Gosh, you're having a bad day, Richard :-)

Lots of things here for me to type, none of them on the ostensible subject of this thread, the D33. Never mind. Can I just wrap up the D33 conversation by saying that I have, this afternoon, just spent a little under 5 hours playing music from my SBT/D33, and have thoroughly enjoyed the lot. I only stopped 'cos it was tea-time. That - 5 hours of enjoying actively listening to music, loud-ish, from a digital source - has never really happened to me before. The D33 has a deeply rooted, architectural quality to its sound that just anchors whatever you're playing in a believable reality. Very nice.

Anyway...

For the record, I thought I'd write down my network setup. That's not to disagree with Martin, I haven't done it - or been able to do it - his way, so I have no idea if mine is optimal, but it's what I have. So here it is, nothing fancy...

Upstairs in the study is the PC at which I'm typing. This is an almost-new Win7/Core i7/8GB machine with two SATA drives and an SSD for boot. (Hi-spec, but my other hobby is digital photography which eats PC horsepower like nothing you've seen, hence the recent upgrade from the old XP box). This is connected via CAT5 to an 8-port switch, a Netgear FS108. Also attached to that switch are my BT Homehub wireless modem/router, my son's PC, my solar controller (via a long CAT5 through the roof to the airing cupboard :-)) and my NetGear ReadyNAS Duo NAS drive.

There's a long run of CAT5 from that router, via wall sockets and in-wall cable, down to my living room, where it goes into another Netgear switch - I think it's an FS105 - to which are hooked the TV, the BD player, the Humax HDD recorder and the Squeezebox Touch. The SBT feeds the D33 over a copper co-ax SPDIF cable.

SBT setup...

When I bought the SBT, I had no music on my computer, so I'd be starting from scratch. Oh, a couple of disks that I'd ripped in WMP for an old MP3 player, but that's all. So, since (because of my son's need for a talking-box-app that only runs on an iThing) we had to have the iTunes software installed on the PC to support his iThings, it seemed reasonable to use iTunes for the job. So I created a directory - E:\Media - pointed iTunes at it and started ripping CDs, using Apple Lossless. Whether I'd recommend any non-apple person to go down this route, I dunno. It has significant drawbacks if you think that you're going to be able to use iTunes to "organise and manage" your library. But we digress. The CDs that wouldn't rip cleanly in iTunes (old and knackered, mostly) I ripped to FLAC with EAC (which is where the fun begins because iTunes won't recognise them) in the same directory structure. So I've only got the one top-level directory to back up.

So the Squeezebox arrived, I installed the server software, pointed it at E:\Media, and off it went. In the server setup I enabled the iTunes integration package - named by someone with a sense of humour - which sort of works. iTunes playlists get imported, and "last played" - etc - dates get updated from squeezeserver back into iTunes, so you can see what you've been playing. Or at least, those parts of what you've been playing that are supported in iTunes (ie no FLAC).

The other significant squeezeserver setup change I made was to stop it compressing when it streams to the client, and just have it pump PCM over the network.

And that's about it. It seems to work for me. The iPhone app is a bit rubbish and needs restarting occasionally - reacts badly to interrupted wifi links - but it's free. There's one on the Appstore called iPeng which claims to be better but costs £6.99.

One question you asked was why does the SBT need its own server, and can't use WMP? The question you're actually asking, I think, is why it doesn't use the DLNA architecture. They're stuck in a technological cul-de-sac for backwards compatibility reasons. The slimserver (Logitech bought Slim) pre-dates DLNA, I think, so they have their own architecture; to change it now would break compatibility with their existing user base. The server is actually a lot brighter, I think, than the average dumb DLNA server - Slim's server does a lot more managing of lists, multiple players, etc - so you could argue that to switch to a DLNA architecture would be a major functional regression. It would also invalidate all the 3rd-party software ecosystem that's out there.

That brings me to my major observation - and the root of your complaint - about the Squeezebox system, and that's the software. I am - or was before I got promoted to somewhere I could do less damage - a professional software engineer, and the Squeezeserver is categorically not a professional job. It's a rather typical open-source software effort, where well-meaning, enthusiastic and talented engineers create bits and bobs to meet their own requirements, often in obsessive detail. For free.

I guess that, from Logitech's perspective, if you have a bunch of talented engineers who will work on your product for nothing, you'd be foolish if you didn't let them. It seems - from a little observation alone - that Logitech do the clients in-house, and that the server is a community effort. That means, on the plus side, that there's a huge community of Squeezebox enthusiasts out there who will be very willing to help you, but on the minus side it means that the documentation (at least) is so crap that you do, in fact, need to go ask them.

I may have had a sheltered life, but I don't think I've ever encountered another consumer product which uses and relies on open-source to quite the extent that the Squeezebox products do. Having dealt with (a different bit of) Logitech as a supplier, I'm really surprised that they have embraced this way of working. Personally it drives me nuts[1], I'd rather have the product Just Work and be properly documented, but I can certainly see that to have developed (and to support) that server with an in-house team would have cost a significant amount of money, which would have to be recouped in product cost. Swings and roundabouts....

