Can you use A hard drive to...

[Dave N.]

While were all on the subject of audio, I wanted to ask if any one has ever used an external hard drive to connect to a surround sound system thru a USB port to play back music files like MP3's?

I have a Yamaha surround system that has a USB port on the receiver that I can plug a flash drive into and play music from that. It works great but I never tried a external hard drive and wanted to put all my CD's on that to play thru the system. sort of use it like a music library.

Thanks

Dave

[Brad1]

USB port on a Yamaha receiver? Which model is that? Couldn't find anything about USB on the Yamaha webpage.

Anyway, IF you can use a USB jump drive, logic would state that you should be able to use a hard drive. Whether it's powered internally or externally, I do not know.

Which model Yamaha that has a USB port? Should be info in the manual. I doubt anyone can answer your question unless they know of that receiver, or see the manual.

I'm curious, now.

Brad1

[Dave N.]

Hey Brad,
It was a TIAB system from best buy

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8504692&type=product&id=1186004964722

here is the site for it. I had about 30 MP3's on my thumb drive and it shown up in the screen menu. I clicked on the folder with music and it started playing the songs through the system. It sounded awesome to say the least. This same system has the multi channel inputs to so I could add a SACD player to it to play the SACD music which I haven't tried yet but looking forward to doing that as well. If a hard drive will work on this system that means I could put my entire music library on and have that to use with out having to play CD, album or anything else. That is where I want to get too but we will see.

Dave

[Dave N.]

Brad,
The Yamaha receiver is a model HTR-6050 surround receiver and I read the manual tonight and it says it will only recognize 32 gigs or less from a fat 16 or 32 format. The files Up to 8 levels of directory hierarchy and 500 music files per directory.

It also says this unit will accept USB mass storage class devices except (USB hard drives using fat 16 or 32). That sucks...

Well I didn't know that when I bought a 320 gig WD eBook tonight and tried it. It didn't work so what I did do was plug the hard drive into my pioneer DV-400V DVD player with a USB port on the front of it and it recognized the hard drive and played a Gary Moore file with MP3's in it. Now I need to figure out how many files it will see, the 320 gig may just be too much so I might try a hard drive at around 20 gigs and see if that will work on the receiver.

What I'm trying to achieve is mass storage of all my music to not have to use CD or records any more. I cannot find an external device that will do this...

Do you know of any device that I can do this with?

Thanks

Dave

[Don Moose]

I like the Roku Soundbridge - leave your library on a server on your network and stream to it.

http://www.rokulabs.com

[Dave N.]

Hey Don,
I've never seen this before, tell me how you set it up?

It looks like something I might prefer as I have a wireless network and different audio systems in my home and this may just be the best route to getting jams to different rooms.

Thanks

Dave.

[Sock Puppet]

What I'm trying to achieve is mass storage of all my music to not have to use CD or records any more. I cannot find an external device that will do this...


There are dozens of "HDD Media enclosures" on ebay the let you add a large hard drive which gives mp3 and avi etc playback in a standalone box with a remote control. Some have card readers built in as well and would make a useful external USB2 drive but... I've yet to see one with a good menu system.

Something to look at,

S.

[Don Moose]

I have a linux box on the wired network with my library on it, subdivided by genre/artist/album (most of the USB-capable receivers I've seen demand a flat directory structure). I run an mt-daapd server daemon which points to the library and does periodic scans for newly-ripped material.

The Roku is on the wireless side, running 802.11b with WEP. That feeds one of the inputs on this $40 home theater speaker set I got at WallyWorld (the DVD feeds the other input). -- it can also run wired, if that works better for you.

When I have a few spare spending units, I'm gonna add identical setups in the master bedroom and the boy's bedroom.

I tried the linksys MP101 a while back (no longer in production, but available cheap on eBay). The user interface was better, but the server software was windows-only and sucked donkey balls.

The D-link unit was also a failure (last year).

The BEST feature of the Roku unit is that the server software is free and open-source, and it plays MP3, FLAC and OGG files. On the negative side, it doesn't (yet) play protected AAC (iTunes) files.

Hope this helps!

[Dave N.]

Hey, Thanks for the great tips guys.

The Roku seems like a cool way to get audio out to all my sound systems but then again the HDD is cool too. I wonder if they make a HDD with a digital out to run to the surround receiver? I have never seen a HDD before so something to to investigate but the Roku seems pretty neat to have as I have most my music on my PC.

Wow, so many new ways to get at the songs without a CD or Album.

Cool....

I am so tired of loading CD's and as cool as having my old album collection is, its a pain too.

Any other good ideas for music????

Thanks

Dave.

[Sock Puppet]

Not so much an idea but interesting non the less.

http://www.lim.com.au/PuppetMaster

- remote control of your computer via the bluetooth on your mobile phone.

I've tried this and it's impressive although my place is so small it's as easy to reach for the mouse.

The Pinnacle Soundbridge could be a cheap solution (around £60 at Maplin) - might get one of these to play with.

S.

.1594

[Don Moose]

Any other good ideas for music????

I'm hooked on the network players for use at home (and Winamp on shared drive at work).

My current concern is figuring out how to take it all with me in the car. The 160GB iPod is looking like the best way, right now.

