The wireless media servers require that you have software running on the PC where your music collection is.
It is a good idea to have a firewall in place between your computer and the internet.
Netgear WGR614 is a combined firewall/router and access point. This will prevent access to your computer form the outside. The Access Point also allows for a wireless connection to the media player.
The router is 54 MB/s and can connect with 802.11g wireless devices. The media players use 802.11g so getting anything faster than this will not help.
If you want to use the media player you will have to always have the PC on so it can serve your mp3s to the player.
One issue might be the range. If your stereo is too far away the wireless connection might not not reach. This is unlikely to be a problem - but if you are trying to go there a couple of floors it might.
Netgear also makes powerline extenders. These plug into a regular wall socket. You have one connected to an outlet near your router and connect your router to it. The second one is plugged into a outlet near where you want wireless access.
Another option is to connect a dedicated access point to the router. This is what I do. The dedicated access points have detachable antennas allowing you to connect a higher gain on. I have a WG302 access point connected to a firewall switch FVS124G
The media players can be controlled by a remote. I find it more convenient to control it using a laptop computer. I bought the slimserver because it was the only one I found that runs under the Linux operating system.
I liked the Sound Blaster unit because of the hand held remote which allowed you to view your music collection from the remote rather than the units screen. Since I don;t always leave my windows computer on - I had to keep turning it on and off when I wanted to use it which was not convenient.
Using a laptop to control the using was much better.
Just make sure the hard drive is formatted to FAT/FAT32 and it will be fine.
NTFS would be preferred if it's a high capacity drive.
If the USB device has it's own power you will likely have better success using that.
Few Touch + USB tips:
- Touch can only see/use a single partition hdd
- hdd utilities can cause issues, best to remove them
- 2tb drives have been used, dunno about larger drives
- best performance will come from not having anything but music files and album art on the hdd
- Touch server is very slow and has a lot fewer features than does the full SBS server running on a computer
- Touch server will take quite a while to scan large music libraries
- removing the USB drive (or losing power) requires a complete hdd rescan
Customer/Technical Support clarified that hard drives need conform to the following file systems:
NTFS (which we have yet to confirm), FAT32, FAT and ext2/exte3 (linux).
Am here to tell you that NTFS does not work. At first I thought it was because I was formatting the hard drive
as NTFS using Paraong NTFS for Mac OSX, but then I used a Windows 7 computer to format the hard drive as NTFS and
progress there.
Earlier in the day as a test, I had formatted a USB Flash Memory Stick as FAT32 and while it was not able to play
the files, the system was able to read the unit and see the Album, its artwork and the files.
Check the formatting of the device, Touch supported formats: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3
- Touch can only see/use a single partition, format as a single partition
- Remove any included device utilities as these can cause issues
- Make sure there is at least 10% free space (20% even better)
- Remove any non-music related files (videos, documents, programs, pictures, data, etc¡Ä)
- Attach device directly to your computer and run basic maintenance utilities (disk cleanup,
error checking, defrag)
- Place a small, single folder of music on the device for initial testing (why have it scanning
for hours if it isn¡Çt going to complete the scan)