I am in the market for a black box music storage server which can hold my 1500+ music CD collection, and the Olive 04HD has caught my eye. Review and overview: http://www.hifi-advice.com/Olive-04HD-review.html The key for me is that I dont want to compress the music files such as would be done by converting them into smaller mp3s. So, for example, a CD which holds a full 700 MB of music would require 700 MB of corresponding storage space on the server. The Olive has a 2TB storage capability, and with the aforementioned 700 MB per disc requirement, that works out to around 2500+ CDs worth of space. So that seems an ideal match for me. Anyone here have any first-hand experience with one of these? Or, as an alternative, anyone have any other suggestions to recommend which accomplishes the same purpose? I dont want to go the conventional PC / internal hard drive route, so that obvious recommendation is out. Thanks and Cheers - DM
Olive makes nice, turnkey devices. Their UI is pretty good, and you can manage all the music remotely (just connect to the device on your network using its IP). It looks like a piece of equipment, so that is a plus. I like that they added a TV out, as the touchscreen is pretty small. Also, you can have them rip your CDs and load your device for a fee -- I think they use ready2play or someone, but still. That will save you a ton of time. Compress your music with FLAC. Olive supports this out of the box, and you lose nothing in the compression (it stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) and you save ~25-40% of the space. Another major issue with ripping to WAV is that there is no support for ID3 tags -- FLAC has extensive tagging support. I have 1968 CDs ripped into FLAC, and after some extensive work fixing tags and whatnot, I am pretty happy with it. Just my .02. Blake