[Dave N.]

Man.... technology getting intense....LOL

I am really having a hard time to try to decide which way to go now after all these cool new ideas :eek:

I didn't know about the new HDD media drives but a totally excellent idea. The soundbridge is a great way to go too. Seems some one could build a HDD box with a good LCD readout instead of having to use a TV to see the files would be good.

Combing the HDD media and a soundbridge woud be great, but only using only a storage drive would be awesome. Seems the folks in England or Europe have a better option than here in the states where companies are so damn worried about getting CR infringement.

I went to bestbuy to see about the Pinnacle and they said, sorry we had to stop selling those. I wonder why??? And they do not carry any HDD media devices either???

Well Ebay is my next stop. I do want to thank you guys for the good info.

I just wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes in audio/video setups within some folks homes? Technology just gets better.....:o

I hear they have a new battery that is 40 times better than the current types used right now. That sounds awesome.


Dave

[Steve Conner]

AFAIK, USB hard drives and USB memory sticks look identical from the computer's point of view. They're both "storage class devices".

My mom has a JVC stereo with a USB port for plugging things into. It worked fine when I tried it with my 20GB hard drive-based MP3 player, as well as a memory stick.

I personally am a bit of a computer geek, so I have a Linux-based home server. I installed mpd and phpMP on it, and put my old Delta-66 pro soundcard into it, and hooked it up to my stereo. It's in a different room, but because the Delta-66 has balanced outputs and my stereo is balanced too, it hardly matters. It gives great quality playback that I can control through a web browser from whatever computer happens to be on, and also streams internet radio as a bonus. I especially like that it plays all the weird formats like Ogg, FLAC and even uncompressed WAV, and should even work with 24-bit, though I've not tried it yet.

For times when I don't have a computer other than the server turned on, I managed to hook up a LCD display and keypad to the server's printer port, and control it through that, thanks to the lcdproc and lcd-stuff utilities. The only problem with this is that MP3 collections can grow truly enormous, and be hard to manage through a small LCD screen.

[Dave N.]

Hello Steve,
I wanted to ask about the Linux server, is it easier to use than a windows based server? I'm not familiar with servers but could learn.

The only other issue with running a server in my home is the power consumption, my wife is a green nut, not that it's a problem but she wants everything off when we are not at home. I always thought it’s not good to shut down servers due to file corruption but maybe if it’s a music or video server that wouldn't be too bad.

Dave

[Steve Conner]

Hi Dave,

I've no idea how the difficulty compares to Windows. It took me a lot of messing around to get it working, and programming is my day job, and I had previous experience with Linux and Solaris. Installing Ubuntu itself was pretty painless, but figuring out what extra packages I needed was a hassle.

I used an old low-end PIII to save power, and the total power consumption of my setup (server, DSL modem router and UPS) ended up as 50 watts. The server can be turned off, even though it has no monitor or keyboard, pressing the power button seems to make it shut itself down properly, with a cute "Thanks for using Linux!" banner on the remote LCD.

The only issue is convenience, since it takes several minutes to boot up again before it's ready to start serving things. I normally leave it on 24/7 since I use it for file backups and source code control both from home and work.

[Dave N.]

Hey Steve,
I just got a copy of Ubunto to use on a pc if I decide to go the route of a server but what extra software did you have to install to make your system work?

I'm trying to figure out a way to do all this including getting an older pc but installing a video card with a HDMI out and then a good sound card with a optical out for the audio.

Looks like there are these new media storage devices hitting the market but who knows just how good these are? :D

Thanks

Dave

[Steve Conner]

It would take me so long to try and figure out/remember what extra software I installed, that I'm not going to even try and make a full list. Here are a few I can think of:

Apache 2
PHP5
MySQL
(these three are preinstalled if you choose the LAMP Ubuntu installation, but stuff necessary for video and audio probably will be missing)

samba (for file sharing with Windows machines)

Development tools and headers (for compiling stuff from source)

mplayer (compiled from source with the legally dubious w32codecs bundle to play Windows Media movies, DivX, DVDs etc)

mpd
phpMP

envy24control (for controlling the Delta-66)

lcdproc (from source)
lcd-stuff (from source, I ended up hacking the source to add extra features and fix a few bugs)

and about 50 other things :|

PS: DVI and HDMI are pretty similar. You get DVI-to-HDMI adaptors. However, HDMI allows embedded digital audio, and I don't know if a video card is smart enough to do this, as it would need to appear as a soundcard too.

[Dave N.]

Hey Steve,
Thanks again on the info. I have been doing some reading over many forums and I have found that some folks are building home theater PC's using the new motherboards out with HDMI outputs and using 7.1 audio on the motherboards. These same folks are running MS vista media format and installing the LG brand Blu ray HD dvd burners so they can play both formats in 1080P

Also using dual sata 500 gig hard drives for video-audio storage.

This is a costly route but seems to have promise. Seems the era of computer home theater is rushing in more now than ever :D

I wonder though using vista seems a rather funky way to do home theater. I'm not a MS vista fan really, its not all that great a media system.


I wonder if any folks here have tried doing this new HTPC with HDMI out build?


Dave