Couple of questions from a soon to be Touch owner

[craiglester]

I just ordered a touch from logitech yay.

Anyway.. I have a couple of questions..

(I'll be using the touch as a server btw, for itself and 1 SB3, with approx 20,000 tracks - about 300 Gb of FLAC and MP3)

1. Does anyone have a recommendation for a small portable HDD that comes with a psu (as the touch can't provide the required power). Seems all the 2.5" drives are exclusively bus powered. I have a 3.5" but it's a little whiney, and I dont like the idea of having to buy a powered usb hub just for a small HDD.

2. On the limitations wiki it states that FLAC encoded > 48Khz and compressed with "Best" or -8 won't work. Does this mean if the file is over 48 Khz AND encoded at -8, or is it either condition? I have a lot of flac encoded at -8 (16/44.1, do I need to re encode all this to -5?

3. I can't seem to find what apps work on the touch.. Is there enything like superdatetime? I really like the weather forecast on the clock.

oh and good work getting this out right now.. had a bad day yesterday, then Saw "in stock" on the logitech site.. brightened my day immeasurably

[Phil Leigh]

I just ordered a touch from logitech yay.

Anyway.. I have a couple of questions..

(I'll be using the touch as a server btw, for itself and 1 SB3, with approx 20,000 tracks - about 300 Gb of FLAC and MP3)

1. Does anyone have a recommendation for a small portable HDD that comes with a psu (as the touch can't provide the required power). Seems all the 2.5" drives are exclusively bus powered. I have a 3.5" but it's a little whiney, and I dont like the idea of having to buy a powered usb hub just for a small HDD.

2. On the limitations wiki it states that FLAC encoded > 48Khz and compressed with "Best" or -8 won't work. Does this mean if the file is over 48 Khz AND encoded at -8, or is it either condition? I have a lot of flac encoded at -8 (16/44.1, do I need to re encode all this to -5?

3. I can't seem to find what apps work on the touch.. Is there enything like superdatetime? I really like the weather forecast on the clock.

oh and good work getting this out right now.. had a bad day yesterday, then Saw "in stock" on the logitech site.. brightened my day immeasurably

16/44.1 @-8 works fine. 48 and above should use -5 (it's easy to reflac any files you might have that fit this category).

There's very little difference in disk space anyway - I switched to -5 2 years ago

[peterw]

(I'll be using the touch as a server btw, for itself and 1 SB3, with approx 20,000 tracks - about 300 Gb of FLAC and MP3)

1. Does anyone have a recommendation for a small portable HDD that comes with a psu (as the touch can't provide the required power).

I can't speak about larger (300-500 GB) drives, but I've tested a number of 2.5" drives in the 80-160 GB range, and all worked fine with bus power. I only know of one user who had trouble with bus power. Alas, that was a ~300 GB Western Digital blue (not black) drive...

Note: my Touch is a pre-release hardware build; I don't know how many beta testers have the final build, and it is conceivable, though I think unlikely, that the final hardware design might behave differently.

[mherger]

You might be interested in this table:

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/USB_Compatibility

I've been running a 2.5" disk usb powered for months now. Not very recent disks though...

[peterw]

You might be interested in this table:

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/USB_Compatibility

Thanks for digging that up. Clearly my memory is no good, as that shows that I tested an 80 GB drive and found it not to work. :-(

[JJZolx]

Thanks for digging that up. Clearly my memory is no good, as that shows that I tested an 80 GB drive and found it not to work. :-(

I just looked at that an could have sworn I added the Apricorn drive that doesn't work for me. I don't think all of the edits from the private wiki made it over.

[JJZolx]

2. On the limitations wiki it states that FLAC encoded > 48Khz and compressed with "Best" or -8 won't work. Does this mean if the file is over 48 Khz AND encoded at -8, or is it either condition? I have a lot of flac encoded at -8 (16/44.1, do I need to re encode all this to -5?

It's AND. I'm pretty certain 16/44.1 compressed at -8 will play without a problem. It's high bitrate files with high compression that cause some processing issues.

[iPhone]

Why do people use -8 anymore? Large drives are readily available and cheap for that matter. And the average savings on an album between -5 and -8 is not worth the processor overhead or even the saved space on a 2TB drive. Even on a huge 2TB drive, I don't think using -8 versus -5 will save enough safe to allow one to get just one more album on the drive.

Speaking of drives, if anybody is having issues or starting to see odd things, check your remaining drive space. Don't fill a drive all the way up even if its only going to be write once then read only afterwards.

[JJZolx]

Speaking of drives, if anybody is having issues or starting to see odd things, check your remaining drive space. Don't fill a drive all the way up even if its only going to be write once then read only afterwards.

An explanation of why may be in order... Squeezebox Server running on the Touch will store its library database and its resized artwork (also a database) on the drive itself. So leave some room for these files. This is kind of a nice feature, as each drive can be considered to be an autonomous 'library'. Changing libraries is as simple as swapping disk drives.

[krochat]

An explanation of why may be in order... Squeezebox Server running on the Touch will store its library database and its resized artwork (also a database) on the drive itself. So leave some room for these files. This is kind of a nice feature, as each drive can be considered to be an autonomous 'library'. Changing libraries is as simple as swapping disk drives.

I was assuming that if you switched drives that the Touch would rescan everything on the "new" drive, causing delays and extra drive wear.

If switching drives really works without excessive overhead and music on the new drive is available in a few seconds, I may just do that with my current USB enclosures rather than trying to build that 3.0TB USB disk array I was asking about on another thread.

Thanks,
Kim