Well, yes your fears are somewhat justified, there is some work involved to set up and maintain a music server mainly. Its worth it though. It will totally change how you listen to and explore music.

Squeezebox Touch and squeezeserver on a computer of choice is the way to start. Add a 1.5 Gb or higher USB drive to rip to and another for backup. I like Seagate drives. They have been fast and reliable and the backup software that come loaded on them works well. Yes make sure you keep backups!!! Things can happen, especially at first.

Rip to lossless .wav using Windows Media Player for an easy PC ripping solution that works well. Just make sure you start the rip manually after all the metadata is set correctly. Don't use autorip or the first track will likely be missing metadata tags in the header and have to be redone to fix. Get the tags right the first time before ripping. If you think you will want or have to go back later and change or add metadata tags manually, use lossless .flac format for editable tags, not .wav.

That's the jist of it. Good luck.

mapman October 28, 2011 18:28

Thanks for the feedback.

Is your Squeeze box connected through the DAC? Do you find streaming from the Bridge easier than the Squeezebox? higher quality?

mutterback October 28, 2011 09:06

Squeezebox touch is great entry and easy to use.

I love my PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC and bridge (wirelessly fed hi rez files from a usb hard drive that connects to my Netgear wireless router). Use my iPad and "elyric" app to run all music.

podeschi October 20, 2011 18:14