I use a laptop I bought specifically for digital music. I then have my main system which I am pretty partial to (ML SL3, Spec 2 amp, Bose 1801 amp on woofers, CJ preamp and a PS Audio DL III dac).
I keep a separate external 3tb drive for my music with that system.
I then have 2 garages, one is separate from my house and of course that is where I spend an awful lot of time (I am remodeling it).
I have a system out there and often take my laptop out there.
For my wireless router, I use an Asus RT-N56U which is a pretty decent router, but even tho I get a pretty decent signal out there, if I tried streaming my music, there were many times when Media Center would get "stuck", repeating a chord or 2 over and over and over......
I played around with the settings and set the prebuffer as long as it would go - 20 seconds, and under the output mode settings, I moved it to the far left (less skip resistant), did away with cross fade etc.....(I never use that anyway).
It got better, but it would still skip, usually when I am doing something so distracts me and I have to go mess with it as it drives me nuts repeating..(I live in the country so the music is played at a fair volume).
So, bought myself a Amped SR300 repeater. Now I have the full 5 bars, but it still does it enough to be a pain.
I am streaming lossless files, so they are large files - I don't do mp3's....that's another topic.
So, I had a spare 2 tb drive so I copied a bunch of music on that drive and took it out to the garage........no more streaming, no more skipping....
BUT.....
so now what happens is, I will take the laptop out to the garage, open media center and it obviously isn't finding the files from the 3tb drive, so I end up getting a whole bunch of popup windows saying it couldn't update the tag info or something like that.
Well, I can fix that by going into the options and turning all of that off, but then if I want my tag info, library etc updated, I then have to remember to go back in and turn it back on......and I have to do this each time I move it........
soooooooo, should be enough info (too much info), is there a way to have a dual library without having to go into options and turning off all the update stuff each time I move the computer, then have to remember to turn it back on as I am always adding new albums etc to my drives.
Obviously streaming would be best so I did not have 2 drives, but it is too far to run a cat 5 cable and I can't get much faster with the wireless unless I spent some big bucks.
Any ideas appreciated.