[Derrick Fawsitt[_2_]]

For those posters here who are not only involved in Music but also Music
in connection with IT, can you help me with the following query and I
apologise if some here feel this post is somewhat more suitable for the
IT newsgroups, needless to say, I have also posted it in just such a
newsgroup.
I have converted a double garage to an excellent Music Room with a Quad
system using Quad 989 Electrostatic Speakers. I have the usual Library
of Classical CD's residing on shelves and my PC, mostly used for office
business, is in the same room. The room has the type of PVC Skirting
Board that can contain wires and therefore I can if I wish connect my PC
to the Audio system but have not yet done so.

Having the need now to update my PC I was considering building or buying
a PC that could not only manage my Media, but in fact store most of my
CD's so that I can find a piece of music very quickly and even arrange a
concert for my friends. I did in fact previously install Music Label in
order to catalogue my collection of CDs but all it did was tell me if I
had a particular work, I still had to "find it" on my shelves, not
always easy.

I should now like to have a very high spec PC with an enormous hard
drive and masses of RAM that could, (in theory), store my entire
collection but also allow me to arrange quick accessibility to my
collection for immediate playback. I would also need to retain some
capacity for ordinary business and office needs. I must add, I don't
envisage editing or composing music, I only want my PC, when needed, to
access my audio system to manage and store music etc.

Can I ask you to help me in building or even buying such a PC with a
spectacular spec that would fulfil the above criteria.
--
Derrick Fawsitt

[Arny Krueger]

"Derrick Fawsitt" wrote in
message

Can I ask you to help me in building or even buying such
a PC with a spectacular spec that would fulfil the above
criteria.

You don't need anything special in the way of a high performance PC in order
to store a lot of CD audio. The cheapest desktop on the Dell website would
do the storage and management job. If you don't want to mess with adding
internal hard drives, just add a lot of external ones via USB. As far as
management software goes, iTunes is about as good as any when used to load
your existing CD collection and organize it.

If you want top quality audio for your stereo system, a commodity PC's
on-board audio interface will come up a little short. Ideally, you'd add an
internal PCI audio interface such as the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 or better
yet, their 24/192 card.

[Eeyore]

Derrick Fawsitt wrote:

I should now like to have a very high spec PC

Why ?

You certainly don't need one to do what you want.

If you value sound quality, do seriously consider getting an external 'sound
card' with professional specs and avoid the use of 3.5mm (or 1/8" as some
Americans erroneously call them) 'mini-jacks' like the plague.

Graham

[Eeyore]

Derrick Fawsitt wrote:

Can I ask you to help me in building or even buying such a PC with a
spectacular spec that would fulfil the above criteria.

Your 'music indexing' and playing PC will need to be in the listening room. The
spec is very light and you'd be best off with a fanless PC (they do exist) to
avoid noise.

http://www.stealthcomputer.com/littlepc_fanless.htm
http://www.deltatronic.de/int/quiet_pc.html
etc....

Ideally it's an application for a diskless workstation in fact. Look
particularly at PCs based on mini-ITX mobos that happen also to be low power
consumption and therefore require little cooling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

The music files should be in another place to remove the hard drive noise.
Rather than use a PC for this, you'd probably be best off with NAS drives
(network attached storage). These will work with many operating systems btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

Graham

[Derrick Fawsitt[_2_]]

In message , Eeyore
writes


Derrick Fawsitt wrote:

Can I ask you to help me in building or even buying such a PC with a
spectacular spec that would fulfil the above criteria.

Your 'music indexing' and playing PC will need to be in the listening room. The
spec is very light and you'd be best off with a fanless PC (they do exist) to
avoid noise.

http://www.stealthcomputer.com/littlepc_fanless.htm
http://www.deltatronic.de/int/quiet_pc.html
etc....

Ideally it's an application for a diskless workstation in fact. Look
particularly at PCs based on mini-ITX mobos that happen also to be low power
consumption and therefore require little cooling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

The music files should be in another place to remove the hard drive noise.
Rather than use a PC for this, you'd probably be best off with NAS drives
(network attached storage). These will work with many operating systems btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

Graham

Sorry, I have been away and therefore did not see your kind advice in
response to my query.
I think the above confirms the general consensus of opinion I have
received so far and I will now pass this to the chap who is supposed to
be building my PC for me.
Thank you all again for your time and trouble.
--
Derrick Fawsitt