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Timothy Wright

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  1. When I store my FLAC files on my WD EX4 I can see them and play them but the directory is always in alphabetical order as opposed to original sequence. Imagine playing something like Handel's Messiah with all the files out of sequence. Some DAC's like my Oppo 105D want to store information like album art at the music file's location, which may or may not work. While I can play music files from my WD EX4 I prefer to play them locally from a WD Passport portable external USB 3.0 hard drive. I think I have large music collection worthy of a public library with 28,000+ songs and 2,100+ CDs and all that requires less than a 500 GB of disk space in mildly compressed lossless FLAC format. There is at least one catch with that this method other than inconvenience of keep a few file locations in sync, Some devices, notably TVs have USB 3.0 ports but are not fully USB 3.0 compliant. They may not recognize the WD Passport either because it is too large in capacity or because it pulls too many amps. And yes these are all reasons why for my next NAS I expect to try Synology. One other major issue, and I think this is not WD fault. Movies files in MKV format still retail full subtitle functionality. The only way I can retain subtitles in mp4 format is to "burn them in" so they will be part of the visual movie and I lose the ability to turn them on and off. Without mp4 compression my 8 TB of movies would be more than 24 TB and my Oppo 105D up scales very nicely but some say I can see looking back and wishing I had retained more information and used less compression.
  2. I am confident that this has been asked and answered but if in your charity please understand that I am a new guy and may not even understand what I am asking. 1) Most of my CDs are regular audioCD and they rip just fine using DBpoweramp software on my PC. I think I am OK in this category. 2) I have a growing library of SACD/audioCD music that I would like to rip the higher quality SACD content to FLAC files using my PC if at all possible getting the best quality if possible. 3) I have only 2 CDs that will play in Oppo DBP-105D but are not even recognized in my PC. They are: "Reference Classics, First Sampling" - Reference Recordings - RRS1CD - Super Audio CD - DSD Adagio D'Albinoni / Gary Karr - Super Audio CD- DSD-import. Can anyone recommend a way to add SACD and Super Audio CD content to my NAS archive in the best quality. I can't be the first person with this issue, has anyone sorted this out yet? Thank you, Timothy Wright
  3. Yuri > I hope my English will progress further. In our schools English learned from 8-9 years old now. However a few people know the language enough for real using Only practical communication allow do it. I knew a couple well, they were both from China. He had a MBA from Wharton. She had a masters degree in organic chemistry. Because he owned a Chinese Buffet she waited tables for a living. She had High School and College English, was very good but weak on American idioms. Every day I'd teach her another American Idiom and she would howl with laughter. When I share a secret: "Just between us Indians" or "Shoot first and ask questions later". Or when you walk in on a cheating spouse and they say "Don't believe your lying eyes." Luke 2:14 Peace on Earth, to people of good will. Timothy
  4. Many of the best of my clan were once hug, jailed or otherwise executed by the British. With sinn fein on my mother's Irish side; Solidarity from my father's Polish side, It is no wonder I can have an attitude problem. :-)
  5. I sometimes joke about the black side of my Irish family: "Somebody's Callin' My Name" -Ry Cooder - Crossroads. "Run, Run, Mourner Run" - Sweet Honey in the Rock - Live at Carnegie Hall "Nothing but the Blood" - Five blind Boys of Alabama - Duets "There is Power in the Blood" - Soundtrack from "The Apostle"
  6. About five years ago I completely rebuilt my Dahlquist DQ-10 speakers, all new drivers, new crossover. Unlike Harpy I never got the Dahlquist sub when it was available. I did get a Yamaha sub but it only added excessive bass to the Dahlquist DQ-10 speakers. I am blessed that my 35 year old Yamaha M2 power amp has held up and is a good match for the Dahlquist DQ-10 speakers. I use a Oppo BDP-105D as my DAC and it pipes directly to the power amp doing duty as the Pre-amp as well. As much as I like my Dahlquist speakers I see myself trying a set of Magnepan MG 1.7 this summer. The Yamaha amp will deliver 350wpc at 4 ohm and would be a good match if I live with less bass? I'll argue that one can't easily have an audiophile listening room and a home theater in the same space. If one or the other has to compromise I take a very good two speaker system and my home theater will have to get by without a 11.1 speaker system. I'm going to prognosticate here, the marketing guys will never sell a 13.1 system because 13 is unlucky. So the next generation will be 17.1? Mr. Sdolezalek, how do you like your 20.1? From time to time I see them for sale on audiogon.
