Laptop/hard drive/connection questions

[Ocean56]

OK, have been enjoying the Touch streaming radio stations. Time for a new phase!

1. I will be loading SB Server onto a laptop, and connecting a USB external HD to that. What format should I use to rip CDs onto said drive? And do I connect the drive itself the the Touch via USB or Cat5 cable?

2. I can easily switch back and forth from streaming wirelessly to using my tracks stored on the HD, right?

3. Do any particular brands of external HD work better than others to do this?

[aubuti]

1) You can either run SBS on your laptop, or run the Touch's built-in server (aka TinySBS). User results with TinySBS are mixed, whereas using your laptop should be straightforward, so I would recommend running SBS on your laptop. That means the USB hard drive would be connected to your laptop, not to the Touch.

After connecting the USB drive to your laptop, the preferred approach is to connect the laptop to your home network router via ethernet. Presumably your Touch is already connected to your network via the router. If this is wireless that's fine, though ethernet would be better if it is feasible in your circumstances.

Best practice is to rip to a lossless format, and for SBs the best format is usually FLAC. I recommend dBpoweramp (www.dbpoweramp.com) for ripping to FLAC. It's not freeware, but its secure ripping and superior metadata handling make it well worth the cost (around $36) in my book. It has a 30-day free trial. In my opinion the best freeware FLAC ripper out there is EAC. Both dBpoweramp and EAC are Windows programs, although they will run on Linux under Wine. If you are using Mac OSX then you need to look for other software.

If you haven't done much ripping yet, do a handful of CDs at first and make sure that you're getting the ripping and tagging the way you want it for you dive in fully to do your whole collection. Some people dive right in, only to have to re-do everything later because of a simple mistake they made, and then repeated 1000 times.....

2. Yes, you can easily switch back and forth between internet radio and your own ripped library. Note that as long as your laptop is running you do not have to switch explicitly from SBS to mysqueezebox.com to get internet radio. You can access everything on mysb.com via SBS running on your laptop.

3. For SBS running on your laptop the brand of USB drive doesn't matter much. If you want to use TinySBS then the choice and type of USB drive matters a LOT. For TinySBS you should use a USB drive that has its own power supply, not one that draws power via USB, because too many drives exceed the spec on power draw, thus exceeding what power the Touch supplies (which is slightly over-spec). Several users have reported having better luck with Toshiba USB drives and TinySBS. I believe there is a page on the wiki (wiki.silmdevices.com) that summarizes which drives work better or worse.

Good luck and enjoy. Having your music library readily available via SB is really where you will take maximum advantage of the SB system.

[garym]

1) You can either run SBS on your laptop, or run the Touch's built-in server (aka TinySBS). User results with TinySBS are mixed, whereas using your laptop should be straightforward, so I would recommend running SBS on your laptop. That means the USB hard drive would be connected to your laptop, not to the Touch.

After connecting the USB drive to your laptop, the preferred approach is to connect the laptop to your home network router via ethernet. Presumably your Touch is already connected to your network via the router. If this is wireless that's fine, though ethernet would be better if it is feasible in your circumstances.

Best practice is to rip to a lossless format, and for SBs the best format is usually FLAC. I recommend dBpoweramp (www.dbpoweramp.com) for ripping to FLAC. It's not freeware, but its secure ripping and superior metadata handling make it well worth the cost (around $36) in my book. It has a 30-day free trial. In my opinion the best freeware FLAC ripper out there is EAC. Both dBpoweramp and EAC are Windows programs, although they will run on Linux under Wine. If you are using Mac OSX then you need to look for other software.

If you haven't done much ripping yet, do a handful of CDs at first and make sure that you're getting the ripping and tagging the way you want it for you dive in fully to do your whole collection. Some people dive right in, only to have to re-do everything later because of a simple mistake they made, and then repeated 1000 times.....

2. Yes, you can easily switch back and forth between internet radio and your own ripped library. Note that as long as your laptop is running you do not have to switch explicitly from SBS to mysqueezebox.com to get internet radio. You can access everything on mysb.com via SBS running on your laptop.

3. For SBS running on your laptop the brand of USB drive doesn't matter much. If you want to use TinySBS then the choice and type of USB drive matters a LOT. For TinySBS you should use a USB drive that has its own power supply, not one that draws power via USB, because too many drives exceed the spec on power draw, thus exceeding what power the Touch supplies (which is slightly over-spec). Several users have reported having better luck with Toshiba USB drives and TinySBS. I believe there is a page on the wiki (wiki.silmdevices.com) that summarizes which drives work better or worse.

Good luck and enjoy. Having your music library readily available via SB is really where you will take maximum advantage of the SB system.

+1 on dbpoweramp (and going slow to figure out how you like your tagging, etc.) MP3tag is a very useful tagging program that I use in addition to dbpa. Also agree on FLAC. If you also use ipods, etc., you can also easily create a mirror library of mp3 files for use on these. But with FLAC (lossless) you rip once, get your tags and art perfect, then you're done. You can always create the best sort of lossy files for other uses from the FLAC archive files (and the FLACs work well with the SB universe of things).

[Ocean56]

OK, now I have MORE questions. I have the hard drive. I have Squeezebox Server loaded on the laptop, and the hard drive connected to the laptop. So I need another USB cable to connect the laptop to the Squeezebox, correct?

Connecting to the router is not an option.

[Mnyb]

OK, now I have MORE questions. I have the hard drive. I have Squeezebox Server loaded on the laptop, and the hard drive connected to the laptop. So I need another USB cable to connect the laptop to the Squeezebox, correct?

Connecting to the router is not an option.

It's a network music player thats how it works, why cant you conect to your router via wifi ?
How do you expect internet radio to work, without internet ?

[Ocean56]

No, the internet RADIO part has worked WELL!

But I just realized this morning that I access my laptop's external HARD drive wirelessly, too.

Last night I was confused.....:-D.....