Touch with USB drive : mastering TinySB

[steveb]

From what I read, the Touch is quite picky about the hard drive it likes. You can check the various threads about that.

You would need to give a bit more context about "won't connect". Is it after pluging the HDD to the Touch ? Is it after powering on the Touch with the HDD attached ? Is it after leaving the Touch idle for some time ?

A first indication would be to check the status of the server in the advanced options (where you enable/disable the internal server). After that, looking at the internal log, but that's beyond my knowledge.

Jean

Thanks Jean, it simply will not connect to usb no matter what order I turn it on.
Ha, it now works. I chose the usb in the menu settings as you advised, instead of from the home screen.
Thanks Jean.

[gmudunuri]

Jean2, I appreciate your patience in getting the TinySB to work well. You consider the NAS to be a waste of money. I got my ReadyNAS Duo for $150 + the cost of a 1TB disk. The NAS does many things other than serving music. So, I consider it a great value. And it is quite green compared to a PC: the ReadyNAS Duo consumes 12W with the disk spun down. And, the NAS can be placed in a closet or other room completely avoiding the noise. I tried the TinySB and found the sound of a (fan-less) USB disk objectionable in my listening room.

Once again I appreciate you for your efforts and sharing this with the community. I just wanted to point out a NAS can be very useful, convenient, silent and cost effective solution for many people. Every approach has its tradeoffs...

[praganj]

I also tried tiny sbs on touch, it was working but with more than 3000 CDs in my library it was a pain and my small Toshiba 2,5" HD was making some noise and i don't want to have noise in my listening room.

I am using QNAP-119 Nas with 1,5TB HD and it consumes about 12W running and 5W in a sleep mode. My nas is outside the listening room, in one closet in a corridor connected to the router.

IMHO tiny sbs is ok for small libraries but libraries are growing and there is also another aspect - internal sbs on touch is causing load to the touch cpu (or even power suplly if your drive is directly connected to touch) and it has negative impact on the sound quality.

[dasmueller]

Just got mine going today. For anyone who is interested I have a Toshiba Canvio 1TB portable drive w 6937 files on it. The majority of files are FLAC-5 artwork in folders 150x150. There is a lot of space left but it is working fine ! Took about 25 mins to scan.

[HectorHughMunro]

It shouldn't really be this difficult should it? We're only talking about the kind of technology that went to an early Ipod. Surely the Touch is more powerful than that?

[ckgrick]

I have three Touch's and I agree it likes ethernet or wifi much better than usb.

I don't like leaving my network on, so I'm using a Samsung portable usb drive with one Touch. I have over 8,000 files on it and I've had a number of learning issues to overcome, but it works fairly well now with one exception.

After turning on and telling it to use the usb it will work fine for perhaps 15-18 or so songs. Then it just stops and there nothing I have found to fix the issue except to go back and tell it to use the usb library once again. The old playlist is lost of course but the big issue is the hassle.

[zub]

Hello,

I find that running a NAS just for the Touch is too much hassle and is also energy hungry.

However, the problem is that I would also like to get access to the USB hard drive where is my music from other device or computer.And, also, the hard drive connected to my touch is not very beautiful and looks crappy in my bedroom.

Thus, I think that the best way is to have the hard drive somewhere activated as a network drive. Some tiny routers/modems running on Linux have a usb plug and enable to share the hard drive connected to it.

As we are mastering the command line in ssh on the touch, I would like to know if you have a solution to prompt the TinySB to look into a network drive instead of the USB drive.

Is there a file that I can change to tell this TinySB to have a look at \\livebox\music.

[toby10]

You could simply use a longer USB cable between Touch and USB drive, then you can better hide the drive.
There is a way to access the USB drive attached to the Touch across the network to add, delete, organize the drive files. I do not know how to do this but the answer is in this forum, somewhere.

[JohnSwenson]

Hello,

I find that running a NAS just for the Touch is too much hassle and is also energy hungry.

However, the problem is that I would also like to get access to the USB hard drive where is my music from other device or computer.And, also, the hard drive connected to my touch is not very beautiful and looks crappy in my bedroom.

Thus, I think that the best way is to have the hard drive somewhere activated as a network drive. Some tiny routers/modems running on Linux have a usb plug and enable to share the hard drive connected to it.

As we are mastering the command line in ssh on the touch, I would like to know if you have a solution to prompt the TinySB to look into a network drive instead of the USB drive.

Is there a file that I can change to tell this TinySB to have a look at \\livebox\music.

The Tiny SBS is not designed to look at a network share. Under some circumstances it can be done, but its not easy. Its WAY better to run SBS on the external box which is also serving up files to other computers. This works very well and gives you the full functionality of SBS. This is what vortexbox does, its a linux server that has SBS and samba for sharing any files on the box with other computers. You can set it up as a video server as well. It also has a DLNA server.

If you want something really small and silent but still quite powerful a FitPC2 running vortexbox software is great. The cheapest way to do this is with a sheevaplug and squeezeplug software, but I don't think it comes out of the box setup as a general purpose file server, but setting it up to do so is not very difficult (WAY easier than getting TinySBS to read a network share)

John S.

[snarlydwarf]

It shouldn't really be this difficult should it? We're only talking about the kind of technology that went to an early Ipod. Surely the Touch is more powerful than that?

I don't recall any "early iPods" that had hundreds of gigs of music files.

Actually, I don't know any current iPods that do.

Indexing 4G of files is not that hard, especially when the index is actually made on a PC and uploaded to the iPod.

Indexing a terabyte of files is another matter entirely, especially when the indexing must be done on the embedded device itself.