Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

[DanielTheGreat]

After stuggling for many months with SqueezeSlave and all its faults (and Softsqueeze is worse), while not being able to listen to DTS tracks directly from the server, I finally solved the problem and ditched Squeezeslave. I now have DTS playback at the server, in perfect sync (always) with the SB3 in another room, with track-gain adjustment (for stereo tracks only).

To save duplication, check my latest post to this old thread for the method:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=331660#post331660

Of course I still have to suffer with SqueezeCenter, but hopefully only for another year or so, till I retire and have time to write something that executes efficiently. :-)

Daniel

[peter]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

DanielTheGreat wrote:
> After stuggling for many months with SqueezeSlave and all its faults
> (and Softsqueeze is worse), while not being able to listen to DTS
> tracks directly from the server, I finally solved the problem and
> ditched Squeezeslave. I now have DTS playback at the server, in
> perfect sync (always) with the SB3 in another room, with track-gain
> adjustment (for stereo tracks only).
>
> To save duplication, check my latest post to this old thread for the
> method:
> http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...660#post331660
>
> Of course I still have to suffer with SqueezeCenter, but hopefully only
> for another year or so, till I retire and have time to write something
> that executes efficiently. :-)
>

Sounds like an extra SB Receiver would've been a lot simpler and even
cheaper.
Hard to beat the sync though.

Regards,
Peter

[Siduhe]

Squeezeplay is the successor to SoftSqueeze and looks like it will be a big improvement. It's very much in beta but if you're up to compiling it yourself you can give it a go. Details in the wiki.

[DanielTheGreat]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

Peter,

Simpler, yes, but definitely not cheaper! In Australia, the cheapest you can buy a new SB3 is about AUD250, RRP is AUD499!

The 'Toslink sender' arrangement has other advantages though. When I'm ready to digitise my LP collection (those not available on CD), I can hook up a high-quality digitiser (an old unused MD recorder) to the turntable (part of the 'hi-fi' system upstairs) and feed its Toslink output down to the office PC for recording to the HDD.

Rgds, Daniel

[peter]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

DanielTheGreat wrote:
> Peter,
>
> Simpler, yes, but definitely not cheaper! In Australia, the cheapest
> you can buy a new SB3 is about AUD250, RRP is AUD499!
>

That's why I mentioned the SB Receiver (no display), which is a lot
cheaper (139 vs 199 EURO's in Holland).

> The 'Toslink sender' arrangement has other advantages though. When I'm
> ready to digitise my LP collection (those not available on CD), I can
> hook up a high-quality digitiser (an old unused MD recorder) to the
> turntable (part of the 'hi-fi' system upstairs) and feed its Toslink
> output down to the office PC for recording to the HDD.
>

Sounds like a useful device.

Regards,
Peter

[atrocity]

When I'm ready to digitise my LP collection (those not available on CD), I can hook up a high-quality digitiser (an old unused MD recorder) to the turntable (part of the 'hi-fi' system upstairs) and feed its Toslink output down to the office PC for recording to the HDD.

Are you sure the MD unit will pass an uncompressed signal? I think it's likely that the signal present in the digital output will have gone through ATRAC.

(This isn't a slap at MD, which I happily used for years myself and am sorry to see obsoleted.)

[maggior]

I would imagine he is referring to Hi-MD, which supported recording/playing uncompressed WAV files. The Hi-MD discs would hold 1 GB. The format was too little too late. It resolved the issue with transferring your own personal recordings via USB to your PC. Previously, you had to playback on the MD and record on the PC in realtime to transfer recordings to the PC.

It's a dead format at this point - Sony no longer makes them (perhaps they still make a professional model) and the discs are no longer manufactured.

It was a great format, but it was too late to the game.

[atrocity]

I would imagine he is referring to Hi-MD, which supported recording/playing uncompressed WAV files.

Yes, that's certainly a possibility. I'd definitely want to test it (somehow), though. It'd be a waste to create full-sized WAV or FLAC files that only contained what ATRAC left behind.

It's a dead format at this point - Sony no longer makes them (perhaps they still make a professional model) and the discs are no longer manufactured.

Are you sure about that? I think Sony is still making a single expensive portable model...or maybe there's still some old stock out there. I haven't seen blank discs in stores in quite a while, but they're easily mail-ordered.

It was a great format, but it was too late to the game.

Even the first-generation models beat the pants off analog cassettes. I sure wish Sony had marketed it better. When MD appeared, it was infinitely easier to deal with than the extremely expensive and extremely fussy computer equipment necessary to make CDs. I loved being able to archive vinyl by getting the levels right, letting everything record, then going back and neatly topping and tailing and creating track marks...but I never even knew that was possible until I bought one of the damned things. Sony just ran ads saying "I can record on a disc!" and never said a word about how advanced the editing capabilities were.

[peter]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

atrocity wrote:
> Even the first-generation models beat the pants off analog cassettes.
> I sure wish Sony had marketed it better. When MD appeared, it was
> infinitely easier to deal with than the extremely expensive and
> extremely fussy computer equipment necessary to make CDs. I loved
> being able to archive vinyl by getting the levels right, letting
> everything record, then going back and neatly topping and tailing and
> creating track marks...but I never even knew that was possible until I
> bought one of the damned things. Sony just ran ads saying "I can
> record on a disc!" and never said a word about how advanced the editing
> capabilities were.
>

Nah, they should've made PC mini disk drives from day one. Being able to
play/read, write/record and copy on a PC would've been a huge thing back
then. Now, they were left behind by the CD which - eventually - did
allow that. Too afraid of 'piracy', of course....

