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Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player

post #1 of 14
11/28/09 at 7:46pm
Thread Starter 
Hi all have any of you used this as a music server? It has a digital out, so an external dac could be used. I wonder about the quality of the digital out, as well as how good the firmware works

I would like to get my speaker system off my old laptop...it has a small HD and the iomega ext HD that I have hooked up is quite noisy

thanks
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post #2 of 14
11/28/09 at 8:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Danielj View Post
Hi all have any of you used this as a music server? It has a digital out, so an external dac could be used. I wonder about the quality of the digital out, as well as how good the firmware works

I would like to get my speaker system off my old laptop...it has a small HD and the iomega ext HD that I have hooked up is quite noisy

thanks
I have one. I have never used it as a network device I just use the optical out to my Entech 203.2. It is my normal home listening device.

Pros:

Sound quality is superb but it is just a digital transport so that is predictable
Exchangeable USB hard drives - limitless expansion
Stable in use , but unplug at night to avoid overheating !

Cons

Needs a separate monitor
Does not support gapless (at present)
UI is meh at best - wastes screen space apallingly

Overall - I like mine but it would be nice to have gapless playback
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post #3 of 14
11/28/09 at 9:44pm
Thread Starter 
thanks Nick thats what i needed to know
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post #4 of 14
11/29/09 at 5:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_charles View Post
]
Cons

Does not support gapless (at present)

I have one in my bedroom and didn't realise it had optical out!! Glad this thread popped up.

Also, what is gaplass playback?
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post #5 of 14
11/29/09 at 5:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mangamonster View Post
I have one in my bedroom and didn't realise it had optical out!! Glad this thread popped up.

Also, what is gaplass playback?
On several albums tracks bleed into each other with no pause. Gapless means a player can go from one track to another with no pause in between the two tracks, so for instance on Dark Side of the Moon unless you rip it as a single track per "side" you get annoying transitions between the tracks if your player does not support gapless.

It also means that if for instance you listen to opera you need to rip music scene by scene or even act by act to avoid clumsy transitions.


WD at present show no plans to address this
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post #6 of 14
11/29/09 at 6:08pm
Ahh, ok. I can see how it would be nice to have it. Thanks Nick
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post #7 of 14
1/17/10 at 3:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_charles View Post
On several albums tracks bleed into each other with no pause. Gapless means a player can go from one track to another with no pause in between the two tracks, so for instance on Dark Side of the Moon unless you rip it as a single track per "side" you get annoying transitions between the tracks if your player does not support gapless.

It also means that if for instance you listen to opera you need to rip music scene by scene or even act by act to avoid clumsy transitions.


WD at present show no plans to address this
Could somebody confirm that WD HD TV (Live) still cannot play gapless FLAC? How can a lossless format have this gap issue anyway???
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post #8 of 14
1/17/10 at 4:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gapless View Post
Could somebody confirm that WD HD TV (Live) still cannot play gapless FLAC? How can a lossless format have this gap issue anyway???
Lossless and gapless are two quite different and unrelated things. Two adjacent files have a slight gap between then on the WDTV on playback so if you are listening to say an opera which you have ripped into separate tracks by default you can get a nasty pause which may even occur in the middle of a line where it moves from one track to another. WD have no plans to address this, presumably as it is mostly meant as a Video device.

You can get around this by ripping whole scenes, acts, movements, symphonies etc as one track , but it is a pain.

Lossless just refers to data compression of say a given ripped track.
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post #9 of 14
1/17/10 at 4:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_charles View Post
Lossless and gapless are two quite different and unrelated things. Two adjacent files have a slight gap between then on the WDTV on playback so if you are listening to say an opera which you have ripped into separate tracks by default you can get a nasty pause which may even occur in the middle of a line where it moves from one track to another. WD have no plans to address this, presumably as it is mostly meant as a Video device.

You can get around this by ripping whole scenes, acts, movements, symphonies etc as one track , but it is a pain.

Lossless just refers to data compression of say a given ripped track.
Of course they are different things, but I would not say they are unrelated. I read somewhere (wiki, maybe) that gaps between tracks are generally connected to lossy audio formats, like mp3, as the gap is a result of the lossy encoding algorhythm. A lossless format like FLAC should NOT have this problem, that is why I was quite surprised to learn that this WD device can only play ANY type of audio file with gaps between tracks. (Even mp3 can be played gapless, for example with Foobar2000. Gapless audio playback is therefore a question of the software decoding the file, I guess in the WD case this could be easily solved by a firmware upgrade.)

Back to the basic question: is there out there a WD-like player (FLAC decoder, digital output) that would play FLAC files gapless?
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post #10 of 14
1/17/10 at 8:02pm
the popcorn hour c-200 just got firmware that added gapless playback
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post #11 of 14
1/19/10 at 6:29am

WD TV can it play APE files

I'm interested in buying one of these can anyone confirm that it can play APE music files, on the web site this is not mentioned like flac,ogg wav etc which are some of the many playback type files.
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post #12 of 14
4/3/10 at 2:47am
I have one. It is so convinent. I play avi movies on it constantly. just go to western digital website, it has all the detail formats listed. FLAC, OGG, ....... You just hook up your USB drive and a LCD monitor and play your albums. The thing is small, I also have a tiny 640G WD USB harddrive. I agree, the extra LCD is a hassle, but uf a TV is already part of your system, it would be a perfect match. You just stuff as much music as you want. This thing just kills Apple TV (can only play itune downloaded movies, or hack the **** out of it for other format). Optical output with an external DAC, you are all set.
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post #13 of 14
4/3/10 at 7:51pm
Wireless, or tethered to USB/optical?
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post #14 of 14
4/5/10 at 1:19pm
nearly bought one until someone said the output is resampled to 48khz whatever the input.
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