Another Linkstation question

[kitecarl]

Hello everyone,

I'm a newbie Squeezebox fan - fantastic device. Couldn't be more impressed with the quality, sound, and beauty of the hardware. Now I'm just trying to get elegant Slimserver-running hardware to accompany it.

In an effort to both save energy and quiet down my listening experience by not having my PC on all the time, I'm interested in purchasing a Buffalo Linkstation to both store my music (approx 400 CDs) and run Slimserver. I've read that the PPC processor-based Linkstation should be able to handle AlienBBC - which is a requirement from my British expat wife - can I get a confirm on that?

Am I kidding myself into thinking the Linkstation will be fast enough to browse my library which is mainly Apple lossless songs and also run AlienBBC to potentially two synched SB2s? Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

[funkstar]

if you do a search on the forums you should find a thread that confirms this. with AlianBBC i think the processor on the Linkstation is only running about 40% too. If i read the thread right anyway

[PaulR]

I got AlienBBC working on a Linkstation but note that it is the HG version which has a faster processor and more memory. I haven't seen any reports of anyone getting it working on a standard one.

Note also that there have been quite a few reports of users bricking their HG linkstations when attempting to update the firmware - which is required to gain telnet access. See the linkstationwiki.org forums for details.

For my music collection I always stream FLAC which means the Linkstation doesn't have to do much. I don't know if it's capable of Apple Lossless decode. Slimserver control via its webpage isn't that great with a Linkstation but adequate for me since I hardly ever control the squeezebox via that route.

All in all I'm pretty happy with it - but if I were you (or I was starting again from scratch) I'd probably explore some of the small form factor, low power PC's that are available.

Hope this helps

Paul.

[kitecarl]

All in all I'm pretty happy with it - but if I were you (or I was starting again from scratch) I'd probably explore some of the small form factor, low power PC's that are available.

Hope this helps

Paul.

Thanks for the response Paul - my main interest in the LinkStation over another PC is that I'd like to save on energy and also have a quiet device since my office is located right next to my living room (where I can now here my PC fan buzzing while I'm trying to enjoy the music and it's driving me nuts!)

Based on what I have read on the forum, I think I'm going to save up a few more clams and invest in a higher-end NAS such as the ReadyNAS or potentially the QNAP 410.