Howdy,
Now that my home system is up and running like a dream I want to use the Media Server feature to gain access to my collection from around the world, mostly from my desk at work.
I have all the basics working, I can see and search through my library from work but here are two issues I could use help with:
1) because my home internet connection is slow upstream (100kbs or so) I need to buffer an entire track in advance - ideally I could buffer at least two entire tracks so that I don't have to wait between songs and I can take advantage of lag in bandwidth consumption to pull down data for songs that are in the play queue.
2) because I normally play uncompressed music (stored as APE files) I need to either mirror my entire library in some other format [say VBR mp3] or dynamically build temporary mp3 files based on the current play list. I do not want to change my primary storage scheme to be lossy. I'd really prefer not to save 4500 songs in two formats - but this might be an option if there is no other way, especially given #3.
3) Unrelated to playing at work. I am preparing to buy a portable digital music player (10GB ). As with my work setup I am content to listen to compressed data to expand my variety but I'd rather not have to keep two copies of my entire collection just so that I can sync some onto a handheld. Having never used a PDMP with MJ I have no idea what to expect - can I have 'convert' be the first step in 'sync onto device'?
I'd love some suggestions or comments on how to: force larger buffer [especially greater than one track], encode dynamically for streaming based on demand queue, encode dymanically for syncing based on sync queue.
thanks,
loo