Month: March 2023

Tuesday, March 21st 2023… Happy Spring/Vernal Equinox D+1…

I’m excited that it’s the second day of spring. I like the time change! I’m going to have to bring the bike in to Richards this weekend with the new wheels, tubes, tires, and have everything tuned up.

I finally have ripping working on the M50, the procedures are understood, and the external drive is set up. It seems so slow… I’m used to speed ripping, and this is single speed. 20min per disk. However, it’s better than nothing. I don’t think the Vault 2i is any better. The nice thing is that it’s using a 8Tb HDD. The problem will be when I am approaching 6Tb. This is going to take a while. I may have to take it off and back it up soon, since I am starting to get into “I wouldn’t want to lose this…” territory.

-Rat

Thursday, March 16th 2023… If at first you don’t succeed… keep on suckin’ till you do succeed…

Gotta love a good “Three Stooges” quote. Well, I finally got the M50 to both have an external device and rip a CD. I just need to figure out a bunch of odds and ends now from a procedure perspective. I feel like dancing. The exFAT format worked in lieu of the FAT32 format. They are supposed to be similar, but I wasn’t confident. It’s not ideally what I would want, but at least I now have external storage. I am still going to try and work out how to get my external storage addressable via the network. Currently, it can only be seen via the M50. I now have to get my Carver and speaker fixed. Hopefully, it won’t cost too much.

-Rat

Monday, March 13th 2023 … I had a brainstorm.. or was it drizzle?

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I was running out of outlets, so I just left a couple of components on instead of turning them off – this is because, once upon a time I decided that switched plugs were the way to go. The long and the short of it is – I am short on non-switched outlets. Have to fix that. So, I think my amp had some thermal issues, since I cranked up the MTBF numbers. I don’t see anything fried. But one of the sides of the amp seems like its dying. I pulled the amp out to let it cool off. Hopefully it will return to operation. If not, I’ll have to troubleshoot it.

I think I am going to try a couple of different tactics on the storage side. I investigated FAT32 and found that it’s a “USB” format and really has a 32GB file size limitation, but on the partition size, a 3TB upper limit. I am going to look at my buddies NAS and see how it’s set up and mimic that setup. Also, I’m going to try and use a single drive, formatted to FAT32 and hook it directly to the M50 to see what it does.

-Rat

Monday, March 6th 2023… Nope, not surprised…

Nothing works like it’s supposed to. I was supposed to be able to rip a CD from my NAD M50 streamer to my NAS drive which I configured last week. First of all, my iTunes server that was installed, works like advertised. I never knew that there was such a thing – nice. The Twonky media server looks into the iTunes and indexes it in Twonky as a DLNA compatible file. Both work. What I still have to figure out is how to keep iTunes from changing it’s .ini directory hierarchy on the C drive on the laptop, or my backup device on a separate drive. I need it to cement it to the NAS drive. Also, I need to figure out how to rip CD’s to my NAS attached to the M50. One thing at a time 🙂

-Rat

Thursday, March 2nd 2023…Sometimes, even I am surprised…

So, I got the new NAS drive and set it up on the network yesterday. I added Twonky and iTunes server. Twonky is a DLNA-compliant media server that runs on the Western Digital platform. It will, if directed also reach into iTunes and index all your iTunes stuff and allows you to play music and whatever on your DLNA receiver. In my case, on my Pioneer Elite SC-72 Receiver (glorified pre-amp). I can actually send music there and it automatically plays. I can also push it to my NAD M-50 streamer. It works “just like downtown”. Amazing. I am hoping that I can figure out how to rip CD’s to the NAD and consequently to the NAS drive. That’s my next hurdle. iTunes server is supposed to allow you to share or play your iTunes content on other devices without the need for a MAC. We shall see…

-Rat