So, when I first set up the music server I initially intended just to get the music using normal network shares. But the Viewsonic VMP74 didn’t seem to want to connect to it. Which was irritating. So I set up UPnP. Now, that’s the only way we’ve used it, pretty much (apart from iPlayer and the odd bit of YouTube). Whilst lots of things worked, files over 4Gb caused it to skip onto the next track at 4Gig, and despite thinking it supported FLAC files, it didn’t seem to work.
But yesterday I set it up to use the network shares and… it’ll play FLAC across the network (and the 30Gig Blu-Ray rips work fine). This is confusing, but happyness.
Of course, this still leaves one teensy tiny problem. iTunes. iTunes in it’s perpetual suckage does not support FLAC. Despite the fact users have been, apparently, asking for this for the last 6 releases. Hey Apple, I love your hardware, and your OS, but I have to admit iTunes is the most crappy piece of software I have to use regularly (at home, we won’t get into what I have at work).
So now everything else in the house can use FLAC, and nothing needs UPnP. I still have to dual rip everything and waste disk space so that I can have music on my iPhone. But I don’t need to transcode FLAC, and I don’t need to fire up mediatomb every time the machine starts. This makes future configuration much, much easier.
