Your Help with Media Player

i ended up with an oppo 103 after trying a western digital wd live media player. probably needless to say, the oppo's an impressive piece of machinery which sounds great--you really would need to spend a lot more money to get much better. that said, i miss the much better UI and ability to create playlists of the squeezebox and the fact that with the squeezebox you access music files from the player screen itself, rather than from the tv monitor. however, the oppo does handle big hard drives effortlessly and might actually entice me to start watching dvds again

Sounds like there's either a problem with the wireless network or the computer SqueezeServer is running on. Lots of people here use Squeezeboxes and other music streamers both wireless and wired with no problems.

So, you might want to look into the state of wireless interference in your area (ei, change the channel of the router). The squeezebox could be too far from the router, also. Maybe it's time to upgrade the router. Is the computer running squeezeserver loaded down with processes, crapware, etc? How far is the computer from the router? Is it wired or wireless?

As far as devices that your could replace the Squeezebox with, Auralic is coming out with the Aries Mini that supports both USB and internal Hard drives, DSD, 24/384 audio, Sabre DAC and Femto clock. Are you sitting down? All that for the incredible price of $399! That looks real tasty to me.

Example: Yesterday, I backed up my music library over the network (almost 2TB, wireless), while streaming wirelessly to four squeezeboxes, two Sonos units and a PlayFi device, downloaded a game while my wife was playing online and never had a dropout. Yes, I'm bragging a little.

You cannot plug in a hard drive but take a look at the Roku 3 for wireless FLAC streaming.

the oppo looks like very viable, but overkill for me since i don't need its bluray/streaming functions. someone suggested offline something like the western digital wd live media player, which i could connect to my tv and avr, plug in a hard drive and go. could be the tool for the job--anybody used it?
thanks again for the suggestions.

How do you access your music with the Oppo? From the face, or do you need a monitor?

My Oppo 93 handles my 2tb hard drives.

You can use a tablet. My Samsung has a usb port on it that you can plug an external HD into. You may need to buy an adapter, but its not expensive. If you want to see exactly how its done, there's several videos on youtube.

I run PLEx media server concurrently alongside Logitech MEdia Server. Both libraries build from teh same set of music files on the server (I use a Gateway laptop with external USB drives). I use FLAC format currently but used .wav in teh past with SB alone, however FLAC tags are much more versatile. PLEX works with .wav as well but does not do album art with .wav and teh multimedia exprience via PLEX is much more limited with .wav versus .FLAC. I also recently bought a PLEX Pass subscription which does a nice job of automatically recognizing and tagging music files with minimal manual effort.

I use Logitech Squeezebox Touch and Radio devices to access Logitech server. Also Squeezepad software on Apple Ipad.

I use Plex app on Amazon Fire TV box and other devices to access Plex server. So I am able to use Plex and Logitech Squeeze systems concurrently with no problems.