Getting the most from the Logitech Touch

[mfsoa]

I'm new to the computer audio world and just got my Touch on Monday.
I thought it might be nice to have a place to share our experiences with this player, and to ask questions.

Some of mine might be pretty basic, like this one:

I got two, one TB drives for music storage-

FAT32 or NTFS?  I'll be using an ACER laptop we just picked up (Core i3, 17" screen for $550 from Staples)

Thanks already!

[richidoo]

http://cquirke.mvps.org/ntfs.htm
It's an old debate, but dying out as Windows finally starts to grow up. My personal opinion is, if you are gonna use Windows and only windows, always windows, then use NTFS for the speed, storage efficiency (smaller clusters), much better security, and much better tolerance of faults. An external disk is more subject to trouble due to pulling out USB cord, impact, or disconnecting wall wart power or similar. NTFS is more likely to recover from those kinds of accidents than FAT, which is pretty much toast if interrupted during a write.

If you want to plug the drive into combinations of Linux, Mac and Windows machines without any fuss, then FAT32 is the wtg, but be very careful.  There are apps to allow mac to write to NTFS but it is not native. Mac can read from NTFS by default.

There aren't as many fancy disk management tools for NTFS. But Windows does have defrag, chkdsk, compression, etc. So it's less of an issue now. Also, you will be writing music files to the drives in a continuous order, so there is not much reason why the drive should become fragmented anyway. If you continually delete records off the drive, then just run defrag a couple times a year. Consider using one to back up the other. 1TB is huge, and a backup copy might be more valuable than more music, at least until you fill it up!!  Plug them both into the computer by USB. Then use windows backup to program a weekly or monthly backup of changes only. The backup drive need not be attached all the time.

Have fun Mike!!!  Don't forget to check out Pandora.
Rich

[mdconnelly]

I've got two 1tb drives as well and I'm running them as mirrored Raid as eSata drives off my Dell desktop computer.  It works great and I don't have to worry about making sure to run any sync or backup procedures.

Have fun with the Touch.  I think it's a great product.  If you have an Apple iPhone or iTouch, be sure to check out the iPeng or Squeemote apps!

[tmazz]

The problem with mirrored RAID is that it is a duplicate copy, not a backup. It will protect you from a hardware failure, but since everything is written to both drives simultaneously it offers no protection from pilot error (if you mistakenly erase something it deletes it from both drives.) It also will not help you if you have any kind of software induced file corruption since again, the bad data will be written to both drives at the same time. If you have an offline backup it will be isolated from file corruption and operator oops. RAID is more about restoration speed in the case of hardware failure (you can just put the second drive on-line and not have to spend time writing the backed up data to the new drive.) It was never intended to be used as an archival storage method. While it is an easy way to keep a second copy of your data it provide you with much less protection than a regular backup routine.

[mdconnelly]

I agree.   I do periodically run a full copy of my music and family photos to another drive that I then keep in my office at work.  But to be honest, I've had 2 hard drives fail over the years, but have not lost any music due to screw ups or pilot error (well, none that I know of yet .   So the raid just let's me worry a little bit less day to day.

But sure, there are several ways to skin a cat and ideally using both provides the best safeguards.  Drives are cheap relative to what it would cost to replace my full music collection and the impossibility of replacing the years of family photos.

[Bigfish8]

Okay guys, I am an old guy just trying to keep my head above water keeping computers working.  Please tell me if my approach with saving music if flawed.  I rip CDs to .flac and store them in a file named "new music" on a 1TB external hard drive.  Once ripped I open Explorer and drag the contents of the "New Music Folder" over to a back-up 1TB external drive to a "Music Folder."  Once the copying to the 2nd External Drive is complete I then drag the contents of the "New Music Folder" into the "Music Folder" located on the original external Hard Drive.  Once these operations are complete I upplug the back-up drive from the computer and instruct Squeezecenter to scan for new music.

If there is a safer (not faster) way for me to accomplish a back-up of my music please share it.

Thanks,

Ken

[tmazz]

Ken,

I think you're good. The advantage you have over a RAID is that your backup drive is disconnected from the machine when it is not being used for doing backups. This prevents any problems in the machine from propagating into the backup drive. (Of course the disadvantage is that you have a manual process required to do the file copying as opposed to is being automatically done by the RAID system - nothing for nothing.)

Since you are ripping CDs to the computer backup is not as serious of an issue for you since you have the original CDs and could just re-rip them if something happens. What you are really protecting is the time you would have to invest to rip your library again if something goes wrong. Back up is more crucial to people who purchase their music online from places like itunes or HDTracks and the hard drive contains their original copies.

If you are still a bit paranoid the only other thing I could suggest to keep your data safe is to buy a third external drive and keep it off site except for when you are actually copying files to it. this will protect you from data loss due to catastrophic events. When you think about it, if you have a fire or a flood in your house the backup drive won't be much use to you if it is sitting on a shelf right next to your main drive. Off site storage is usually used by businesses for critical data and IMO may be overkill just for a music collection, but hard drives are cheap these days and if you don’t mind the extra work of copying the files yet again and it helps you sleep night, by all means do an off-site back up as well.

