per second. 24/96 stereo is 2 * 24 * 96000 * 1.2 = 5.5 Megabits per second. Hm... those are higher than I expected

I see subhuman's point, this might require a 100MBit LAN...

6. I forgot about the UI. Personally, I would like to just have whole CDs on the disk and select them. I honestly can't be bothered selecting individual tracks. It would be cool to somehow set up playlists based on a "search" ie play all tracks by Jacqui Du Pres and so on.

7. One reason I'd like to have a separate file server is so that I can (potentially) have stations in different rooms. Plus, I want movies on it as well

and the HT room is separate from the audio room...

JohnR

JohnR · « **Reply #30 on:** 30 May 2003, 10:17 am »

Another thought

For controlling the thing, we could just use an HTTP server and browser... a proper remote would be an add-on over the top of that for those that cared (I don't think I would, I have a wireless laptop

). Then we could create an interface for setting up playlists and the like.

The server would then need to be running Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP... but some of us do have some experience with that...

EchiDna · « **Reply #31 on:** 30 May 2003, 02:34 pm »

1. www.monkeysaudio.com should explain it... a lossless compression format

which should also answer point 5... nothin wrong with a 100MB LAN

6. 4am music console is your answer.... http://www.overnighttech.com/products/4amMusic_overview.html

7. yep I totally agree, in fact thats what I do now. I stream files from the server through my laptop, into the listening area... wherever I am I have access... now if only my wireless connection was still good at the pool

movies, can do... I stream all my files the same way, just using different players for the video and audio files.

hope that helps

cheers,

JoshK · « **Reply #32 on:** 30 May 2003, 03:44 pm »

Quote from: JohnR

Another thought

For controlling the thing, we could just use an HTTP server and browser... a proper remote would be an add-on over the top of that for those that cared (I don't think I would, I have a wireless laptop ). Then we could create an interface for setting up playlists and the like.

The server would then need to be running Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP... but some of us do have some experience with that...

I don't see why you would need to run just one of these, any proxy server will do.

The remote/IR interface actually is rather simple and wouldn't require the use to have a laptop in their listening area to control the playlist. I have done the remote/IR before so I know how to set it up. Actually this was less of my worries than the hardware but it looks like you guys suggested a solution for the hardware interface so long as you could add in a ethernet input into the DAC.

JoshK · « **Reply #33 on:** 30 May 2003, 04:09 pm »

John,

If you organize things correctly then selecting a whole album really isn't a big problem and usually what I do. Previously I organized all my albums (in mp3's back then) in a file structure by major genre, then alphabetically by artist with each album in its own dir. In each of these dir I create a playlist for the album in the album order besides having the individual tracks. Then to play the album rather than a track just select the album playlist.

If I was to use a pronto or wireless PDA (also good idea, but basically the same thing) I would just need to have a slick way of associating the alb with the alb playlist and the tracks with individual tracks.

JohnR · « **Reply #34 on:** 30 May 2003, 04:26 pm »

Um, well, I'm not an organized person, so I want the computer to organize it for me

I'm a bit hazy on the remote thing. What's receiving the signal from the remote?

JohnR

JoshK · « **Reply #35 on:** 30 May 2003, 04:32 pm »

I have a IR receiver from an older product that plugs into a serial port. Then it also has software that interprets the IR and plays the files. For those that don't already have one of these there are products available these days that will do this relatively cheaply.

I think the silent server approach is fine but I would still prefer to see if we can pull off the ethernet input to a DAC.

EchiDna · « **Reply #36 on:** 31 May 2003, 01:59 am »

Quote from: JoshK

I have a IR receiver from an older product that plugs into a serial port. Then it also has software that interprets the IR and plays the files. For those that don't already have one of these there are products available these days that will do this relatively cheaply.

I think the silent server approach is fine but I would still prefer to see if we can pull off the ethernet input to a DAC.

forgive me if I'm wrong, but couldn't you just put the server in a cupboard or whatever (for quietening it) near the listening area and run the IR port and the digital IC out of the said cupboard direct to your DAC? It would remove a level of complexity in your system that is not needed. I use the server-client approach because I already have one.... you would have to be running some funky code that I do not know exists to enable control of files on one machine to be streamed through an ethernet port to the DAC with ethernet ability... AFAIK, the local machine 'pulls' the files across the network, not the server sends them out through a switch to (in this case) a very dumb client... I don't see a way around having a local pc of whatever kind (silent server, panda pc, tablet pc...) to grab the files off the server and use something like Girder for controlling it via your remote/PDA/pronto... given time, this will be my approach.

Brad · « **Reply #37 on:** 31 May 2003, 06:48 am »

JohnR - O'Reilly has a good book on L/A/M/P

cab · « **Reply #38 on:** 1 Jun 2003, 02:28 am »

Gentleman-

I too have been thinking about this kind of system, and for mac users, there are a few options that appear to be simple, easy, and cheap to implement.

One could use a powerbook with daisy chained firewire hd drives, with a direct digital out card through a USB port (either coax or toslink) (several vendors, about $100), direct to an outboard dac. Remote control can be done either with an ir remote controller made explicitly for running itunes (http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/remote/) ($50), or, for something really interesting, via a cell phone running bluetooth via a new software product called salling clicker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18500). This would allow the use of on screen menus.

JoshK · « **Reply #39 on:** 1 Jun 2003, 03:41 am »

Welcome to the discussion Cab! Yeah I think the more we think about this the easier it seems to be. Thanks for your input....more later.