ok - so here is the whole deal;
I've done a lot of research, and made my decisions. Now I am committed. I now own the software and the hardware to do what I want.
I sold my 200 disk carosel cd changer purchased a new computer to be an audio server. 200 disk changer ~$200 - new computer to handle the load ~$1000. I have a rather deluxe hometheater setup with many highpower amplifiers and over a dozen speakers and the whole house is wired for High quality audio (no speaker cost less then $200 when purchased - on sale).
After careful comparisons and evaluations - I have decided on Media Center to be the player of choice, EAC as the ripper of choice, and Carddeluxe to be the sound card of choice. I decided to use APE as the compression of choice as it will give me lossless compression and ~4% more compression then shorten - when ripping 600+ cd's the 4% will add up. I have purchase the 250 gb maxtor hard drive and I am dedicating it music to storage. This is what I plan on using at home - and it is working GREAT. After only 5 days - I have 210 disks loaded and I am very happy with it. it would be a great benifit to be able to listen to my collection either at work - or when I am traveling. Most of my friends and family have a cable or DSL modem and when I visit, I could have all my music at my finger tips - without having to carry 3-200 disk cd binder - and risk breaking, scratching, and loosing of my disks. i have lost many a disk in my day. So now for my dilema - APE wont stream clearly, I am getting a solid 350k upstream pull and its still choppy on the play side, I played around with some mp3 settings and some oog settings and I have found I have to compress to 128k bit rate (down from the 1411) to get hiccup free audio. I dont want to do that for there is no reason to ruin my home audio quality for the sake of convience, so as I see my options
- run a conversion program to convert my audio (all 600+ disk) to a lossy compression and store it on another drive - this will be difficult and expensive to maintain and keep up to date as I purchase more disk - but it would work.
- beg, plead, wish for feature enhancements that would allow buffer setting for streaming files. I think it would be ok if I could buffer 30 or 40 seconds (more would be better), this would enable my computer to get ahead and stay ahead of the stream- or at least make the choppyness minimal
- I have toyed with setting up a FTP server on the media box and granting myself access to my files via FTP rather then steaming them - but the functionality of that would be limited and cumbersome -download file - import file - play file - delete file. I wouldnt want my music lying around in places it shouldnt.
So in a nut shell - I am very happy with my decisons, it sound great and the product works well. There could be a few tweaks that would make it an incredible system, any thoughts would be appreciated.