Obtaining Nirvana – iTunes + ReadyNAS + iPOD

[Anonymous]

I have three basic requirements for my music which I don’t feel is that unreasonable:

1) To be able to play lossless quality audio on my ipod and display the album artwork.
2) To be able to stream lossless quality audio around the house to the various iTunes enabled PC’s and

Mac’s via Netgear ReadyNAS NV’s
3) To be able to stream video and audio on my PS3*.

OK – so you think that would be simple – but no – so maybe I’m not as clever as I thought I was 🙂

Firstly, I ripped all my 1000 + CD’s to FLAC using dbpoweramp. That’s fine – and iTunes will play the FLAC files from the ReadNAS using (presumably) the onthefly FLAC convertor. PROBLEM – It doesn’t display the album artwork! – Now before someone tells me that FLAC doesn’t support artwork – my understanding is that the latest version does and having first used dbpoweramp to do the rip and then tag and rename to clean up missing artwork, etc. I thought this would be OK.

Secondly – knowing full well that the FLAC files won’t play on my iPOD, I then chose to recode all the FLAC files again using dbpoweramp – into Apple Lossless. So that went well – and I could then play the resultant files in iTunes locally and the artwork also displayed OK. PROBLEM – the Apple Lossless files will not work when trying to stream to other machines via the Firefly iTunes Server. iTunes can see the files, but they refuse to play. Further investication led me to run the dbpoweramp m4a optimizer over all the files – as the optimiser “moving the meta data to the beginning, whilst optionally creating a hint track (used for streaming m4a over Apple Airtunes).” Unfortunately, this made absolutely no difference.

Bottom line – I can play the files in iTunes locally, but they will not play when trying to stream off the ReadyNAS.

So, I’m stumped – I visited this whole sceanrio once before, gave up and just converted everything into MP3’s which has been working fine for the last year or so – but whilst my music objectives (as above), I really don’t want to have to store numerous file types. As it is I’ve just had to invest in another ReadyNAS so that I can keep my music/video files seperate to my personal/work stuff 🙂

Any help, suggestions, ideas or comments would be more than welcome….

* As far as the PS3 goes – well – I’m not too bothered about that right now although as a footnote I can say that after many trials of formats, applications I now have the perfect setup using the latest version of Nero Recode (8) – to generate (from a previously ripped commercial DVD) high quality streaming movies without jumping through hoops 🙂

[rpedde]

@digitalworkshop wrote:

PROBLEM – the Apple Lossless files will not work when trying to stream to other machines via the Firefly iTunes Server. iTunes can see the files, but they refuse to play. Further investication led me to run the dbpoweramp m4a optimizer over all the files – as the optimiser “moving the meta data to the beginning, whilst optionally creating a hint track (used for streaming m4a over Apple Airtunes).” Unfortunately, this made absolutely no difference.

This should work. Not sure why it doesn’t right now, but I’m tracking it down. I’ve got a sample file.

– Ron

[Anonymous]

Further to my original question, the guys at dBpoweramp responded stating that the Apple Lossless Converter Codec was reverse enginereed as Apple do not provide any documentation or support to 3rd party developers. Their suggestion was to convert all my FLAC files to WMA Lossless and then using iTunes, import them using Apple Lossless.

This worked fine – although after having imported everything (yes I know I should have run a batch test 🙂 ) I noticed that all my artwork was missing. Researching this further this was because I had originally used the RipStation software which doesn’t embed the artwork but instead saves it as ‘folder.jpg’ file within each and every folder.

Thinking that I was going to either have to re-rip or at least go through and manually tag everything – I was told by the dBpoweramp guys to use their ID Tag Update Codec which will update/embed the artwork in batch mode.

So – right now I think I have the problem solved – I’ll only know when everything has been moved across to the NAS. Anyway – just thought you might like to know.

[rpedde]

@digitalworkshop wrote:

Further to my original question, the guys at dBpoweramp responded stating that the Apple Lossless Converter Codec was reverse enginereed as Apple do not provide any documentation or support to 3rd party developers. Their suggestion was to convert all my FLAC files to WMA Lossless and then using iTunes, import them using Apple Lossless.

This worked fine – although after having imported everything (yes I know I should have run a batch test 🙂 ) I noticed that all my artwork was missing. Researching this further this was because I had originally used the RipStation software which doesn’t embed the artwork but instead saves it as ‘folder.jpg’ file within each and every folder.

Thinking that I was going to either have to re-rip or at least go through and manually tag everything – I was told by the dBpoweramp guys to use their ID Tag Update Codec which will update/embed the artwork in batch mode.

So – right now I think I have the problem solved – I’ll only know when everything has been moved across to the NAS. Anyway – just thought you might like to know.

Ooooh… so alac changed. Nice. Wonder how long it will take to reverse that (again!)

[Author]

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