The music server was a problem. I'd rather spend my dosh on hi-fi then more computer bits and I don't want a PC running 24 hours a day. My original Asus EEE PC 701 came to the rescue. It's meagre 4 Gb drive is only really big enough for the OS (Ubuntu) so a USB 250 Gb external hard drive was added. Installed Samba to share the drive and copy songs and the Squeezebox server. Playing either FLAC or Apple Lossless consumes about 40% of the CPU. (It can cope with 192kHz FLACs by the way.)
The first problem was I don't want the automout system, so the drive needs to be added to /etc/fstab. Its also vital to get the permission correct or the Squeezeboxserver user can't read the drive. The drive was formatted VFAT and the whole thing networked via 85 Mbs Homeplug.
iTunes on a Mac has been used to rip, all Apple Lossless of course. There are also a few FLACs around. I would of used FLAC throughout but I like the automation that I got from iTunes. It can be set to automatically rip and eject the CD afterwards. (I know other programmes must do this as well but I was too eager to get going.)
I've used DirSyncPro to incrementally copy the music to the server as I rip it. This process has caused (and is still causing) a few headaches since it uses the file's time stamp to control the syncing. The problem here is the Mac's filesystem is HFS+ and the FAT filesystem don't get on 100%. FAT for reasons only known to Bill Gates and his cronies rounds the time to an even number of seconds. DirectSyncPro has options to get around this (and daylight saving time problems).
The next step is upgrade the server to a HP ProLiant Microserver so I can increase the harddrive space (and back-up!).
