Streaming, as in hooking up the external hard drive directly to the receiver?
When I hook the HDD directly to my receiver, I never had that popping sound.
I only had the popping sound when I was playing the files via the PC, which was hooked to the receiver.
My WAV files are on an external HDD. So I did not have to re-transfer any files.
Now I just use the Windows Media Center to play all the music files because I love all those album covers.