Wireless Music Systems (READ ONLY ARCHIVE)

[NJDavid]

I’m in the process of digitizing my library of 2000 CDs onto a USB 2 TB drive and am looking for a player to access the music for a home stereo.  I can’t find my exact use case on the Logitech (or distributor) websites or in reviews.  I could use a bit of advice from current owners before I plunk down $300.

My preference is to connect the drive to a plain vanilla hardware NAS adaptor with a USB input– a cheapo job – this way the player and all the other devices in my home network can see the drive.  It looks like Logitech doesn’t allow that as I have to load their software onto an NAS device.  Can someone confirm that and that this is not an option?

Assuming the above is true then my other option is to connect the drive to the Squeezebox Touch directly via the USB port.  Is a 2TB drive formatted with a standard “music” folder too big for it to index?  How about a 1TB drive?  Will this strategy work?  If it does, is there any way for my windows 7 and XP PC’s to still access the music through my network at the same time its connected to the Touch?

Thanks very much in advance.

[Transporter]

I think the Touch is just what you are looking for. As for the NAS, I say stay as far away as possible from running SBS on an NAS. Yes you can have and use an NAS so all the files are in one place, but run SBS on a PC or other machine, not an NAS.

SBS allows you to tell it where the Music is. My preference is on a dedicated Media Server running Linux or Vortexbox which includes SBS. Vortexbox OS is free and they also sell the Vortexbox Appliance which is a turn key Media Server that just needs plugged in for it has SBS and a CD ripper inside it.

One can use a USB drive (make sure you have a second for backup only), but I think its best to use a regular SATA drive and USB for backup. Just my opinion from doing this for awhile.