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[djwhog]

 OK Guys Gals here is a question.

So I have say about 300 gigs of music ripped on the local laptop drive. Then it is connected to the DAC via a USB cable. Laptop is win7 pro 64 yada yada....

Also my laptop is connected to my network and I have lets say in this example a Drive mapped to M which is my file server, the server has say many gigs of music, and then I have JRiver pull this into the library and build the list. This is just like opening a folder to view a audio file and the PC file association is defaulted to JRiver Media Center. so if you right click or double click the file plays in media center.

So when I dive down into the M drive on the server in Explorer I can open and play a files the same as I do from the local C drive. I guess there is also a method of building all the media from the M drive into the JRiver media player which I have not tried to import yet until I understand this more clearly. I have at this point only opened the network drive and played a music file from the networked server over the hardwired cable to the laptop, which then plays in JRiver media center 18... and thus exports to the USB cable to the DAC.

So by playing the music in this mode files from the mapped server M drive through JRiver and over the USB to the DAC is this going to be the same quality as running from the local drive?

I will hardware and not wifi as to eliminate speed issues etc. And I know you can change buffering settings etc if needed, but the LAN is Fast and no issues lags etc have been heard when I play.

I am aware that if you setup a DLNA server that the sounds is severely limited and that is not what I want. Since the media server has to use the protocol to establish the connection and thus converts the media types on the fly.

I am looking for more storage with the same audiophile quality as running from a local drive. And have the desire data protect while expanding storage of music and still have the same best in class audiophile quality as the internal storage provides. I think, well I know my network is faster than an external usb drive.

For details I really have a xeon based server with an Acrea raid 16 port SAS card (4) 4tb hot swap drives for storage running raid 10 and (2) Samsung PRO solid state drives in Raid 1 mirror for the OS on win7 pro, with 32 gigs ram. The sas drives are storage and all is connected to a hardwired whole house gigabit switch with the entire house wired to cat 6.

Help and feedback from anyone else doing something like this?

thanks folks
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[csimon]

What is it that you are asking - you want to move your media files from a local drive to a networked drive? No problem, just point MC at the network drive rather than a local drive, it will behave in the same way.

But it sounds like you are not using MC to its full potential, you are not importing the music into MC but just using it as a player, selecting the files to be played from Windows Explorer?  If you import the files into MC's library then you will be able to categorise and browse your collection via the metadata, the tags, rather than the file structure than Explorer gives you.

DLNA is a red herring. If you are outputting to a USB DAC then this will remain the same whether you are using local storage or networked storage. If you had a DLNA device then the sound quality would be dependent on the quality of that device's output, just like your current quality is dependent on the quality of your USB DAC. What is missing from the DLNA server is the ability to use all the different audio configuration that you can do in MC in the DSP settings. using DLNA doesn't necessarily mean that it has to transcode everything on the fly, if your DLNA device can play the file types that you have then there is no need to transcode, the DLNA device will receive the files as-is, regardless of whether they are sent via USB or DLNA.

However, if you're concerned as to the "quality loss" that may result from extra electrical noise or network activity or whatever that may be introduced by having your files on a network server then that is another more complicated issue!