Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

You should only have to add them to the library once...

Someday I'm going to have to add pics of my PC based rig...

I'm in the Marco-camp, in the sense that I have a PC with a USB audio device (Waveterminal U24 also), which connects to a dCS Purcell, dCS Delius, then onto the preamp. My PC is a little (mebbe 2"H x 8"W x 12"D) serener fanless PC. Its got a NEC spinpoint drive, which make it one of the quietest PCs I have ever heard (really, "not heard"... its dead quiet). The spinpoint drive isn't huge--80GB--so the serener is connected to my home ethernet and accesses a Buffalo terastation stored in a closet. The Terastation is 4 x 250 GB drives, configured as RAID 5, so its pretty safe. If I blow up two drives at once, guess I'm reripping everything, but that prospect seems pretty minimal.

I do all my ripping using EAC in secure mode, which seems to be the best option for getting bit-perfect copies. I use a little script called iTunesEncode to interface between EAC and iTunes--EAC rips the wav file, gets tag information from CDDB, and passes it all off to iTunes to have the file converted into Apple Lossless (ALAC), with tags. I do have to add album art separately. I will typically then switch the iTunes library and convert the ALAC files to 128kbps AAC files for iPod use--means they are stored in a completely different subdirectory.

For controlling playback, I use a 10" viewsonic airpanel, a wireless touchscreen that has one trick only--it acts as a remote desktop under the PC RDP protocol. So, I can sit on the couch with the 10" touchscreen, see the iTunes interface, and select songs that are then pulled off the terastation by the PC and sent to the stereo.

The little serener is also sufficient horsepower to run slimserver, which is sort of integrated with iTunes. Slimserver is the "always on" side of the squeezebox system. I've got a bunch of Squeezebox 3s in other parts of the house that interact with the slimserver to deliver audio, from the common library to other stereos.

The SB3s are hooked up to systems that really aren't all that high-end, so I can't really comment on the fidelity of those. But, my serener->waveterminal u24->main rig sounds as good to my ear as my DV50S playing the same CD run through the same upsampling/DAC system.

My only complaints are that, with 1600 CDs, over 15,000 songs (stored both in ALAC and AAC) and 400 GB of tunes, iTunes runs a little slow. iTunes is also *not* my favorite user interface--I know Apple is supposed to do good UIs, but this isn't one of the better ones. No provision for looking at album art when you scroll through your albums... No play queue you can just "add" too as you scroll through your music... Sure, you can fake some of this stuff, but... I really need a better UI.

Dweller... you only have to do most of it once... The post on how I play the stuff is much different:

Turn on stereo.
Pick up airpanel.
Use library to conveniently select one of 15,000 songs.
Double tap.
Song plays.

While I wasn't actually playing music in the sixties, it can't have been easy finding LPs with only a black light to guide you and no short term memory... ;)

Option for the lib should (in PC version) be under Edit->Preferences->Advanced. If you check the button underneath that, it should, I believe, copy all the files into the iTunes directory when you apply the changes. It will take a while.

I've had really bad experiences with consumer drives, but the Buffalo seems to be holding up well. I've actually got another 1TB PowerVault 645N with RAID 5 in my garage as well... That one gives me more faith, but my god it's loud!

That said, I figure the CDs are sort of the backup-backup. Some people sell 'em... I like having them around, even if they are packed in Xerox boxes in an upstairs closet...

Actually, the name is Eric...

Good luck.

Frank, a lot of us swear by USB audio devices instead of sound cards. I don't have experience with a lot of the "pro" soundcards from the likes of RME and such, but you can minimize some of the jitter effects from reclocking inside a noisy computer by taking the audio out of the USB port and going directly into a DAC with a USB input or to a device like the M-Audio Transit, Waveterminal U24, or Empirical Audio Off Ramp. The reclocking is done in the external device. It may not be immune to reclocking jitter, but a lot of people's experience suggests USB devices are a better solution...

Having dCS gear, I am interested by the concept of a card with a word clock that can be sync'd with my upsampler/DAC, but haven't gone that route yet. Wish there was a USB device that did that...

>>>CAVEAT... After typing all this, I suddenly realized this assumes you have a PC, not a Mac. Similar principles should apply in the Mac environment, but this assumes a PC...

Let's see, you *copied* the songs from your main drive to the external drive, right? What format are they in?

Here's the general overview. iT has a library file that is basically an XML database that has info in it that has been read from the file tags (if available) and notes re: which playlist the song appears in, the playcount, etc. If you are OK with losing all that, you can just nuke the iT database file and then "add folders to library" specifying your external drive as the folder to add.

Here's why this might be a bad idea... You *will* lose all your playcounts and playlists. If you use a file format without tags--such as WAV--you will also lose all the album/artist/genre info, since that is *only* stored in the database for WAV files.

Here's another potential slip... iT has a feature called "keep my music organized" which will copy all the songs to where iT thinks they ought to be when you add them. So, even if you move them, if that flag is checked in iT, you will end up having all the files moved *back* to the iT default directory, which is probably *not* your external drive.

So what can you do? You can actually use the iT "keep organized" function to move the stuff for you. If you have copied the files, nuke 'em. Then reset the iTunes library to the external drive and check the "keep organized" button. That should result in all your files moving to the new external drive, organized into Artist/Album directories.

In the vein of potential slip ups... if you succeed in doing what you want, iT will have a new library where all the pointers are to a drive (specified by a letter). When your external drive is mounted, you need to make sure it appears as the same letter each time. Probably not that big a deal, but if you have a digital camera and turn that on before the external drive, you may find the digital camera memory as F: and the external drive as G:. If you turn them on in the reverse order, the external drive will be F: and teh camera G:. While you won't care, iT won't be able to find the files in one of those cases.