robertsmith52

Thanks very much for all advice greatly received, yes I did mean Mediamonkey sorry for any confusion. I will now follow-up on all of your suggestions, this is all very new to me and I appreciate your time to offer advice. I looked at the ASUS board probably ignorantly because it has USB 3.0 capability and here in the UK it is only a little more expensive than the Intel board suggested. I am not quite ready to start building yet, still feeling around and getting as much info as I can before I finalize anything. Thanks again.

Having been previously sceptical about utilising a computer as a audio media player I have done some research mainly on this site and others and have now started to get some ideas in my mind about how to start. Please excuse my ignorance as I am keen to learn. My initial thoughts are to build my own media server and I have selected some thoughts on the basic components with which to start before I proceed any further I would welcome any comments from members greater experience than my own. Motherboard : Asus AT5IONT-I Fanless Dual Core 1.8GHz Atom ION2 Mini-ITX Board with USB 3.0 I intend if possible to use a case with an external power supply Operating System Windows 7 which flavour is recommended the full professional version or the home version? are there advantages to the 64 bit version also. I probably will use EAC for ripping and probably Musicmonkey for playing. Soundcard Asus Xonar Essence STX Small to medium 40GB SSD to hold Operating System etc to be augmented at a future date to include a second larger SSD to hold actual current FLAC files for playing. I presume I could in the first instance use the optical output from the ASUS sound card to connect to my DAC within my Arcam CD Player is this correct? I will eventually purchase a separate DAC probably a musical fidelity and then connect through to my HiFi amplification in the traditional way. I have also been considering a Vortebox for ripping CD's etc into .flac files and for archive storage of .flac files Logitech Squeezebox touch for control