  7. >that index the Oppo builds when you go access your USB drive by artist, genre, album, etc. does not get stored anywhere on either the Oppo or your USB drive. When you power the Oppo off and then power it back on, it starts building the index from scratch again. I learned this by letting it index my 1TB drive, which took several hours. i was then able to use the tags on my music (artist, album, genre, etc), but the next day when I powered the oppo back up and went to listen to music, it started building the index all over again! WEAK! I wrote to Oppo and they said the index is not stored anywhere and there is no plan to add that feature. >Seems to me that Oppo intended this feature to be used for smaller USB flash drives, not giant hard drives. You may be correct, but I read somewhere that the Oppo has internal memory for storage of cache information? I've had much better success at home with the better ASUS routers than any other brands. My Samsung flat screen TVs are both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz and support all 800.11 standards. But the Oppo is a lot slower but unlike the Samsung TV is much more DLNA compliant. As a option to Ethernet over 110v, one might just add a wireless router at the other end configured as a repeater. The two routers can sort out wireless protocol issues and every device on the other end would have a wired Ethernet gigabit connection.
  8. Yuri, Your English is much better than my Russian. ;-) In theory once everything is in a database and searchable, the structure is secondary. But I am old fashion guy who more often than not likes to browse my collection. In my case having a limited number of broad genre serves that need very well. Information can get "lost" in a data base. Blues, Jazz or Classical can have dozens of sub-genre. If you are not searching using the precise term you can miss something you may care to listen to. Using broad inclusive genre lessens that risk. When I had a large physical LP collection that covered a wall, those LPs were sorted alphabetically by artist with no thought to genre and I sometimes wondered how some of those performers would have felt about being shelved adjacent to some very odd bed fellows. Blessings on Blessings Timothy
  9. Thank you Ricardo for that clarification. I apologize for missing that. On a given day if I have 15 -20 CDs come in I will unpack each one then log in the stack one at a time into my excel spread sheet. I scan all my own covers and use DBpoweramp to add the cover art from the scan directory. A 200 dpi scan yields a 800x800 cover art which is the maximum size allowed by DBpoweramp. I have not found the online meta tags all that reliable with respect to genre or year so I keep allmusic.com open in a tab to verify those fields. Often I'll keep the online genre tag because it may be more specific, such as "fusion jazz" or "R&B" and I find that helpful but when I am done ripping all 20 or so CDs I force it into one of my broader genre categories. Last time I went on a major music binge was in 2011, so guess I do major library updates about once every 4 years. This time around I got my Oppo 105D and the difference between a FLAC file and a MP3 file is very apparent to me when listening (not so much when listening on my computer but when listening on my living room system) ; so I went back and re ripped every CD into FLAC format. It was when I in the middle of that process that wondered if just a few new CDs might not help fill in gaps in my collection, and perhaps you know how a few can become 200? This time I replaced a lot of music that I once owned on LP, and searched Amazon more diligently for SACD and audiophile bargains. I get nostalgic when ever I do this, I remember those last words from my fleeing X-wife: "I never did like your taste in music anyway." May she die a horrible death in a traffic accident. I haven't seen her in almost 30 years. It took me that long to replace her "A group named Smith" Lp with a brand new CD. I feel more complete now. BTW, is "Land of the Angles" any where near "El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles ", cue up Randy Newman? Set the amp on "eleven".
  10. Mr. Semente Classical music is notorious for being difficult to tag well. I could never offer my advise on that topic. In my much simpler world my top category is by Genre and in all caps so that when I rip new CDs I can easily spot them in lower case. My top Genre look like this: AUDIOPHILE, CHRISTMAS, CLASSICAL, COUNTRY-FOLK, DANCE, EASY LISTENING, JAZZ-BLUES, PRAYERS, RELIGIOUS, ROCK-POP, STAGE-SCREEN. Next level down is by artist, then actual CDs are prefaced by year, so that a recording artist's works will always be chronological. The folks who sell DBpoweramp also have a program called "Perfect tunes" for sorting out tags and folder art. Myself I don't mind duplicates. If one considers one CD as a complete creative effort, cutting one up and passing it around seems violent to me. My category Audiophile includes any other genre, but they are all audiophile recordings, as in heavy on TELARC. Christmas includes any holiday music. Most of my Classical stuff is hidden but not well organized in the Audiophile genre. Country-Folk includes bluegrass, well it does for me. I don't dance much, but I have known a few attractive lady friends who do. I had nice friend from Columbia and if I played dance music for her you might thing I put something in her drink. For her it is transformative. Easy Listening is a big category for me, even when it is not easy. There is a whole sub genre of philharmonics performing the works of rock groups. It is fun to have an orchestral version of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. I don't know where the line is between Jazz and Blues so they are grouped together, as is Rock and Pop for the same reason, as is Stage and Screen.
