I am thinking of getting an Audiophile only server

[deacongreg]

Originally Posted by kennyt

I guess for me the one thing that has me going nutz over the whole music server thing is the total and complete lack of standardization.

I already have all my and my wifes CD's on HDs in AIFF (I'm a Mac guy) so totally uncompressed. I can, in theory convert them to anything I want at any time now, but many servers will not allow me to use or import these files to them.

If they could reach an agreement on a standard, all the problems would go away (granted all the market share for the high end guys might too but it would be great for me!)

For now, I will keep my simple computer based server for day to day casual listening. I really don't want to swap in and out all those discs again. I have already done it almost three times now, the first time I screwed up my computer early on and lost all the data, no big deal, only ~1-200 discs in by then. The second time I did it in MP3 @ 192k, OK, great for an iPod but not much else, so then I decided as HD space is so cheap to do it completely uncompressed and this is where I am now.

Just remembered I need to buy another external HD to back all this up to....

It would be great if they could reach a standard. I would be easy for all of us. kenny, I have a question for you, I`m jumping into the I - pod game now, as currently I do not have one. Just my stepson and daughter. I`ve decided I could use it to archive a lot of my old classic jazz and soul music. Would you get the updated Nano with video, or go for the main I - pod at the top of the food chain?

I`m thinking maybe my wife will bless me for Fathers Day?? I have a Dell PC, so I guess everything will be in lossless, not AIFF, right?

[CharlyD]

Originally Posted by deacongreg

It would be great if they could reach a standard.

There is a standard, DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance). The goal of DLNA is to "provide vendors with the information needed to build interoperable networked platforms and devices for the digital home" (quoted from DLNA documentation). Several vendors (e.g. Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer) are already delivering components that comply with these standards. DLNA defines mandatory media formats for video, audio and A/V but allows several optional types to be included. For example, LPCM is the mandatory format for audio, but WMA, AAC, MP3 and many others are optional.

[Lotus]

Kenny,

I'm pretty sure that all the high end servers use FLAC as their standard lossless audio codec (since it's free). DLNA I believe also uses FLAC as a standard codec. ***Just checked and "Any DLNA device," is FLAC compatible. ***

So FLAC would be what you'd convert it all to, and is the standard lossless codec it would appear.

[CharlyD]

As far as I know, the only mandatory audio format in DLNA is LPCM. FLAC is an optional format that is supported by several clients and servers. DLNA servers can implement transcoding services where, for example, a FLAC file can be transcoded and streamed as LPCM to a rendering client that does not support FLAC.

[deacongreg]

Thanks for the input guys. But from reading all of this, it seems some of this is still a bit up in the air.

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by CharlyD

As far as I know, the only mandatory audio format in DLNA is LPCM. FLAC is an optional format that is supported by several clients and servers. DLNA servers can implement transcoding services where, for example, a FLAC file can be transcoded and streamed as LPCM to a rendering client that does not support FLAC.

All DLNA devices MUST be able to decode FLAC.