Can a wd My book live be used to stream wave music files to a network receiver

[RainMan]

Hi all , I just purchased a Marantz Av 7005 and was told by the stereo shop that they have used network drives successfully to stream music .
In the past I had a rxv 2700 Yamaha receiver hooked up to a computer running xp and had no issues streaming music ,but when I tried to connect the western digital my book live to the Yamaha I was able to see the album and choose a song but when I entered play it said connect error .
Now i try the same with the Marantz and I can also see the album that I uploaded to the drive in wav format ,and it shows the album art and album songs but when you try to play it I believe it says unsupported format . I went into the menus of the network receiver and I do see he ip address of the wd my book live .
I have the marantz network receiver connected with cat 5 to a fairly new dlink router and the wd network hd is also connected to the router on a spare port .

Is this even possible to do or do I need another brand of network drive ?
Also dhcp is enabled .
I thought it would be much nicer to use a network hd instead of a full blown computer to stream all my cd's .
If it comes down to it though I will build a small computer dedicated to the stereo.
Thanks in advance

 

[Lordhumungus]

Any more specific info on the type of .wav file you were trying to play? Have you tried any other music format? This website had a few interesting things to say under the heading "Ethernet UPnP/DLNA" which may have something to do with the issues you are seeing.

As far as I can tell, what you want to do should work fine, but there is most likely some simple setting and/or procedural issue causing the problems.

 

[sholling]

It took a ridiculous amount of research to confirm that it does support WAV. I don't know why they don't list the formats more prominently. I would convert one of the tracks to FLAC and test it and see if the problem remains. I personally prefer using an external media player just because they tend to be more flexible.

 

[Lordhumungus]

Yeah, it took me a few minutes to figure out if .WAV was supported at all, but luckily I found the link I posted. It does mention that there are some limitations within .WAV support, and I personally think it's relatively uncommon to stream .WAV files directly, so I agree that eliminating that as a factor would at least give you somewhere to start.

 

[RainMan]

Thanks for the replies guys . I uploaded what I would call a wav with no compression in windows .are there different types of waves?
I do the one that keeps the file size the same as the cd it dame from .
I don't like anything that uses lossy compression so I stick to wav .
I am going to see if the marantz will communicate with my laptop as a test ,then if is does I guess I know the network drive is not going to stream a wav file .

 

[Lordhumungus]

There are different possible bit-depths and sample rates within .WAV files. Here is a site that explains it more in depth.

I think hooking it up to your laptop is a great idea, but I would still suggest trying it with an .mp3. or .FLAC file. On that note, you may want to convert your .WAV files to .FLAC anyway to save some space (and lose no quality), unless there is a specific reason you need them as .WAV.

 

[RainMan]

There are different possible bit-depths and sample rates within .WAV files. Here is a site that explains it more in depth.

I think hooking it up to your laptop is a great idea, but I would still suggest trying it with an .mp3. or .FLAC file. On that note, you may want to convert your .WAV files to .FLAC anyway to save some space (and lose no quality), unless there is a specific reason you need them as .WAV.

I goggled flac and I thought there was a loss in sound quality as the bit rate was less or something .
I have been out of the loop for a few years but I always thought an uncompressed wav was the best option sq wise?

Btw thanks for the link ,I will give it a good read later

 

[Lordhumungus]

Not to re-route the thread, but FLAC is a 100% lossless codec, so you can freely convert between FLAC and WAV without losing any information. It has the added bonuses of being smaller, tagable, and I'd imagine compatible with significantly more devices.

For the record I have a fair amount of experience via my personal collection of about 25,000+ audio files

 

[RainMan]

Well I uploaded some cd's in lossless WAV format to my Dell 6400 precision laptop which is running windows xp and connected it to the network and no issues .The marantz handles WAV so either I have done something wrong with the net hd or it won't work the way people have claimed .
I have no issues using a laptop . I have to bypass the standby option in the power options as even when I turn on wake up on LAN or WAN in bios I loose the connection once the laptop goes to stand by .
It's kinda cool accessing my photos threw the amp to

 

[Lordhumungus]

I am seeing that you want to keep your music in .WAV format, but have you at least tried streaming an mp3 or FLAC file from the WD HDD to the Marantz or even to a PC?

I see that you played a .WAV going from a laptop to the receiver which potentially helps eliminates the receiver as the problem, but as far as I can tell, there has been no verification that the WD HDD is streaming anything correctly.

Can you confirm if this is correct or not?

 

[RainMan]

Problem over .
I was using my desktop to rip to the WD network drive and I was 100% positive I ripped in lossless WAV format . Also the Marantz displayed WAV in the bottom right corner when the file format error window came up as they tried to play .
Funny as I hooked up my laptop to the network and when I looked at the music files on the WD network drive they showed up as WMA files?
I deleted them and started from scratch and ripped from my laptop in lossless WAV format once again and now there are no issues .
I know I should probably have tried your idea and probably saved myself allot of time but it is resolved now . Just in time to as I was going to give up and spend money on a rack mount computer that was not necessary for this application .
I do appreciate your input as networking and different music formats can drive me to drink

 

[Lordhumungus]

Glad you got it worked out. I'm guessing you were using Media Player to rip? WMA = Windows Media Audio.