NAS drive. At the moment, my NAS drive - dual 1TB, RAID - is used for backup only. I turn it on, backup to it, and turn it off again. As luck would have it, it's about the only NAS drive on which the Squeezeserver software is "officially" supported, so I could install it and administer it over its web interface, and have it serve music from the "backup" copy of the music database. I don't know yet if I want to do that - the iTunes integration becomes much clumsier and I don't know if I care about that or not yet. My plan is to give it a few months, then see how I feel.

Hope some of this is useful to someone.

Cheers
Pete

[1] I was about to write that this is why I won't have Linux in the house - I used to do a UNIX Sysadmin role and I don't want to do it at home too - but then I realised that I have a TV, a BD player, a HDD recorder - that I know of - that are Linux boxes... :-(

Ah, now I understand why you're unhappy. I think I have good news. With the greatest respect, Richard, I think you may have missed a bit...

On the main library view, where you can browse by artist, album, song, there's also a "Folders" view. That's the filesystem view, as seen on disk. That lets you do exactly what you want to do. I used that one when I've just added something new, because the metadata scanner runs in the background and takes an hour or two to see new stuff when it's been added. I think that's your bunny if you want to browse your filesystem.

Disagree with you about the metadata, though. Being able to play all tracks by one artist with a single click, for example, is a real boon...

Rescanned and result is the same.

Random listing of albums, most own mp3s missed, part of folders listed (one has 93 commercial CDs in it and 3 are listed).

What you suggested, Pete, doesn't do anything differently, I'm afraid. The selection appears to be totally random.

Have emailed Pete to take this discussion off the forum.

Edited by user 22 June 2012 11:09:34(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thanks, guys.

With help in particular from Pete_W here and some very useful input from garymc over at Logitech SB forum plus a lot of resetting & rescanning, I'm nearly there!

The Music Folder is now a pretty good replica of the PC one and the few folders that still need sorting out can wait.

Nothing to do with Hifi I know.... I use Gimp (shareware for those who don't know it)for all my digital photography manipulation, and most of holiday and special interest stuff I then have printed in A3 photobooks from Photobox. Not found anything missing so far from Gimp, though the help file could be a bit better. Is there anything that the current version of Photoshop does (I've got an old version 5.0) that Gimp doesn't that would make it worth my buying?

Just thought I'd put a postscript on this thread, in case anyone actually comes along and reads it...

The rather negative review in the last issue of HFC notwithstanding, I remain very fond of this DAC, and seem to fall in love with it again every time I play it.

However, recent experience does seem to suggest that it reacts quite strongly to its supports, and has what we might politely term "system synergy" issues.

I took it across to visit a new friend - also a member of this forum, whom I shan't name - 'cos he wanted a listen, so it got plugged into a system comprising a ARC Ref 3 pre-amp, CJ 350SA power amp and some SF Cremonas. Very nice kit. The DAC was plonked on top of the Denon DVD player that was used to feed it S/PDIF bits from CD, and also to a Squeezebox Touch.

Frankly, it sounded pretty grim. A very lightweight balance, forward, and with what I can only describe as an electronic edge. I'd taken the Power Plant Premier with me, so we plugged that in (just for the DAC) and that improved matters - as it almost always does - but not to the point of actually making it sound any good. Somewhere further up this thread I've probably used words like "architectural" and "solid" to describe the D33's sound, what we heard that day was the complete antithesis of that. Using my vdH carbon cables to the ARC again helped a little, but the balance remained fundamentally somehow wrong.

We played around with supports - took it off of the player and sat it on a solid table - Alphason, I think, with lead-filled legs - and that just made matters worse. We also tried various bizarre feet that my friend had in his drawer. Frankly, it barely - and I'm being charitable - sounded better than the analogue outputs of the Squeezebox.

I have no idea what was going on, and in a couple of hours we didn't get to the bottom of it.

If that had been a product dem in a shop, I'd have walked out after 10 minutes, saying "don't bother".

I mentioned synergy - there are very distinct "voicing" choices between my friend's system and mine. His has been chosen and voiced - deliberately - to give a slightly distant "concert hall" perspective, with the music falling mostly behind the plane of the speakers, with a beautifully even tone. Mine's more or less the complete opposite, I seem to have focussed in my choices on freedom of dynamic expression, rather than on tonal quality, with the result that the presentation is much more "close", rather closer to the microphone's view of the singer's tonsils than the audience's view. This would appear, perhaps, to play to the Arcam's strengths. But I struggle to believe that that's all that lies between the "architectural" sound at home, and the lightweight sound in the away match.

Anyway. I remain very happy, but I would suggest that a home dem is mandatory for this DAC. You might hear what I hear at home - and what several members of the Hifi press seem to have heard - or you might hear what I heard at my friend's house, which more closely matches what HFC's reviewer appears to have heard.

I heard some 24 bit files at my dealer last week fed from a Mac Mini and controlled via an app on the iPad, some wonderfully clear, 3D music coming form the Arcam D33 DAC and A38 amp via Proac 140's. 24 bit recordings is such an uplift over 16 bit it was really an eye (ear) openner !