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[nickharambee]

hi

my music collection is stored on a couple of external hard drives linked to a laptop as ape files, and i use media centre as my media player.  i am looking for a wireless system so that i can listen to my music around the home, preferably a remote/wireless receiver system through my wifi home network, so that i can connect the receiver to an amp/speakers.  i am aware that there are systems for mp3 files, but haven't come across one for ape files.  anyt ideas?

another possibility would be to move my laptop around the house, and somehow connect up to the external hard drives.  is there a way of doing this without buying a second pc?

do i need to convert to FLAC in order to use squeezebox 2?

thanks

nick

[NickM]

A Slim Device will work very easily.  Wired version is USD199, wireless USD279.

The server software runs as a service on any PC, and looks at the network or attached drives.
Just copy the in_ape.dll to the \server\bin directory and the SlimServer will then stream APE's.
If you have limited bandwidth ( i.e. 'b' rather than 'g', or are running over long distances ), then the server can also down sample the music to conserve bandwidth.

I use MC for ripping and my main play-back rooms.  For all other rooms, I use Slim Devices - 6 running off an old i486 with 512MB RAM, no problem.

http://www.slimdevices.com/

nick

[DJMUK]

do i need to convert to FLAC in order to use squeezebox 2?

The SqueezeBox2 can do on-the-fly conversion of APE to FLAC, which it supports natively.

The SB2 is a wonderful device (I have 3) the only drawback is that there is no way to use MC to play the tracks.

SB2 uses open source software called 'SlimServer', which would be installed on your laptop, to play the music.  You can use MC still to organise/tag your tracks and create playlists that can be used by 'SlimServer'.

I find 'SlimServer' copes with all my needs for playing.  Having decided to switch my music playing from PC based with JMRC to the SB2 I did use dbPowerAmp to mass convert all my APE file (about 20,000) to FLAC so as to gain the advantage of the SB2' native FLAC support.

'SlimServer can be downloaded for free and includes a software SB2 emulator calleed 'SoftSqueeze' so you could give it a try and see if it suits.  If you do I suggest you download the latest beta version 6.2 which is quite stable and has improved features over the current 6.1 official release.

Hope this helps.

David

[nickharambee]

thanks for these replies

if i converted all my collection from APE to FLAC, or another lossless format, is there an alternative wireless product that would allow me to use MC as a player?

nick