Regards,
Peter

[atrocity]

Nah, they should've made PC mini disk drives from day one. Being able to
play/read, write/record and copy on a PC would've been a huge thing back
then. Now, they were left behind by the CD which - eventually - did
allow that. Too afraid of 'piracy', of course....

But remember that at the time the MD was introduced, you needed an extremely expensive computer to properly do audio recording. Heck, I bought a new PC after having MD for a couple years and even it had a tendency to drop a lot of samples when I tried to use it as a recorder.

Not that I really mean to defend Sony here...they eventually did come up with a PC MD drive, but of course they deliberately crippled it for music use which, combined with its absurdly slow speed, made it largely uninteresting to just about everyone.

I still find it less nerve-wracking to capture analog sources via a standalone CD recorder, then copy the bits into the computer for prettying up.

[pfarrell]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

Peter wrote:
> Nah, they should've made PC mini disk drives from day one. Being able to
> play/read, write/record and copy on a PC would've been a huge thing back
> then. Now, they were left behind by the CD which - eventually - did
> allow that. Too afraid of 'piracy', of course....

You are talking about Sony. They own (owned) a major record label.
Afraid of piracy is too weak a phrase.

Of course, Sony has always been a bit schizophrenic. Part of them sells
to studios and wants to be able to record bit perfect.

Mini-disk was actually cool, but Sony made it brain dead


--
Pat Farrell

http://www.pfarrell.com/

[maggior]

Are you sure about that? I think Sony is still making a single expensive portable model...or maybe there's still some old stock out there. I haven't seen blank discs in stores in quite a while, but they're easily mail-ordered.

Yeah, they have that one model left. There are no more consumer models unless you can find some old stock. Regarding the manufacture of the blanks - I remember reading someplace that they were shutting down the plant that manufactured the discs. Searching now I can't find a reference to the article. Yes, you can still get them mail order and on E-Bay.

The format it dead from the perspective that Sony won't be rolling out any new models and aren't making updates to the ATRAC codec. They even abandoned ATRAC on their media players, which shocked me.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. I don't want to turn this into a discussion of Sony/MD/ATRAC.

[DanielTheGreat]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

Atrocity,

No, the output from the MD recorder won't be ATRAC. I'll be using an old MDS-501 model, which has a neat feature whereby, if you DON'T have a disc in the machine and press the RECORD button, it enables the AD-DA converters and pipes the converted analogue signal straight to the Toslink output (and to the analogue o/p via the DAC).

I don't plan to join the MD discussion, other than to mention that I still use them for the car, where CDs are a most inappropriate/inconvenient medium, and MDLP4 is great for 5 hours of music (per disc) on a long trip (the quality is surprisingly acceptable, though obviously not CD quality).

Rgds, Daniel

[peter]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

atrocity wrote:
> peter;332369 Wrote:
>
>> Nah, they should've made PC mini disk drives from day one. Being able to
>>
>> play/read, write/record and copy on a PC would've been a huge thing
>> back
>> then. Now, they were left behind by the CD which - eventually - did
>> allow that. Too afraid of 'piracy', of course....
>>
>>
>
> But remember that at the time the MD was introduced, you needed an
> extremely expensive computer to properly do audio recording. Heck, I
> bought a new PC after having MD for a couple years and even it had a
> tendency to drop a lot of samples when I tried to use it as a
> recorder.
>

If I remember correctly it was also the time that 1.44 MB floppies
started to get really small. A successor was badly needed. Also you
don't have to record on a PC to be able to play/copy stuff.

> Not that I really mean to defend Sony here...they eventually did come
> up with a PC MD drive, but of course they deliberately crippled it for
> music use which, combined with its absurdly slow speed, made it largely
> uninteresting to just about everyone.
>
> I still find it less nerve-wracking to capture analog sources via a
> standalone CD recorder, then copy the bits into the computer for
> prettying up.
>
I remember thinking the MD would be really cool to have if only I could
use it to store and copy music on my PC. Of course, then MP3 arrived. In
the early days I remember playing MP3's put quite a load on my PC.
Moving a window caused the music to stutter. That soon got fixed though...

Regards,
Peter

[peter]

Goodbye SqueezeSlave! :-)

Pat Farrell wrote:
> Peter wrote:
>
>> Nah, they should've made PC mini disk drives from day one. Being able to
>> play/read, write/record and copy on a PC would've been a huge thing back
>> then. Now, they were left behind by the CD which - eventually - did
>> allow that. Too afraid of 'piracy', of course....
>>
>
> You are talking about Sony. They own (owned) a major record label.
> Afraid of piracy is too weak a phrase.
>
> Of course, Sony has always been a bit schizophrenic. Part of them sells
> to studios and wants to be able to record bit perfect.
>

Absolutely, Philips owned a major record label too (Polygram, continued
from the other thread), but they had the sense to drop it in the late
nineties.
> Mini-disk was actually cool, but Sony made it brain dead
>

They did, reminds me of Apple a bit...

Regards,
Peter'