  11. I was an very early adopter for the WD EX4 NAS. I have (4) 4TB hard drive for a total of 16 TB in RAID0 config. Next to a Synology NAS the WD is much slower, simpler and very basic. File transfers are slow, then again I can't aggregate ethernet ports on my home network. On the plus side the WD is reliable and very inexpensive and the support is good. I ordered a 8TB NAS and expected (2) 4TB hard drives. Instead I got (4) 2TB drives. So I called WD support and with in days I had (4) 4TB wd red drives with an RMA for smaller drives, ALL AT NO CHARGE. I'd call that very good support. The WD does do all I need it to do, serve movie and FLAC files. But as my collection grows I can see out growing 16TB and I am looking hard at a Synology DS1815+ because swapping out the drives in my EX4 to (4) TB and then putting all the music and movies back on could leave me with no NAS for more than 2 weeks.
  12. I also have a oppo 105D and watch movies from my NAS. But I put my music in FLAC format on a 1TB WD "My Passport" USB 2.0 hard drive and plug that into the back of my OPPO. It may be more trouble to keep that drive up to date but file sorts and seeks are much faster with the local hard drive than they are from the NAS via wireless. Just tonight I was searching for one song by name on the NAS and the Oppo may as well have locked up. In contrast with the rear USB drive I can listen to music while the Oppo creates or updates the index file. I should add that my oppo 105d is less than a week old and the firmware was up to date when I got it.
  13. One pays for "Beyond compare 4" but I have found it well worth it. Someone was kind enough to recommend the program to me. You are very welcome, in time charity makes a big circle and returns home to the giver. My inexpensive WD EX4 NAS is filling up. It would take weeks replace the hard drives and put all the files back so I'm thinking of adding a second NAS so that I would have no down time. My first NAS was a learning experience for me. This time I thing I will go up market and buy a Synology DS1815+ for speed, much better software and 8 drive bays. On my stereo the difference between FLAC files and MP3 files is easy to hear. Dem' FLAC files eat a hell of a lot of room. I can see standardizing on Blu-ray movies as opposed to DVD's. They also eat up a lot of room. I would not have to fill all 8 bays on day one. I could load up the bays as needed.
  14. I have a 16TB NAS with about 3,000 movies and about 24,000 songs. I know a little about backing up. Recently I re-ripped all my music files to FLAC format and I have less than 500 GB of music files on my workstation that I need to copy onto the NAS. Every day I get a few more CD and when I rip them I also need to copy those files on to the NAS. For big copy jobs I prefer a free program called Teracopy for speed and accuracy. Over Gigabit Ethernet copying 500 GB roughly requires 24 hours. I would rather copy than "Back up" because that way if I can see it, it is useful. For copying only updates in either direction I prefer a program named "Beyond Compare 4" which can identify only the differences in a whole directory structure and then selectively update in either or both directions. My NAS supports 6TB red drives. Sometime this summer I expect to replace the (4) 4TB in my NAS. They will get moved to new home and I'll copy some 9-10 TB of files back on to the NAS from my workstation. Simple math, at 1/2 TB per day, 10 TB of data will require 20 days to copy the data.
  15. On RAID My NAS is RAID 0 so that it sees (4) 4TB drives all as one space with no backup or redundancy. My backups on the two workstations, Music is copied to its own 6TB hard drive on each workstation, as is all DRAMAS (Hollywood movies) and DOCUMENTARIES (require as much disk space as the Dramas. So each workstation has three 6tb dedicated to backing up the NSA and if anything bad happened to any NAS hard drive I have two backup I can restore from using simple copy commands or a Windows program I like called "Beyond Compare". Copying just the music over Ethernet can take a full day. Either movie category over Ethernet will require days. I've never done a full restore but a full backup takes more than a week. Those 13,000+ compressed mp4 files take a while to read/write/verify. I like my WD EX4 NAS, for the price. I don't use any media server software. I explained how the files are organized and I find it simple to just select and play any file I need. My NAS supports four 6TB hard drives with current bios. Lord willing by the time I out grow my 16TB WD may offer even larger hard drives.
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