Hardware

[dmcr]

Hi everyone

I have an Arcam AVR450 receiver and a BDP300 Blu-ray disc player plus some brilliant Sunfire speakers allowing me to "hear" my CD collection for the first time. Ii would like to store my CD music on an external hard drive.

I would think that using the dB power amp software a PC with disc drive and an extenal hard drive should be reasonably straight forward - reassurance or advice appreciated.

The playback setup I'm not sure about - does anyone have any experience with the QA 350 MOD V2 SD card WAV HiFi media player or the Slim Devices Squeezebox WiFI D/A processor or any other advice.

Many thanks

[garym]

Re: Hardware

you have several steps you need to go through. first you need to rip your CDs to digital files. You'll need to do this no matter what. I use dbpa and rip my CDs to FLAC (lossless) files. Second, you'll need a way to play your digital fils via your stereo system. I personally use several Squeezebox players (Transporter, TOUCH, etc.). The database/server software that holds the music and serves it to the player is called Logitech Media Server and runs on windows machines, Macs, linux machines, etc. Doesn't matter. If happy with win7 machine, that works perfectly, including storing the actual music on an external USB drive connected to the computer. Keep in mind that Squeezeboxes have been discontinued. Sonos players are another option. Another option is to use the illustrate program ASSET as a upnp setup (by the maker of dbpa).

My advice is to get your CDs ripped to FLAC with dbpa, with good artwork and tagging (and several backups of the files). Then you can start exploring the mechanism for playing those files in your system.