I'm brand new to JRiver. I am a musician and music lover and have a fairly good stereo system in my living room - Oppo BDP-103, Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Conrad Johnson preamp, Magnepan speakers. I'm in the last steps or reconfiguring my music library to be able to stream everything to my stereo from a computer in the practice room in my basement, where I previously housed a large part of my music library in lossless format, played thru iTunes.
When my basement computer died, I spent weeks researching how to improve the SQ of my library. I bought a new computer specifically configured for ripping CDs, downloading and storing music and streaming it to my stereo. I've got a fair number of 192/24 and 96/24 downloads, and have started exploring DSD. So I bought a Marantz HD DAC1, which can play these files. But whereas I previously connected the iTunes library via my home network through the Oppo, the Marantz supports DSD through a specific USB-B port. Consequently, the wifi connection wouldn't do. I also had to buy a TrippLite USB cable with a repeater to be able to utilize the full capabilities of the Marantz USB-B port.
Today I downloaded JRiver to my basement computer, to which I also attached one hard drive with my lossless library and another with my HD library. I also plan shortly to start to re-rip my CD library to FLAC or WAV. At least in these early stages, I want to be able to do more than just select tunes from the living room. I also want to be able to experiment with settings in JRiver to see what sounds the best.
I may be wrong about this, but from my preliminary reading, I think I need more than just the usual remote capabilties of selecting files for playback. I also need administrative control over the basement computer. I saw the article on servers at
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Servers , but that article says it's outdated, and being new to JRiver and not being familiar with DLNA to begin with, I didn't want to start following an article that by it's own admission likely contains some inaccurate information, and I simply don't know enough to figure out what might or might not still be accurate.
Can anyone explain to me the best way to be able to perform the functions I want from my living room? I have a laptop computer I can use. I also have an Android phone if in fact there's a way to do these things without a full blown computer. Do I download another copy of JRiver to my laptop? If so, how do I connect to the basement computer, and how do I set it up to have/share administrative functions so I can modify the settings as I sit in the living room and hear the effects of my experiments?
Thanks in advance for your kind assistance!