Tom

[richidoo]

I use RAID too, in a permanent array in a NAS. But Mike is using his new laptop for slimserver, so hanging two USB drives off it all the time for RAID isn't practical, plus I don't know how to make a RAID array in windows? Oh yeah, I guess you would use disk manager?

Ken, you are fully backed up! (Try some ExLax.)  So do you have 3 external drives? Or are you ripping to drive 1, copying to drive 2, then copying back to drive 1 again?  I would just rip to the drive you play from, then program windows backup to write an incremental backup to the other drive - a  1x/month manual job if you want to keep the backup drive in a safe place. If Vera stores data on that drive during the week then do a weekly or even daily automatic job, but then it must remain attached all the time. If it is just music then you are only backing up for convenience to prevent losing the small number of CDs you have ripped since the last backup, not so critical because you could redo the lost work without too much pain. Not like your taxes or latest novel are on there. Find Windows Backup application in Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Backup. Fart around with it or read the help file. It is pretty easy to use, but powerful. You could reduce your operation down to monthly 2-3 clicks, unattended.

Edit: I see Tom has already stated some of my better points. 

[mdconnelly]

Ken,

There are certainly lots of tools that will help keep you from fat-fingering the copy and backup processes but sounds like you've got the basics down just fine.  I suspect how you handle it will ultimately expand and improve as your library grows. 

I use EAC to rip directly to my RAID and it places and names it exactly how I want (this can be done in the EAC setup).  Once done, I use MediaMonkey to update the tags and insert album art.  Once that's done, I scan into Squeezebox Server.  There are tools that can combine the functions of both EAC and MediaMonkey (dbPoweramp for one), but I really depend on EAC and it's never let me down.

[mfsoa]

So apparently the audio quality is all over the place for internet radio. The voices on NPR had that horrible compressed quality (as my old car pool buddy would say "Hey, its the Tin Man" when we listened to talking on XM in the car)

But now I'm listening to the WQXR classical feed and the sound isn't too bad.

My wife has been searching the new-agey zen-ey stuff and a bunch of that was listenable too.

Must explore more...

-Mike

[richidoo]

Pandora is all 128kbps, or 192 if you subscribe. The metallic sound is rarely annoying, but occasionally it's there.

[tmazz]

I have a question for all of you Logictech Touch/Squeezebox guys.

It seems like an awful lot of work to setup and load these systems.

Are you doing it because you get better sound quality (as opposed to just playing the CDs directly) or is it just an ease of use and/or organization type of thing?

[richidoo]

Primarily for convenience to me, but I have read there is sonic improvement too, although I can't remember why. Something about ripped tracks don't have error codes and live CD tracks do. Even if there are theoretical benefits to streaming from HDD, these devices are usually cheap consumer toys so the digital outputs and analog outputs aren't any better quality than a cheap CDP. Logitech Transporter is designed as a high end component, so it should have better reliability and performance than the SB/Duet/Touch/Sonos/Soundbridge type products. But the TP stock analog output is clean but dull.

Access to entire library in palm of hand is the primary draw, but in time I have realized that access to internet radio is probably even more valuable to me. Thanks to John Cook for finally convincing me to check out Pandora music service. The Sonos with Pandora has changed the way my family consumes music, and enhanced the experience.

Ripping the entire collection of CDs to a hard drive is a pita. You can't play a CD in it, you have to rip it first. Networking issues, software bugs and reliability have been issues in the past with these devices. But things are getting better now. Setting up is piece of cake.

[Deton Nation]

I use a Mac, maybe Im the only Mac guy? I have my music on an esata drive. I want to get a small raid system soon, since 24/96 takes up a lot of space. In the past it has been very simple to setup. There were some issues with Mac which are resolved. 24/96 sounds phenomenal. My first experience with it! The Touches digital output is much better than the sb3. Much more clarity. Love having 16000 songs at the touch of a button!

[richidoo]

Does Touch play 24/96 files???  I know you're using digital out, is the BDA showing link to 24/96? That's great if it does. Shane brought a bunch of hirez files to our last g2g. They sounded awesome on the Gemme Katanas.

The purpose of RAID is safety, not size. Although a RAID array can have many drives in it and be very huge. RAID sacrifices one of the drives to gain redundancy against a drive failure. Any drive can fail and can be replaced with a new drive and the others will rebuild the new one with no data lost. If you lose two at once you're fucked. Maybe there is a RAID config that allows for 2 redundants? I dunno. Anyway RAID needs a controller to run the storage scheme. Maybe OS-X has it built in for local drives, or you can use a hardware controller PCI card, or a software app. Or buy a multi drive NAS that uses RAID and hang it on your network. The Netgear ReadyNas products are well designed. The newer ones have worked out the problems of the first models. It uses a proprietary RAID system that is easy and idiot proof. Basically you just stick the disks in and it figures everything out. Hot swap on failure, email notification of failure, print server, file server, runs slim server natively (slowly,) webserver, etc. Optimized for media streaming, like audio video playback, etc. I/O speed is pissa  but it's not cheap. There are other brands making products like this too. D-Link has a small 2 drive RAID fileserver that's cheap. 2 2TB drives would give you redundant 2 TB in RAID1. DNS323. There are others out there, big and small.