Brennan B2 and Raspberry Pi

[Adrian Caspersz]

I have saved thousands, subbing to Spotify instead of filling cupboards with CDs, some that may get played maybe five times in their lifetime.

[Andy Burns]

This is the only time I've seen one mentioned, outside the small-ad pages of private eye.

[Huge]

Ah, yes, sage advice. Spend hundreds of pounds for spyware infested shit that doesn't work any better than what you can get for nothing.

[Huge]

"Much better"? [derisive snort] Nothing about Windos is "much better".

Anyway, I've ripped thousands of CDs on my Linux box.

[16 lines snipped]

Is he ripping them as MP3s? If so, stop now, go back and start again using a lossless format. I wish I had. :o(

That's a function of the ID3 tagging the Brennan box is applying to the files and which media player you're using to play them. This is (potentially) a problem no matter how you rip them. I assume it's getting the tags from one of the on-line services such as MusicBrainz, which since the data is user-supplied is full of inconsistencies and errors. I'm still finding glitches in the tagging for files after ~15 years at it. Oh, and forget about classical music. The ID3 scheme is not designed for it and fits very poorly. I gave up with classical music, but fortunately I only have a few hundred classical CDs.

[Huge]

+1

It's too late now, but I don't see the point of them unless you don't own a computer, in which case, buy one, since a computer is cheaper than one of these boxes anyway and can do all kinds of other stuff.

£569? Some kind of joke, surely?

[Chris Bartram]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ often works worse than. I mean, if you were going to use Windows, CDEX is free, but the best tools are on Linux IMO.

[Chris Bartram]

On 19/02/2018 11:33, Huge wrote: [snip]

I've found CDDB more reliable, but it's best with manual intervention to choose the best entry. Presumably the Brennan box just takes the first hit.

[Chris Bartram]

It's a lot of cash. I have a player with Runaudio on a Pi, and I got given an external USB disk enclosure, so all it cost me was the Pi, a pair of 1TB disks for storage, and a DAC.

[Chris Bartram]

I run a RPi as a music player with an external DAC. It runs Runaudio

and generally works well, but with previous Linux images (volumio, for example) I had problems with corrupt cards, especially after an unexpected power cycle. I make a point of using decent quality SD cards, but it has been pointed out to me that industrial grade cards may last better: .

I've not yet tried this as the current one with Runeaudio has lasted over a year, even surviving a dodgy PSU that at times caused a boot failure.

[dennis]

My Yamaha amps appear to do seamless playback from my NAS. They also react faster than when I used a Pi3 as a media player so they must have quite a bit of RAM and CPU power.

[dennis]

You can buy a new laptop/tablet for about £160 that could do the ripping and server (and player with a decent USB sound card or bluetooth) with an external CD and Disk.

It would also get you something like amazon music for about three years and save the trouble.

I wonder what does an echo dot sounds like if you connect it to an amp using the jack or bluetooth? Bluetooth should be able to do at least CD quality if the amp is any good but I have no idea what DAC is in an echo dot.

[Bill]

Well, I have spent all afternoon on the phone to the friend and looking into his Brennan. The SD card and main HD still say they were improperly unmounted and may be corrupt. The main drive gives an error message about an invalid cluster chain.

We spent some time looking at how to power the device on and off safely, which is not terribly clear. We got an external CD drive to rip, but the CD name failed to appear, so when it had finished (in about 2/3s the time of the internal drive) we couldn't find it on the HD. It turns out that he has been ejecting 'unnamed' CD's during the standard ripping process because of the black hole they fall into. We assume this doesn't affect the mounting of any drives. Many of his (and my!) CD's don't seem to appear in any online databases.

He is hopefully now going to raise these questions in the manufacturer's forum.

Thanks to everyone for the help, discussion and ideas.

[newshound]

Going off at a tangent, but relevant if the collection is mostly popular rather than classical music. I have most of my CDs on a NAS drive (so accessible anywhere around the house) and have half heartedly been digitising the LPs (which is pretty time consuming).

However, I've just subscribed to Spotify (they had a cheap 3 month offer before Xmas) and am starting to build up playlists for my phone, tablet, and desktop. OK the digitising won't satisfy purists but it is good enough for my late 60's hearing. I reckon it probably saves money over buying stuff on name or reputation, and then finding out I don't like it. Also gives the opportunity to go back and listen to stuff that I never quite got round to buying.

[alan_m]

Warning CDEX is now full of spyware and possibly viruses.

It works well but you have to find a copy of the older versions (V1.70 and earlier) when the original developers were still in control and it came with no unwanted additions.

I'm using an older version on a win10 64 bit PC

See

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- mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

[Huge]

[21 lines snipped]

Send it back for a refund.

[Brian Gaff]

Windows 10 has fat 32, it only works though if you use the command prompt to format with. There is a bug in the windows format front end apparently. Brian

[Chris Bartram]

Noted, thank you. I think I have an old version (but to be honest I usually just use abcde on Linux).

[Johnny B Good]

====snip====

That sounds like a Microsoft Windows experience. The cause was due to the driver code detecting a high error rate, causing it to drop back to a lower UDMA performance mode, one stage at a time in the hope of easing the stress on the interface to eliminate the high rate of errors until finally resorting to the least stressful[1] of all modes, PIO mode, which once selected, could not be reverted back to UDMA mode automatically.

If the driver had dropped from UDMA mode 3 down to 2 then 1 before eliminating the high rate of errors, it could automatically revert back to the faster UDMA modes provided it hadn't resorted to PIO mode. The idea behind this behaviour was to automatically select the fastest reliable UDMA setting with hard disk drives since not all drives fully or reliably met their claimed UDMA specification.

It was a way to save the user the need to test and and adjust to find the optimum performance setting between the drive and the ATA interface itself which was apt to demonstrate 'compatibility issues' at the maximum theoretical UDMA settings with various models of drive and brands of interface chips used on the main board and plug in adapters.

This rarely resulted in resorting to PIO mode in the case of hard disk drives, unless they were actually 'going bad', but it was a bit of a disaster with optical media since defective media could trigger this drop back to PIO mode, leaving the optical drive locked in this mode just for the sake of one troublesome data CD or DVD leaving the put upon user to google for the solution (either a registry edit or else uninstall/re- install the optical device to trigger a reset back to UDMA mode[2]).

[1] Least stressful for the drive but horribly stressful for the CPU which now had to do *all* the grunt work of shifting the data instead of offloading it to the DMA controller. [2] Microsoft must have addressed this issue in the more recent versions of Windows if you've only had to reboot the machine to restore full performance to your optical drive.

[Chris Bartram]

Actually, recently on Linux. One CD, seemingly undamaged, just refused to rip, sticking at one point, and then the next one was slow. I was wondering if the first one was one of those deliberately nobbled ones from the early 2000s.

I've seen all that in the past, but in this case it feels like drive firmware setting a read rate. That's just a guess, obviously, without delving very deep. From what I recall, PIO dropback on Windows with an optical drive survived a reboot?

[snip]

[Bill]

In message , Andrew writes

Just for the record, I've been doing some tests with Windows ripping.

On the same CD, on the same Windows 7 laptop, ripping to wav Exact Audio copy took 8' 44" dbPoweramp took 4' 24" Windows Media Player took 4' 16".

Results were consistent over several passes. I assume EAC is doing lots of error checking even though this is a new, rarely played, clean disk.

Previous attempts to rip using WMP on a W10 laptop with the same CD took over 9 minutes.