FLAC music server?

[NAILER341]

Are there any of you that have built their own music server, and are able to play FLAC files via the network?

I have an Onkyo TX NR905 which is a network type receiver, but it doesn't recognize FLAC files.

There are some expensive music servers out there that support this format, and provide plenty of space to store the files on, bit I'd rather not buy any of those fancy contraptions.

I do have a computer here that I am no longer using that could be turned into a Music-Server, but I am looking for someone that has done this before that can offer some real experience with it.

[RAT]

Are there any of you that have built their own music server, and are able to play FLAC files via the network?

I have an Onkyo TX NR905 which is a network type receiver, but it doesn't recognize FLAC files.

There are some expensive music servers out there that support this format, and provide plenty of space to store the files on, bit I'd rather not buy any of those fancy contraptions.

I do have a computer here that I am no longer using that could be turned into a Music-Server, but I am looking for someone that has done this before that can offer some real experience with it.

I've read some articles about FLAC files. Super fast, lots of data; I wonder how long before the Ipod goes away in lieu of a FLAC file player. If you get it figured out I'd like to come check it out.

[NAILER341]

The great thing about the FLAC files is that it is a "Lossless" recording of the music.
If you can get your hands on FLAC files that were recorded from masters, or other similar high quality disks the sound is amazing.

You can take a FLAC file and a normal mp3 file and play one after the other as a comparison, and you will be amazed at what you have been missing in listening to MP3's.

Over a bit of time I have put together a pretty nice system, and I'd like to get some decent music to play on it to get the full potential out of it.

A quality audiophile MFSL CD sounds incredible.

Having a library of those available in FLAC on a music server would sure be nice

[Materdaddy]

I think your problem is that your Onkyo won't decode flac. You probably need a server that will transcode on the fly to another lossless format, i.e. raw wave. Bandwidth for that would be fairly large and might not work on an older 802.11b network, but since you have a $2,000 audio receiver, you probably either have wired ethernet or 802.11g/n. Anyways, I don't know much about winblow$ stuff, but MediaTomb supports live transcoding so you can store your files in flac, and serve them up over your network in wave/mp3/etc. I'm not sure if that would interface w/ the onkyo's windows-y implementation.

I didn't know onkyo was so paired with m$... I guess that explains why I have to keep turning my receiver off/on to get video sources switching, and resetting to factory defaults, etc. Maybe M$ writes the firmware on onkyo receivers? </rant>

[Materdaddy]

With a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers#UPnP_media_render_hardwarelit tle more digging[/url], it seems Onkyo's TX-NR905 has a UPnP client, which means it should play well with MediaTomb.

[RAT]

I think your problem is that your Onkyo won't decode flac. You probably need a server that will transcode on the fly to another lossless format, i.e. raw wave. Bandwidth for that would be fairly large and might not work on an older 802.11b network, but since you have a $2,000 audio receiver, you probably either have wired ethernet or 802.11g/n. Anyways, I don't know much about winblow$ stuff, but MediaTomb supports live transcoding so you can store your files in flac, and serve them up over your network in wave/mp3/etc. I'm not sure if that would interface w/ the onkyo's windows-y implementation.

I didn't know onkyo was so paired with m$... I guess that explains why I have to keep turning my receiver off/on to get video sources switching, and resetting to factory defaults, etc. Maybe M$ writes the firmware on onkyo receivers? </rant>

Speak English please?

[NAILER341]

Speak English please?

No kidding

[NAILER341]

With a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers#UPnP_media_render_hardwarelit tle more digging[/url], it seems Onkyo's TX-NR905 has a UPnP client, which means it should play well with MediaTomb.

Do you know how to set this up?
I have tried something similar with "Fuppes" and was unable to get it to go. I just don't have a good understanding of how to get all of these things to see one another.

I make a hell of a steak

[ECV Jeep]

I don't have a music server, but listen to plenty of FLAC files and can rip to FLAC if desired. I use a combination of programs, but I use the FLAC codecs from FLAC Frontend. I got ALL the FLAC tools I needed from

http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html

I am no expert, and not sure this helps. However, I agree with you that switching your music files to FLAC would be way cool. Keep us posted.

[Materdaddy]

Do you know how to set this up?
I have tried something similar with "Fuppes" and was unable to get it to go. I just don't have a good understanding of how to get all of these things to see one another.

I make a hell of a steak

Ha, I know how to set it up on a linux machine, but not Mac. I'm not sure what hardware you have for your server. Is it something that you need to do other things? like serve files over your network using windows?

I've used fuppes before too, and wasn't happy with it. I've never actually played with mediatomb, but I've heard it's much better from some coworkers. We wrote the UPnP stack for the DirecTV set top boxes, so they know a lot about these things.

Actually, since I'm sure you're a windows person, I'm not sure why I didn't recommend TVersity in the first place... It runs on windows and supports live transcoding, including flac. I even had lunch with Ronen Mizrahi (president/ceo of TVersity) two years ago at CES.

In other words, scratch all my other babbling, and go install TVersity. It'll do what you want, which is live transcode of flac.