If you have a chance, you may want to take a look at Easy CD-DA Extractor. I've used this program for something like 10 years and absolutely love it. It rips and converts between basically any format that exists.

 

[RainMan]

Thanks for the link , I will have to check it out .
I have no idea how I screwed it up but I'm glad it's resolved .Sure beats having to use a dedicated computer .If there were SQ benefits with a comp I would build one though .

 

[RainMan]

Well now that I have it working there would be one advantage to using a dedicated computer instead of the network hard drive as my receiver will bring up the artists name but none of the other categories work . So if you had 500 CDs you would have to scroll for a while to find a song ,where as when I ripped to a computer it gave me the option of sorting by album name ,artist genre etc. It still shows those options when I access the network drive but when you choose say album or genre , it just lists all songs alphabetically from all albums?
Maybe I will put out the money for a rack mount computer case and build something that doesn't use allot of current.

Wouldn't it be better to rip to a computer directly than say going threw cat5 and then a router ? I realize your streaming threw the router and cat5 regardless when listening

 

[MDS]

Well now that I have it working there would be one advantage to using a dedicated computer instead of the network hard drive as my receiver will bring up the artists name but none of the other categories work . So if you had 500 CDs you would have to scroll for a while to find a song ,where as when I ripped to a computer it gave me the option of sorting by album name ,artist genre etc. It still shows those options when I access the network drive but when you choose say album or genre , it just lists all songs alphabetically from all albums?
Maybe I will put out the money for a rack mount computer case and build something that doesn't use allot of current.

Wouldn't it be better to rip to a computer directly than say going threw cat5 and then a router ? I realize your streaming threw the router and cat5 regardless when listening

There must be a settings issue somewhere with the receiver and/or the way you've organized the music folders and tagged the audio files. Receivers tend to have very specific requirements.

The WD is just network attached storage. There should be no difference whatsoever between having the WD show up as a drive on the network vs an internal hard drive in a full fledged computer showing up as a drive on the network.

 

[RainMan]

I never really organized it as I just ripped my CDs to the drive threw windows media player 11 .
But I thought the same thing ,why would there e a difference in the way the files are placed?
I think I'm just adamant about spending more money and building a rack mount computer lol

I am going to take one more look and see if I can figure out why the tracks are coming up differently

 

[Lordhumungus]

I don't mean to be a broken record, but one of the major advantages to having .FLAC files is you can have them tagged just like an mp3 with all the fields you need, where you can't do that with .WAV files. That plus the fact that .FLAC is a lossless codec that saves space and there's not really any reason to not use that format.

RainMan, if you don't mind my asking, why are you dead set on using .WAV?

 

[RainMan]

Well when I googled flac versus wav I thought wav was the winner . I thought they mentioned wav sounded better . I realize flac is not lossless but I thought wav was as close as you can get to the original cd . And considering large HDs are so cheap nowadays there's no need for a compression scheme IMO ,at least in my situation .
I only own a few hundred CDs ,but hopefully double that someday ,and I don't see a day when I'll be able to need over a terabyte .

Funny thing is , I found a station on the Internet that I am streaming threw my receiver ,and as much as I hate lossy compression it sounds quite good to my ears .
It's 105.5 spreeradio classic rock ,and it shows ACC on my flat screen as a format .it actually sounds better than some of my CDs that I am streaming in wav ,so I thinking they are using some bass enhancement ?

I actually downloaded a converter for flac but couldn't figure the software out .but I didn't spend allot of time playing with it .

 

[MDS]

Well when I googled flac versus wav I thought wav was the winner . I thought they mentioned wav sounded better . I realize flac is not lossless but I thought wav was as close as you can get to the original cd.

WAV is the original CD (raw PCM) but FLAC is a lossless (not lossy, like mp3, wma, aac, etc) codec. When FLAC is decoded, you get the original WAV you started with. There is no possible way that the WAV sounds better than FLAC because they are the same thing (after decoding the FLAC).

The only use for FLAC is to reduce file sizes and because it supports tagging better than WAV, it's often used for archiving purposes. WAV can be tagged (there are a few different techniques - one of which is to simply put an ID3 tag in the INFO or LIST chunks) but player support for actually reading those tags is slim.

I have a large archive of WAV too. I use it because WAV is the lowest common denominator in digital audio and it will live forever whereas even now with the huge popularity of FLAC it is still not universally supported.

 

[RainMan]

Well I will try flac as I would like to see if the tagging system is an improvement for the marantz receiver .

Thank you for the link Lord .
I was reading some of the info on the benefits of flac and I like the fact that you can have it automatically set the recording loudness . I have some albums that almost blow my speakers when they follow another song from another album so maybe flacs software will help.
I also have some songs that have literally no dynamic range like the songs on my Sweet album . I wonder if there's anything for that , like to increase the bass or something .

You guys are going to make a believer out of me yet lol