Incorporating Transporter into my system

[kearhear]

Hello -

I'm trying to build a music server system for my home and am a bit green on how the Transporter can work into my existing computer equipment to serve up music to my high-end stereo. I currently have a new MacBook Pro and a new Airport Extreme Base Camp. My desire is, at some point, to store all 5K of my CDs on this system, so I know I'm going to need a RAID device like an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+.

So my question is what do I need to do to make this all work. Do I buy a RAID device, patch it into my Airport Extreme Base Camp, populate the RAID with music files that I ripped on my MacBook (which is on my Airport network), load SlimServer onto the RAID and then have the Transporter access music files wirelessly on the RAID via the Airport Extreme Base Camp. Am I missing something, and, if not, is this a feasible setup, or is there a better way?

Any help is much appreciated.

[SuperQ]

With 5000 CDs.. wow.. That's going to be a hell of a lot of stuff to rip. I built a dedicated ripping machine that had 4 DVD burner drives for ripping all at once. With the 4x drives, I can get through 100-200 disks in a day if I push it. The machine itself wasn't all that powerfull, a 1ghz with 512mb ram. Running linux it was easily able to handle the I/O load and FLAC encoding.

I _highly_ recommend lossless encoding. FLAC is my preference, but ALAC would also work if you want to stick to iTunes lockin. (good or bad, up to you). Figure about 4 CDs per gigabyte in lossless format.

Unless you're a technical person, I recommend an infrant or drobo for storage. 4x 500G drives should be just enough to hold 5000 CDs after RAID 5 formatting. I personally would not use the infrant for running your slimserver, it just doesn't have the horsepower to run that large a library. I would build a small dedicated machine for that.

[mherger]

> So my question is what do I need to do to make this all work. Do I buy
> a RAID device, patch it into my Airport Extreme Base Camp, populate the
> RAID with music files that I ripped on my MacBook (which is on my
> Airport network), load SlimServer onto the RAID and then have the
> Transporter access music files wirelessly on the RAID via the Airport
> Extreme Base Camp. Am I missing something, and, if not, is this a
> feasible setup, or is there a better way?

You're basically right. But these SOHO NAS devices tend to be rather slow,
probably too slow for your sized collection. One of the more powerful
devices (x86 1.5GHz based) seems to be the Thecus N5200 (please search the
forum for details). Most of the others run at a fraction of this CPU.

Alternatively you could build a cheap PC based solution, stuff a bunch of
cheap, large disks in there.

You don't need RAID, but a backup strategy. Make sure you have a copy of
all the songs on separate disks/machines.

[egd]

You would definitely benefit from purchasing a NAS that is capable of running slimserver. Stay away from the ReadyNAS - it is significantly underpowered. I'd strongly recommend a Thecus N5200PRO - my library is similar in size to yours and I have slimserver running on the N5200PRO directly with remote and web based control a breeze.