Music Servers

Many of us computer audiophiles, and audiophiles looking to get into the music server game, have long wanted a music server that rivals the Sooloos touchscreen interface without paying the Sooloos price premium. What many people don't realize is how advanced the Sooloos product is as a complete package. Notably how it handles metadata and library navigation using this extended metadata. I continually research music servers and every related product under the sun but I've yet to find anything that duplicates or equals the quality of Sooloos metadata support and library navigation. For example browsing an album's credits to find the producer then searching for other albums in the library that were produced by this person. It's all a couple touches away and without manually entering the information at any time. As the saying goes, there's no free lunch. This is certainly true with what I call Joe Sixpack's Sooloos.

Over the last several months I've researched different combinations of motherboards, computer cases, audio cards, and accessories that go along with these components. The goal of all this research was to put together a hardware and software music server solution that I would actually use and the Computer Audiophile readers could actually use. I would do the leg work, test & listen to everything, and provide the information for CA readers to put together the exact same music server. This sounds somewhat simple until one considers all the requirements that go into such an audiophile solution. Great sound, great looking, no moving parts, silent, fairly inexpensive, and 100% of the components must be available today. Along the way this server was named the Pocket Server by a colleague who was very surprise at its small size when I pulled it out of my carry-on luggage. The server is a bit larger today than it was at that time but the name hasn't changed. What follows is the story of the Computer Audiophile Pocket Server and all the information required to recreate the $1,500 C.A.P.S solution.

Thanks to some of the CA readers for mentioning MonkeyTunes recently on the forum. I decided to check it out and I am very impressed. Until now controlling MediaMonkey with an iPhone or iPod Touch using iMonkey was primitive at best. Fortunately the good people at Melloware, who originally developed iMonkey, we also unsatisfied with that application and created MonkeyTunes as a replacement. MonkeyTunes is really nice. It even uses Apple's Remote application as its interface. Why recreate the wheel if one doesn't have to?