Uber-Newbie needs HELP! NAS-Denon AVP-WMP/WMC integration.

[RNRGAGNE]

My apologies in advance if I'm violating some kind of protocol. As the title states I'm an uber-newbie - a fifty year old guy with extremely limited computer knowledge. I tried for probably the equivalent of four days to get my set up to do what I'd like with some partial victories but overall no success. I try to read help files and instructions but get lost in all the acronyms and obviously don't understand simple computer logic for naming files etc.
My main goal, and the reason I bought dbpoweramp, is to archive my CD's to audiophile quality codecs for playback on my main system and obviously for secondary playback throughout the house. So far I found FLAC sounds best to these ears with WAV a close second - unfortunately my pre-amp won't do WMA Lossless so I can't try it. Also for some reason with wav files there's an annoying "pop" when switching tracks that's not there when I've been able to stream FLAC.

Here's the gear;
HP Entertainment laptop running Vista/dbpoweramp, HP Media Center PC running XP, Denon AVP A1HD networking pre-amp (plays for sure) and Linksys NAS200 with media server enabled.

What I want to accomplish;
Rip my CD's to a lossless codec (At this point I greatly prefer FLAC but will settle for what works) to the NAS that both the Denon and WMP/Media Center can find and play with album art visible. I would really like to use the Media Center remote to for the room that the PC is in.

Problems;
WMP/Media Center won't play FLAC.
Denon won't play WMA Lossless.
I can't get album art and titles to display at the same time.
My total lack of understanding on how this stuff works.

Now, I was able to get album art to display when I played a song on the Denon with WAV using the "save in dynamic artist folder" but no titles, album or artist showed on the menus just "unknown" in each category and each song was labeled "rock" and then the artist and song info after. With this set up however, I was unable to find the files in WMP despite the fact they were on the NAS.

Can someone please give me a step by step instruction on how to get what I'm after - and do so as though I was a five year old instead of a fifty year old? Actually - check that - a five year old might actually have a better chance!!

Thanks,
Rick.

[Spoon]

Re: Uber-Newbie needs HELP! NAS-Denon AVP-WMP/WMC integration.

>So far I found FLAC sounds best to these ears with WAV a close second

Called a placebo, as wav and flac decode to 100% identical files. The pop from the wave is the dennon not being able to handle the id tag, even though we write id tags to the wav files it cannot read them, or even handle skipping over the chunk (which points to a very bad implementation of wave support).

[Spoon]

Re: Uber-Newbie needs HELP! NAS-Denon AVP-WMP/WMC integration.

WMP can play FLAC, you just need to install the correct directshow filters.

[RNRGAGNE]

Re: Uber-Newbie needs HELP! NAS-Denon AVP-WMP/WMC integration.

WMP can play FLAC, you just need to install the correct directshow filters.

I can appreciate what you're saying about FLAC & WAV sounding alike - it makes perfect sense.

I definitely can't put up with the pops between tracks so FLAC is likely the best bet for what I'm after if I can figure out how to do as you say above, I'd even give up album art on the Denon as long as I could get it in WMP.

This "uber-newbie" has tried several supposed FLAC "plug ins" but I haven't had any success loading them into WMP. I could really use some hand holding throught this process.

[RNRGAGNE]

Re: Uber-Newbie needs HELP! NAS-Denon AVP-WMP/WMC integration.

As an example of my cluelessness; when I attemp to download madFLAC 1.8
the instructions say to select "save" and pick an "appropriate folder" - I have no idea what an appropriate folder is for what I'm trying to do.