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[ajowers]

I am an audiophile and purist. As a result I have a 2 TB hard drive in my HTPC that I use exclusively for audio playback using the Audiophilleo transport into a REGA DAC.  I desire the best possible playback but I am curious if anyone stores audio files on a NAS for example (I have the Seagate Black Armor 4T unit over Gbit ethernet) and could try this.

Does MC17 perform enough read ahead or buffering that I should not normally have any issues (barring a network problem) ?

I know there is a setting for "load file into memory" ... Should you use this if streaming from a NAS ?

[Hendrik]

Playback over network is perfectly fine, a usual home network has enough bandwidth for audio and very low latencys.

When playing over network, you should preferably not use the memory playback option, though.

[audioriver]

Check this recent thread out.

[ajowers]

Did you forget to paste the thread link ? 

Just curious now... Why would you use the option to Load then play from memory?

[Hendrik]

Some people believe it helps on local file playback, so that hdd access is not done at the same time as playback. Personally, i think its a lot of BS, but moving on.

[audioriver]

Did you forget to paste the thread link ?  

I didn't, press on "this".

[ajowers]

LAst night I images my entire FLAC library accross the network to my Seagate NAS.  250GB of data which took several hours.  I watched as Windows reported a through put of 11.5 MB/s.  Seems that should be plenty of bandwidth for stream music.  I cleared and rebuilt the library based on a NAS share.  I have listened all morning and thus far, no hiccups or glitches.

One curious thing though is the hard drive continues to flicker during playback about once per second.  Does MC cache and decompress to the hard drive while playing over the network ?

Thus would an SSD reduce the risk of issues during caching/decompression ?

[Vincent Kars]

I know there is a setting for "load file into memory" ... Should you use this if streaming from a NAS ?

No, this will cause a lot of problems.
If you use file sharing (reading from a NAS) all audio is buffered in memory already

[eddyshere]

I streamed dff/dsd files (SACD) from a NAS (synology 1511+) over wired gigabyte Ethernet without any issue.

[mbagge]

the hard drive continues to flicker during playback about once per second

All though you can stop MC from accessing the hard drive during playback, this can be documented by running the built-in resource monitor in Windows, I do not think you can get Windows services and antivirus programs to stop accessing the drives. Some hard drives even has a 'move-heads-to-safe-landing-zone' routine as well.
You cannot tell by looking at the hard drive lamp, what is accessing it.

[HiFiTubes]

In the past using a low-powered ATOM HTPC, I did have playback issues at times streaming over wired ethernet at 192kHz for example - with various hardware such as Lynx AEs16 and worse with Weiss AFI1. Playback from memory was not possible as expected unless I was playing off a local SSD.

Now I can stream high ample rates from Synology over ethernet and use playback from memory. I don't have any of the issue Vincent alluded to. I have opted for a much more powerful PC for my hifi in another room tethered to hifi by USB with 5v disabled (since my DAC only needs it for initial handshake and has it own linear PSU).

Using WASAPI [Event] mode, and again hats off to Matt for whipping that up for us who had issues with WASAPI.

[ajowers]

Well,

I have now continuously played for 24 hours and listend a good bit of that time over the ethernet from the NAS and I have not noticed a single glitch so far.

Much of the music was 24/192 as a test and I did not get any issues.  fast forward seemed to work fine as well.