Linn DS, and multiple MAC OS machines

[simoncn]

(05-06-2012 18:33)minidravid Wrote:  Hi, I am a newbie and was pointed to this site by the LINN forum.
I have 2 Apple machines (MAC Pro and IMAC) with music on then both. I am planning to rip my CDs onto an external hard drive and connect it to the IMAC. I have a LInn DS and want to be able to play the music resident on the Mac Pro, IMAC and external drive on the LInn DS as well other (capable) devices on the netwrok.
I also want to be able to control the music playback from both computers which I plan to do through Kinsky

Would like tio know what I need to download / install on which computer.
Also when ripping, which is preferable ALAC or FLAC?
Thanks in advance

You need to download and install MinimServer 0.31 on both the Mac Pro and iMac. See this page for details of how to do this. If you already have Java installed on these machines, scroll down to the section titled "Installing MinimServer on Mac OS X" and begin at step 3. If you don't already have Java installed, you should be able to install it by opening Java Preferences (in /Applications/Utilities) and clicking the Install button when prompted.

When you have MinimServer and Java installed, you can start MinimServer by clicking the MinimServer application icon. You can then start Kinsky (on the Mac or iPod/iPhone/iPad) and Kinsky will show a MinimServer icon in the Library section. If you have MinimServer running on multiple machines, you'll see MinimServer icons for each of these machines.

Playing music from an external drive (as well as music on the Mac's hard drive) is a bit tricky at the moment because MinimServer 0.31 can only support a single content directory (the top-level folder that contains all your music). This means that you'd need to stop and restart MinimServer when switching from music on the hard drive to music on the external drive (or vice versa). The next release of MinimServer (available soon) will remove this limitation by adding support for multiple content directories.

MinimServer, Kinsky and the Linn DS support both ALAC and FLAC, so you can rip your music to either of these formats. The quality is equivalent, but there are differences in what else you can do with these files. For example, if you want to play them in iTunes or download them to an iPod/iPhone/iPad, they'll need to be ALAC.

I hope this gives you all the information you need to get up and running with MinimServer. If you have any more questions, please post back here.