[geeks] home mp3 system suggestions

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 10:18:37AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:

> As far as what I want on the mp3, this would be ideal.
> 1. A master library computer that can house several gigs of files from 
> audio galaxy, napster, etc that I've downloaded. 
> 2.  Ability to access them from other computers and play them on other 
> systems through those other laptops--like, for example, in the guest house.  
> 3.  Ability to burn them quickly to wav file and custom compile 
> 4.  Ability to convert existing records and CD's to MP3's and store on 
> this master system.  
> I'm more concerned with quality than saving a few bucks here and there. 
> I don't want to overkill, but I do want to spend an extra $50 if it gives 
> me noticeable more quality on the audio.  
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> 
> 1.  Mac, with iTunes, running Samba so he can drag-n-drop from his Windows box.
> 2.  Mac, running OS X, with Apache and NetJuke 
>     (http://netjuke.sourceforge.net/)
> 3.  Mac, with iTunes, and an IDE CD-R in an external IDE-FireWire enclosure
> 4.  Mac, with iTunes (well, dunno about the records, but I can work on that)
> 
> So, thoughts?  I think there's only one way to do this "right".  This guy's
> a Windows person with very limited Mac experience, but if I set this up right,
> it could be as "hands off" as possible.

With a little scripting, a linux machine (or presumably *BSD) would do every
thing in an even more hands off manner, possible with a web interface.  For
that matter, so could an OS X box.

Unfortunately, best quality calls for external ADC/DACs, and those are 
expensive, but then, he does talk about vinyl, so maybe it would be so 
bad for him.

Also, personally, I like flac.  For some things the difference between it
and high bandwidth MP3 aren't noticable, but other times it is.  But, if
he can afford the disk space, why not make everything FLAC?  It would likely
only raise the price of the box something like $120 (well, since you are
talking about IDE, throwing in an additional 120gig drive should be enough
to make the jump to FLAC for all but the very most extreme cases.  Even 
Shridhar should be able to make do with the amount of FLAC audio one gets
from 120gig drives.

So, with either flac or mp3, samba will take care of the serving the file
to remote notebooks requirement.

Scripted CD ripping on CD insertion would be easy to pull off with an hour 
of scripting time.  Automating the ripping of vinyl is less trivial though.
There are various algorithms one could apply to finding the breaks between 
songs, but they are likely to be fouled up by long pauses in songs, or by
tracks that don't have a pause between them.  And there is no automated why
to get the album and track titles automatically.  In my opinion, vinyl 
ripping is a task better left to be done by hand, then encode and copy to the
server.

I don't have any idea why he wants to compile a list to make a wav file, but
that two should be easy.  Convert the mp3 and flac files to raw audio (mpg123
and the flac equiv support this), cat them together, then run a utility
to convert raw audio to .wav files.  But again, Why?


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd