organising music on Squeezebox

[peccadillo]

Hi all

I'm making my first steps into networking my music collection. I have recently ripped all my CDs onto hard drive (in wav format - I'm getting the impression that is some kind of sin!?).

I now play all my music through Windows Media Player and I really love the ease of finding tracks, rating tracks and making playlists.

Does the squeezebox (together witha NAS) with its few lines of display allow this kind of interactivity?

Thanks for any help

[amcluesent]

>in wav format - I'm getting the impression that is some kind of sin!<

It simply prevents you from tagging the music, making finding and managing the music harder. But don't worry, you can use foobar2000 to bulk convert to FLAC.

>Does the squeezebox...<

Yes. But the slimserver and Softsqueeze can both be downloaded for £0 (www.slimdevices.com); Softsqueeze emulates the SB3, so you can try it our before buying the real thing!

[Mark Ward]

I have 100's of my CDs that I've ripped to Flac for my SB3 and I have to say navigation isn't a problem at all.

The search is very intuitive, if you start scrolling from "A" then the scroll will get progressively quicker as you keep the button pushed.

You typically only need to enter the first couple of digits of an artist's name then scroll through the remaining few.

I really like the way it works.

SB3 sounds great too withthose Burr Brown DACS
Mark.

[peccadillo]

Thanks for the link Amcluesent - I'll give that a try.


>It simply prevents you from tagging the music

About the tagging though, all my music is currently in wav format and is tagged by WMP with album art, rating and all that stuff. So what is the advantage of FLAC over WAV?


>SB3 sounds great too withthose Burr Brown DACS

Thanks for your input Mark. The DACS are enticing from what I've heard! But what about getting an external soundcard with nice DACS and using my old laptop as the player?

Cheers

[badbob]

I recommend using custom browser. I don't like the standard \Artist arrangement (even with "various" set to own directory, You can choose to have compilation albums appear together under "Various Artists" or have them appear under each artist in the compilation.)

With custom browser have my own xml filters which create a \A, \B then the artist name so the trees are much tidier.

[stevos]

If i was to re-rip my music collection (hope i never have to) i would rip it using the tagged version of wav (AIFF files i believe), since this is the most universally supported format (works with squeezebox, ps3, xbox360, itunes, ipod, wmp, etc)


If WMP has included tags (i assume it is storing them some where other than file, overwise there could be some issuing using the files in other programs) just use it to convert the files to a lossless format that supports tags.

[Autopilot]

Originally Posted by peccadillo

About the tagging though, all my music is currently in wav format and is tagged by WMP with album art, rating and all that stuff. So what is the advantage of FLAC over WAV?

WAV's don't support tagging. You WMP library might hold some info about them, but trust us when we say there are no proper tags in the WAV's. If you copy them elsewhere an try and play them with something else you find all the album art, info about year, artist, album, genre, lyrics etc will be gone. And if WMP (which i seriously advice you stop using) goes south, then you will be up the creek.

As well as the essential tags, FLACS are roughly half the size - some that means less storage needed and faster HDD usage. But most importantly, especially when using something like a Squeezebox, far less network load - which can be an issue for wireless networks when someone else decides to use the connection at the same time for a bit of counter strike.

[peccadillo]

Aha. Now I understand. Thanks Autopilot. That explains why all my "tags" mysteriously disappeared one day some months ago. I'll start looking into foobar2000 then!

Does anyone have any thoughts on using a squeezebox in preference to my old laptop + soundcard - or vice versa?