Should I upgrade to Squeezecenter 7.1 or not?

[Nonreality]

My music collection is 80% wav and 20% flac.

One more thing as I'm on a roll. You really need to give up on the wav thing and get dbpoweramp and go with flac only. Much better tags and you'll save a half your space. The tags are the important thing. No reason at all for wav on a computer. You can convert them all in one conversion with dbpoweramp and then as you rip you can get real accurate tags that will work great without much work on your part. Much better in the long run.

[Nonreality]

I upgraded from 7.0.1 earlier today having also downloaded the latest weatherdatetime screensaver (as I knew that the old version was incompatible).
However, many of my other regularly-used plugins were incompatible so I've downgraded again - for the first time ever.
I think I'll be staying on 7.0.1 unless a future OS change forces me to upgrade.

Did you try to just change the install.xml to max version 7.1+ ? That fixes many of the plugins.

[cavediver]

Well Pandora is a service that you pick your artist that you want or song and that becomes a seed that determines how it picks others artists and songs. It becomes a radio station that you pick how you want it to go. I did one that had Josh Ritter and Neil Young and a couple of more like artists. Then all you do is hit play and you have a radio station that plays some music that you like. It's great fun and lets you hear some music that you probably never would have know about. It blends the artist that you pick plus new ones that fit the genre. It's great when you really don't want to sit and pick stuff to play and just want to hit play and go on with life. Last fm works a it like it but whatever you play get's submitted to the site and you can see your playing tendencies. Then you can play back your own library from their site and add other artists that they recommend. It's fun because you get to see a lot of stats on what you listen to and then get some new artists to listen to. Both are a lot of fun. I've probably not done justice to them but trust me, you will probably get hooked if you try them.

Also you get so many internet radio stations that sound very good. I thought from my experience on the computer that they would sound crappy and didn't even try them for a while. Once I did my opinion changed and actually it's not bad at all. Radio stations from all over the world.

Ok. This sounds interesting. Where does it pull the music from? And is it streaming mp3s or flacs or what?

[cavediver]

One more thing as I'm on a roll. You really need to give up on the wav thing and get dbpoweramp and go with flac only. Much better tags and you'll save a half your space. The tags are the important thing. No reason at all for wav on a computer. You can convert them all in one conversion with dbpoweramp and then as you rip you can get real accurate tags that will work great without much work on your part. Much better in the long run.

I chose wav for my archive format because I don't care about storage space as I have a lot and can add as much more when I need it. Storage is not expensive. And with wav files, I can convert them to any format I want or need at the time.

Ok, the tags thing. I've never really understood the tags issue. What is a tag and what does it do for me? With my Squeezebox setup I have now, I don't see any difference with the wav files or the flac files. They both look and play the same.

[MrSinatra]

i think wavs have very limited tagging abilities compared to other formats, but i may be wrong. i'm also not sure what apps support tagging wavs.

tags are just data in a special "padded" section of the audio file that identify many things about it, ie. artist, title, album, genre, year, etc...

one other consideration about wav isn't just data storage size, but bw use. wavs require a lot of bw compared to other formats.

[jfo]

I chose wav for my archive format because I don't care about storage space as I have a lot and can add as much more when I need it. Storage is not expensive. And with wav files, I can convert them to any format I want or need at the time.

Ok, the tags thing. I've never really understood the tags issue. What is a tag and what does it do for me? With my Squeezebox setup I have now, I don't see any difference with the wav files or the flac files. They both look and play the same.

You can convert FLAC to any format you want also, including back to WAV. db poweramp will handle everything for you including adding tags, artwork, replaygain, conversion to multiple formats at the same time, etc.
You're right, storage is cheap, but why use 40% to 50% more than you really need for no advantage?
What are you using to rip?

Jim

[cavediver]

You can convert FLAC to any format you want also, including back to WAV. db poweramp will handle everything for you including adding tags, artwork, replaygain, conversion to multiple formats at the same time, etc.
You're right, storage is cheap, but why use 40% to 50% more than you really need for no advantage?
What are you using to rip?

Jim

I've been using EAC to rip to wav.

[cavediver]

i think wavs have very limited tagging abilities compared to other formats, but i may be wrong. i'm also not sure what apps support tagging wavs.

tags are just data in a special "padded" section of the audio file that identify many things about it, ie. artist, title, album, genre, year, etc...

one other consideration about wav isn't just data storage size, but bw use. wavs require a lot of bw compared to other formats.

But, why should I care about imbedded tag data including artist, title, album, genre, year, etc.

And why should I care about bandwidth. The Squeezebox doesn't have any problems with the wav files. My network doesn't have any problems with them. I have more than enough bw to anything I want at any time. I care about high quality uncompressed audio and want my files to be as high quality and as close to the source as possible.

[jfo]

I've been using EAC to rip to wav.

I used EAC for years to rip, Tag and Rename to get artwork, dbpoweramp to convert to MP3, and Foobar to add replaygain( album gain) I recently switched to the current version of dbpoweramp since it does all of the above and more...very simple to use and much more convenient.

Jim

[MrSinatra]

i can't tell you why you should care, but i can tell you that i care about having the tag data b/c i have a very large collection of music and the tag data not only helps me organize it and keep track of it, (what version something is, where it came from), but it also allows me other functions such as replaygain that allow me to maintain essentially a consistent volume in a random mix without altering the actual music data.

to each his own, but i couldn't get by without tags.

as to bw, if your situation ever changes or if you ever want to share your music (to others) or even take it portably somewhere, it matters.