The Music Server

[paulhaines]

For those who know me well, you will know that I am heavily into music. Can't play an instrument to save myself, although I used to be very good at playing the penis. There are some who know me that may equate 'heavily' with 'obsessed'. It's probably true, it is my biggest passion in life

Comments

[paulhaines]

The standard res "Hawaii" sounds great, but you can imagine how awful the gapless issue is playing that one back! Got Talahoumi Way the other day too. Ripped to the drive, but no played yet. Must do tomorrow.

Gaps!

[plonkmonster]

Fark... It doesn't do gapless? Really? I considered going down the PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC/Bridge route. Until I saw the price. At that price you should not get an iPod controller, you should get your own personal groupie to twiddle knobs (and control the music). Reviews universally say the PWD sounds wonderful. But nobody mentioned the fact that it would macerate my classical collection.

We went for a MacMini running the evil iTunes, connected to the DAC in my Perreaux amp. Hours of old fogey music enjoyment with no gaps.

I guess there might be a bit of HDD/fan noise from the Mac (I never notice it) but you could buy a fanless box with solid state drive and still have money left over to pay the postage on hate mail to PS Audio.

Re: Gaps!

[paulhaines]

I'd heard you had also been upgrading the system. Lucky for me for the price wasn't *so* bad over here in Oz. Still awful, but the Olive range were the other ones I was looking at. Except the one with a big enough drive to fit my collection and allow for expansion was even more expensive.

Yes, PS Audio kept sort of quiet about the gapless not working, until their user forums had some rather disgrunteled audiophiles on it. (And even then half the people on the forum have no idea what gapless it).

Perreuax. Lovely stuff, just lovely.

[taliehelene]

I read it all. I've ditched all my jewel cases, and have my collection in file drawers while I transfer them all to drive as well. (It takes so much babysitting.) Eventually the drawers will be by genre as backups, and as I sometimes need liner notes.

Applaud your snobbery against lossy compression!

Enjoy music. You need this. This is important. :-)

[paulhaines]

Oh yeah, music is essential. Glad to see a classically trained muso as yourself is right behind lossless. :-)

[taliehelene]

Paul, I also trained in audio engineering, although didn't qualify above CertIV because there is too much cock in the studio. (There is a more polite way of saying it, but why bother.)

There is no comparison between lossy/lossless!

Your music server setup sounds awesome fun.

[paulhaines]

Too much cock in the studio. I love it.

[clairemckenna]

WAV's inability to hold information was my pirating trick, back in the old days (last year) when most places that sold online music had protection on it. Any MP3 converted to WAV and back again would have the restrictive protection (burn three times, copy no times) stripped off it.

In terms of a gapless album, would it be worth your while and make one single playable file of the whole album?? A program like WAVpad can splice several files together then output them as one file.

Also - Windows 7 rocks in terms on massive file handling. As stable as XP too. I still have to get back to you on the aquisition of BluRays for personal use.

[paulhaines]

You can rip a CD as a single WAV file, and this is in fact the 'gapless' that one of the Mr Retail Audiophile was saying. Except you then can't choose an individual song if you wanted.

So then you rip the album as all the songs, and also as one track. NNNOOOOO!!

I didn't want to upgrade from XP to 7 as part of this exercise though. All the reinstalling and configuring of programs would drive me mad.

[wendy_waring]

I made it to the end, in part because I had a tiny techno-aristo moment of sympathy on the FLAC/WAV question. I settled on FLAC for the same reason as you when I converted my deutsche grammaphone CDs. Understanding that para allowed me to get over my desire for a secret decoder ring at para five.

But it's interesting, the Gapless question makes me think about the way that none of these systems handle the gap question in classical music particularly well. If you're listening to a Beethoven piano sonata, the "gap" is a silence that is part of the music on both sides of different movements. It has to be the right length. It has to frame, terminate, open and segue simultaneously. It IS music, in other word (yes, yes, I know John Cage has not-said this better). Okay, done ranting, not sure where I was going with that, other than musing out loud.

Now, the question is, are you gonna ebay all those CDs?

[paulhaines]

Gapless can be handled when you rip the CD. You can actually rip the gap so that it is part of the actual track (which is what I've done). Those gaps are part of the music as you say (not just in classical either) .

The gap that is introduced in playback is something else - it is an artificial gap created by either the software or hardware as it loads the next song. Gapless is about removing that problem.

eBay those CDs? NEVER!