Nightmares, headaches, and a couple of empty bottles of scotch...

[goraman]

Well as some of you may remember I made the major change,looseing 1000 CD's and as menny records by ripping to apple lossless my colection and useing an apple tv grossly modded to become a music server into a stand alone DAC.and dismantaling a lead shot filled rack with my TT ,phono stage ect.. and fitting it all under the 65 inch DLP TV.
Since then I have run into so menny issues.
I got an external hard drive 1.5 terra bites and begain ripping only to find after 50 cd's the rest of my colection defaulted to my 200 gig lap top hard drive filling it up.
Seems my defualt setting was kicking out the external drive.
I had gotten a virus from a free down load testing my lap top for slow preformance.This caused menny problems.

So I got a new 640gig hard drive and loaded it with a new windows 7 operating system getting rid of vista once and for all.

While fighting this fight I sent the Apple to an ebay guy who uses a pata to sata adapter and loads the apple soft ware to a 500gig hard drive but didn't re secure the drive leaveing it to shift around inside dureing shipping.

When it showed up it didn't work at all,seems it came unplugged from the IED ribbon cable.In replaceing it and trying to fit it all back with not enough room I ran a case screw throw the propritary cable that shifted in the way makeing it useless.The cable is made by foxxconn of china to apples specs and can not be purchased by mortal man.The ebay guy explained the cable must also be modifide by drilling a pin hole precicley where the brass contact is molded inside with a dimond bit dremmal tool,got that and did it.
I removed the rubber pad blocking all the holes and the glue to alow for better cooling and reduce heat, I used longer screws and nylon pillers to open up some space inside for cooling and to be able to secure the hard drive and ribbon cable.Then added rubber feet to allow for better cooling.

I reripped all my cd's to the new large laptop drive and went to sync it to the apple and Nortons anivirus would keep turning off the ports and diableing my wifi after 40 gigs EVEN WHEN TURNED OFF!!!

So I deinstalled the new Norton 2011 anti virus and installed Kaspersky antivirus and everthing synced perfactly.

After 3 hours of musical bliss I began to smell the acrid sent of burning electronic componates.
I looked up to see white/ grey smoke comming from my new Little Dot DAC1 and turned off the power to everthing at the power conditioner to find my new DAC compleatly reeking of smoke and needing to be sent back for replacement.

Anyone have a simaler story?
I have gone through a 5th of scotch and a bottle of Crown Royal thus far.
And I'm thinking of takeing up Haroin...

[Alex_UK]

Sorry to hear of your woes, Jeff. Can't say I've had such a nightmare experience, but in my opinion, computer audio is nowhere near as simple as it should be! I've had all sorts of niggly problems (mainly with itunes, to be fair, but also with hard drives and AV software as well as other music server software including Firefly and Twonky, network issues, especially wireless have also proved to be a pain) in the past, and this is why I've largely turned my back on computer audio for home use - other than to stream Spotify to my Caiman DAC which seems to be trouble-free whichever laptop I've used. I still rip everything to a 1tb HDD but all I then do really is stick it on my ipod for portable use, or for background listening. Most of the time it is just easier and more fulfilling to pull the CD or LP from the rack - but then I know that is exactly why you did what you did, so good luck resolving your problems. :( (And not just the drinking problem! :eyebrows:)

[Techno Commander]

Norton is renown for being a pain in the arse.

[goraman]

Sorry to hear of your woes, Jeff. Can't say I've had such a nightmare experience, but in my opinion, computer audio is nowhere near as simple as it should be! I've had all sorts of niggly problems (mainly with itunes, to be fair, but also with hard drives and AV software as well as other music server software including Firefly and Twonky, network issues, especially wireless have also proved to be a pain) in the past, and this is why I've largely turned my back on computer audio for home use - other than to stream Spotify to my Caiman DAC which seems to be trouble-free whichever laptop I've used. I still rip everything to a 1tb HDD but all I then do really is stick it on my ipod for portable use, or for background listening. Most of the time it is just easier and more fulfilling to pull the CD or LP from the rack - but then I know that is exactly why you did what you did, so good luck resolving your problems. :( (And not just the drinking problem! :eyebrows:)

The drinking is never a problem,it's effortless and prevents vilolent outbursts ageinst defenceless yet uncoapritive computer gear.

[Ali Tait]

Know how you feel Jeff, I've had a few problems myself, but all seems well at he moment. I agree that it's not yet as simple as it could be, but that will require time and investment from the major players.
To be fair,most problems I've had were down to software problems with the Touch, which now seem to be resolved. Keep it as simple as possible seems to be the way to go,though I'm going to break that rule and get a mini pc to run squeezecenter to see if it improves sound quality,as it is puported to do,so I'm sure there's plenry more cursing to come!

[DSJR]

What's all this guff I read on HDD about I-tunes, "Time machine" and being able to restore your music files after a computer failure?

I prefer the tactile approach of LP's and CD's and despite having loads downloaded and saved on DVD's, I've yet to bother about a full streaming solution. I do admit that CD's saved on the computer can often sound better played back from this than an equivalent cheaper CD player.

One day, I'll have the spare cash and the desire to do the streaming thing properly.

[MartinT]

I work in IT and I know not to trust file storage. I have a three-way synchronisation going on in two locations and even then I'm very careful with my backups. I simply am not interested in converting my precious collection to files, the management is too much hassle.