Hi all. I have a dream...to replace the high-end CD player with a high-end DAC fed by a laptop (or sexy little workstation with plasma screen...one day) plugged into the home network as my primary audio source for the home.
I discovered MJ and APE late last year and the dream came a little closer to reality but storage was still a bit expensive (here in Australia) so it remained on the back burner. As of about a month ago the project is all systems GO.
I've now got a prototype system running and have finally found workarounds for all the challenges that I've come across (so far).
The data and database (library) are held on an old P233MMX with 256Meg of RAM running Win2000 Server and a 3x40Gig RAID-5 array. This box has no sound card. My main workstation is a dual 1Gig PIII with 512Gig of RAM running Win2000 Pro. There is also another PIII 500 running Win98SE on the network (kid's PC). All network connections are 100mbps full duplex.
The file server doesn't really have the grunt to rip and encode (in a reasonable time). It also has no sound which makes library maintenance difficult as well, so all the work had to be done on my workstation. I had a hell of a time trying to get MJ to play music, do library maintenance, rip and encode simultaneously. As soon as the encoder kicked in, everything would grind to a halt. It would finish eventually but MJ remained unresponsive for the half hour or more that it took. Playing music was out of the question, let alone library maintenance.
Taking the network out of the equation made it better but still pretty unreliable. Dropouts in audio, wild fluctuations and finally, slowing right down of ripping speed, intermittent stalling of MJ ("not responding"). All the while using hardly any CPU.
Then I discovered EAC and found that it too couldn't rip and encode to a network drive. It had exactly the same symptoms as MJ. But it would happily rip and encode to a local drive while MJ played music and allowed me to do library maintenance without a hitch. I could then simply import the results into MJ (some workarounds required but I'll leave that for another post). A breakthrough!!!
When I go to bed at night I simply do a find for "f:\" (my local ripping drive) select all and use the find/replace function in the properties dialogue to change all "f:\" to "m:\" (my network music drive). MJ is pretty much unresponsive during this operation but I can live with that. When I get up the files have been moved and library updated. The biggest batch I've done so far has been over 5 Gig without incident.
So, after a month of removing hardware, reinstalling drivers, full system rebuilds and generally pulling my hair out I am finally DOING IT...realising the dream. I can sit at my PC for hours, listening to music, feeding another CD into the drive every 5-6 minutes, making bit-perfect copies while organising my library (or catching up on Interact threads). And the kids can listen to their own music at the same time.
Thanks JRiver, I'm as happy as the preverbial...
P.S. Now that I've got that out of the way, I can post a few messages regarding the challenges and workaround I've had to deal with.
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Topic: Some successes to share... (Read 1256 times)