About to build a new music server

[r042wal]

I am about to build a new music server for my audio system using a QNAP TS-251D. I have a couple of questions:

1. Will MinimServer scrape my existing music collection and organize title, artist, album, genre, etc? What about album art?

2. In MinimServer compatible with DSF file? I will be streaming to a PS Audio Bridge II network card.

3. Does MinimServer make my QNAP a DLNA / UPnP server after the installation?

Thanks in advance.

[simoncn]

Yes to all of these. For 1, MinimServer reads the tags in your files, so you need to have correctly tagged files.

[r042wal]

What about album art?

[r042wal]

(04-06-2022 08:06)simoncn Wrote:  Yes to all of these. For 1, MinimServer reads the tags in your files, so you need to have correctly tagged files.

What about album art?

[simoncn]

MinimServer has full support for album art (both embedded and in separate files), as described in this section.

[r042wal]

Thanks Simon. I have a new question. I will be rendering my DSF music files to a PS Audio Bridge II card. My understanding is the Bridge II can render .dsf files directly. Can I confirm that no transcoding should be taking place on the MinimServer and that the .dsf files are servered up as is? Thanks again.

[simoncn]

Confirmed. Transcoding must be specifed explicitly.

[Darcentric]

I like where this thread has started. I am also building a music server to store Rock Smith 2014 Remastered CDLC and Guitar Pro 8 files (mp3, mid, album art, and other supporting files). I am using an older Synology DS214, which was wiped clean last week. I am expecting lossless mp3 at 224kbps for play back. I see there are many posts on play quality. I suspect playback will have some latency and hardware recoding issues.

But my initial question is there a way to rip cd's directly with Minim or Minim2? Is it lossless?

Darcentric

[simbun]

Hi Darcentric,

MinimServer is "just" an audio server, it doesn't rip discs nor does it tag the music files, it just takes what you have, indexes it and makes it available to other components that implement the UPnP protocol.
Here's an overview of UPnP, and here's how MinimServer can help.

MinimServer has support for these audio formats, so it doesn't support MID files (although I guess they could be converted), and I'm not aware of a music server that does unfortunately.

MinimServer is very light on resources; I've run it on an rpi 3 for years serving over 1,300 albums and that's with it performing recoding in order to normalise volume.

If you're looking for a good ripper of Audio CDs then you can't go wrong with XLD for the mac, and for Windows EAC or CUERipper. If you want to use a single tool for ripping, tagging and converting then you'll probably want the dBpoweramp suite.

[r042wal]

I recently discovered my newly purchased Bridge II card will only do single layer DSD (DSD64). This present a problem for me because most of my music collection is DSD128. I heard MinimServer with the 'stream' option will do transcoding on the fly. What kind of latency can I expect with this install on a QNAP TS-251D? Does MinimServer convert to WAV instead of transcoding down to DSD64?

Currently when I try to play a DSD128 file through my Bridge II it sounds terrible. My PSA DAC tells me the sampling rate is only 88 KHz when normally it is 176.4 KHz. Also, the selection sound like 'mono', not stereo.

My current music server sits beside my PSA DAC and is connected by coax. The reproduction is amazing so now I'm asking myself how badly do I need to stream music off my server when I can connect to it directly. If I build a QNAP / MinimServer, I will lose this option. Any opinions?

Thanks