Best external hard drive configuration for squeezebox touch with 20k+ flacs

[tusken]

I am considering buying a touch but would mainly like to use it with an external hard drive. Many people do seem to report problems with an external dirve if they have large libraries of flacs.

my question is, what is the best configuration to get the best out of the touch's limited RAM

1. type, model of external drive
2. presumably new or reformatted would be best
3 music folders in root directory?


any information and advice would be most helpful

thanks

[mdm]

I bought bus powered 1Tb WD Elements SE first. It turned out to be a horrible thing. It span down in 30 seconds of not being accessed and took 5 seconds to spin up again, so I sent it back to seller and replaced it with 1Tb self powered LaCie HDD Design by Neil Poulton. It looks fantastic, fast (7200 rpm) but quiet. So if you are not looking for a portable solution (LaCie is 3.5") and not going to keep it powered 24x7 (I turned it off when go to sleep) LaCie is a good choice for me.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11016

[JohnSwenson]

Nobody can give you a setup thats guaranteed to work no matter what. The best you can do is try and steer clear of what seems to cause the most problems.

Number 1 is to use a self powered drive (has its own power supply).

Number 2 is to make sure you don't have any large cover art. Either as separate files or embedded in files. Up to 600x600 seems to work well, beyond that can cause problems.

The best arrangement seems to be a separate directory for each album with a separate cover.jpg in that directory and no embedded artwork in each file.

If your tagging in the flacs themselves is good you don't have to use any more complex a directory structure than a directory per album. If you WANT to you can have a more complex structure with genres etc. It won't hurt. Its perfectly fine having the album directories under another directory. Say you have a directory called music, then the albums under that, or more levels if you wish.

Make sure you empty the trash before putting the disk on the Touch, it doesn't know about windows trash can and just sees anything in there as regular files, this can confuse the heck out of things.

Don't store other non-music related pictures on the drive. If you have a directory of jpegs for say a slide show it will see them and try and use them as cover art and most likely crash and burn trying to resize them.


The one thing you CAN'T do is have the flacs under a directory called say music at the top level and another directory at the top level with other non music files. The scanner will look at ALL files on the disk, you cannot tell it just look at the files under music. So its best if you just have music files on the disk. For example if you have a music directory and a games directory, all the little files with bleeps and blurps and gunshots etc will show up in your music library and all the image files will be converted into into cover art, probably not what you want!

And after you get all that done, let the Touch finish its initial scan before attempting to do anything else, this could take many hours, let it finish. If it doesn't finish, the next time its going to try again, but this time you might try and play music since you now have a partial database, this is guaranteed to be disastrous. Trying to play music while the scan is happening is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration, don't do it.

Remember that each time you boot the Touch it will do a quick scan of the disk to check for new music, make sure this quick scan has completed before playing music, if you don't you will be playing music while a scan is happening, see above!

That should do it. If you follow this you should have a fairly good probability of things just working.

John S.

[mdm]

Yes, I've just followed this simple instructions provided by John and never faced any issues. I have 420M, more than 10.000 files, which have been indexed in less than an hour.
Mike.

[tusken]

thanks very much for your replies
so, following those instructions, it should be ok to fill a 1tb drive with flacs? im not big on atrwork anyway

that lacie drive looks great, so i think i'll pick one of those up!

[JohnSwenson]

You have to leave at least 10% of the drive free for the server database. I would error on the conservative side and not put more than 850G of files on a 1TB disk.

John S.

[mdm]

that lacie drive looks great, so i think i'll pick one of those up!

If you will, pls be aware that out of the box it is unformated. You should run an utility from the drive to format it. There are two options of how to do this: create one partition (Windows) or two partitions (Windows/UNIX). Choose Windows only. In a minute you'll have HDD formated but it will be so called GPT format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table). It supported by Win 7, Vista, XP64 but not supported by Touch. Run disk management tool and convert GPT to NTFS (quick format). Another 30 seconds and the HDD is ready to use with Touch. May sounds a bit complicated but not a big problem indeed.

Cheers now.
Mike.

[rotho]

I am using a self powered 1.5 Tb LaCie d2 Quadra HDD (formatted in FAT32 with Disk Utility on a Mac), containing around 450 Gb of Flac files (approx. 1500 albums / 25000 songs).

AFAIC, with Tiny SC, when reading 16/44.1 files, I find the navigation in the menus a bit slow (in comparison with the external server) and there is just a rebuffering problem on the beginning of the first track of an album, but I can live with that.

On the other hand, when reading 24/96 files with Tiny SC, I have big rebuffering problems (even after the corrections made in the 7.5.1 version), and this must linked with the size of the collection : the same files on the same HDD with only a couple of albums play flawlessly.

And one last thing : the use of the Touch in standalone mode with the Controller is far slower than with the external server...

[808htfan]

The one thing you CAN'T do is have the flacs under a directory called say music at the top level and another directory at the top level with other non music files. The scanner will look at ALL files on the disk, you cannot tell it just look at the files under music. So its best if you just have music files on the disk. For example if you have a music directory and a games directory, all the little files with bleeps and blurps and gunshots etc will show up in your music library and all the image files will be converted into into cover art, probably not what you want.

Hi all, wondering if it would work OK if those 'other' files are non-music, non-image (non-jpg, etc) types?

My external drive (only have one) is sort of a back up drive as well. Along with my music it's got some DVD rips, program installers (.exe's), text files, disc images (.iso's), and some Ghost images...stuff like that. Oh, some .pdf's too, but they don't really need to be there.

Other than slowing down the scan, ya think they'll cause TinySBS to choke?

Thanks!

[JohnSwenson]

Hi all, wondering if it would work OK if those 'other' files are non-music, non-image (non-jpg, etc) types?

My external drive (only have one) is sort of a back up drive as well. Along with my music it's got some DVD rips, program installers (.exe's), text files, disc images (.iso's), and some Ghost images...stuff like that. Oh, some .pdf's too, but they don't really need to be there.

Other than slowing down the scan, ya think they'll cause TinySC to choke?

Thanks!

It may be all right it may not. It depends on how the scanner classifies the file types. I tried a drive with a backup on it and it took an hour and a half to go through all the backup files. The problem is that its going to do a scan of the whole disk every time you boot the Touch, thus in my case it would have been an hour and a half wait before I could play music every time it booted.

You can certainly try it, but its not a particularly good thing to do. A backup disk is probably the worst to share with music, there can be hundreds of thousands of files and many of those could very well wind up having extensions that the scanner is interested in. Its just not really a good idea.

John S.