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I was reading up a little on this when I moved all of my stuff to a consumer-grade NAS, and the only thing I could find was that it's a bit laggy if you put everything on a network drive. I don't think that'll be an issue if you have a firewire 800 or thunderbolt interface external drive. Not sure about usb2.

Means to an end, no? I'd be much happier listening to the original 1991 cd release of "Loveless" than a 24/192 high resolution recording of someone like Yngwie Malmsteen ("ooh, the space in the hi-res studio master release lets me make out those 32nd note arpeggios that he keeps cranking out with so much clarity!!"). Then again, I do quite like the remaster of said MBV... I won't claim that I don't like the gear, but it really pales in comparison to the music.

Depending on how quiet your listening room can be (and if this is important to you), you might as well get ssd to further eliminate hard drive noise, not sure if this is included in your $1000 price for the mini. I have all of my music sitting on a mini which is right next to my DAC and the hard drive noise at times is quite noticeable and annoying. So much so that I think I'm going to have to get an ssd for the system files and dump all of my media onto an NAS in another room.

The gapless metadata tag has pretty much never affected itunes playback as I knew it and it seemed like everything was treated as a gapless album whether or not you tagged your files with that option. It had never even occurred to me that I had to make sure I had the correct option on that until I started using PM a few days before the release of itunes 11. A pretty good chunk of recent releases are gapless so I just went ahead and tagged everything in my library as if it were a gapless album since having it this way is a lot easier and less detrimental to my listening experience than having audible gaps between tracks on a gapless album. With all this said, I've been hesitant to update to itunes 11 but have always had sporadic issues with PM hanging while loading the tracks of a respective album to memory (I have a mid-2011 mac mini with 16gb ram). Restarting PM has pretty much always resolved this. With this latest release, are we now back to the state where playback (gapless or not) is at least as stable as itunes 10.7/pm 1.88a? Is there any reason for me to update to 11 since 95% of my interaction with itunes is through the remote app on my phone?

The first time I heard about Meridian teaming up with HP I thought it was pointless, but if you can get a reasonably priced HP notebook that runs the Sooloos interface, get something close to integer mode to an external DAC, and just access the media on an NAS or wherever, that's actually sounding better and better. Much friendlier to my checkbook than a 100% Sooloos, too. HP Connected Music - Meridian

I've used the doug's script for embedding artwork on multiple albums at once, so there's very little harm that can come from trying it on the whole library at once. If it's just taking the first character or two from the filename and putting that into the track # field (and not doing anything with total tracks for the album), there's really no reason it should hang. Worth a shot, anyway.

what is this blank column on the left? it looks like that's what you're sorting by

Keeping your mini on ethernet also has the added benefit of being able to take advantage of wake-on-lan. I'm holding off on itunes 11, but I've had similar issues with itunes 10.7 where PM hangs and it says it's loading tracks to memory. Here's to hoping 1.9 addresses some of these little issues, because it sure sounds great.

Thanks for passing this along to the rest of us. The type of view affects the playback characteristics? The list view is what I've always used, but wow, is that peculiar. So deselect the Pure Music gapless option, go to the "Songs" view and I'll be able to listen to my ambient/drone albums gaplessly?

Did you turn off the Pure Music option for gapless playback? I'm interpreting what I've read that the "part of a gapless album" option has been removed from iTunes 11 and now all albums are essentially gapless in iTunes' eyes. Does that mean Pure Music plays everything back gaplessly to our ears even if the option isn't selected?