Audio CD > AZBox HDD?

[AcWxRadar]

Hi y'all,

Anyone tried to FTP or TelNet an audio CD to your AZBox HDD and have success?

I have been able to do this with *.ts video viles to the MOVIE folder, but I cannot seem to get simple audio tracks (from a CD) to work.

If you have been succesful in this endeavor, please let me know what hoops you had to jump through to make it happen.

Thank you,

RADAR

 

[B.J.]

Hi y'all,

Anyone tried to FTP or TelNet an audio CD to your AZBox HDD and have success?

I have been able to do this with *.ts video viles to the MOVIE folder, but I cannot seem to get simple audio tracks (from a CD) to work.

If you have been succesful in this endeavor, please let me know what hoops you had to jump through to make it happen.

Thank you,

RADAR

Probably not quite what you want, but as an experiment, I just took an audio CD, and ripped a track to a .wav file using dbPowerAmp converter.
Then I FTP'd that .wav file over to one of the USB drives on the Azbox, and it plays fine. I think you're problem is probably that the actual files aren't showing up properly in the FTP program. Ie you may have to use a rip program to convert them first. That program I use will also convert to mp3 formats too. We've used it to convert all of our CDs to .mp3s, and have them on the computer so we can stream them to several different devices including the Azbox.

I also can stream them to my Roku, which is kind of neat, because I can also stream a directory of .jpg pictures too, and it will display the pictures one by one, while playing a .mp3 music file or directory full of files. Not sure if the Azbox will do both music and pictures like that.

I think that dbPowerAmp program will also save the whole CD to disk, in the same format it's found on the CD, but I've never tried that. That might be more of what you're trying to do.... I'm not sure.

 

[AcWxRadar]

Probably not quite what you want, but as an experiment, I just took an audio CD, and ripped a track to a .wav file using dbPowerAmp converter.
Then I FTP'd that .wav file over to one of the USB drives on the Azbox, and it plays fine. I think you're problem is probably that the actual files aren't showing up properly in the FTP program. Ie you may have to use a rip program to convert them first. That program I use will also convert to mp3 formats too. We've used it to convert all of our CDs to .mp3s, and have them on the computer so we can stream them to several different devices including the Azbox.

I also can stream them to my Roku, which is kind of neat, because I can also stream a directory of .jpg pictures too, and it will display the pictures one by one, while playing a .mp3 music file or directory full of files. Not sure if the Azbox will do both music and pictures like that.

I think that dbPowerAmp program will also save the whole CD to disk, in the same format it's found on the CD, but I've never tried that. That might be more of what you're trying to do.... I'm not sure.

B.J.

Aha! I am hoping you are right on this. It sounds correct now that I think about it. When I transferred the files, they showed up as *.cda files and won't play. Although I can see that they are there in the file manager utility of the AZBox, the box doesn't seem to know what to do with them. Converting them to *.wav files or mp3 files might just be the answer for me. Thanks for the input, I hope it works.

Now on to the dbPoweramp program, is that freeware? Obviously I can find that out for myself by searching, but for others who read this thread it would be a helpful piece of information. Also, is there any other software that you know of that will convert these audio files other than dbPoweramp?

Thanks B.J.

RADAR

 

[DiscoLoveGrapes]

dbpoweramp isn't freeware, but you can convert to WAV and numerous other formats for free -- but MP3 is limited.

Other options are numerous, including Format Factory, BonkEnc, and of course, ITunes. All are free and not crippleware.

 

[AcWxRadar]

Probably not quite what you want, but as an experiment, I just took an audio CD, and ripped a track to a .wav file using dbPowerAmp converter.
Then I FTP'd that .wav file over to one of the USB drives on the Azbox, and it plays fine. I think you're problem is probably that the actual files aren't showing up properly in the FTP program. Ie you may have to use a rip program to convert them first. That program I use will also convert to mp3 formats too. We've used it to convert all of our CDs to .mp3s, and have them on the computer so we can stream them to several different devices including the Azbox.

I also can stream them to my Roku, which is kind of neat, because I can also stream a directory of .jpg pictures too, and it will display the pictures one by one, while playing a .mp3 music file or directory full of files. Not sure if the Azbox will do both music and pictures like that.

I think that dbPowerAmp program will also save the whole CD to disk, in the same format it's found on the CD, but I've never tried that. That might be more of what you're trying to do.... I'm not sure.

B.J.

I finally got the time to try out dbPowerAmp. I used their "fully functional" freeware trial version.

I converted John Denver's Greatest Hits CD (volume 2) to *.wav and to *.mp3 formats. I started out with just one track using *.wav and then the same track using *.mp3. Both worked really great! However, converting to *.mp3 saves a huge amount of time! Especially when downloading to the AZBox, the *.mp3 files transfer with lightning fast speed.

Converting the entire disc (12 tracks) to *.mp3 required 3.5 minutes. FTP'ing it to the AZBox required less than 30 seconds, actually much less than that. I think about 2-3 seconds per song.

When I converted the entire disc (at one shot) I created a folder with the name of the album as the destination folder within my PC. Although I tried to create such a folder within the AZBox, it wouldn't allow me to move the individual tracks into that folder, so I had to do that before I transferred them to the AZBox. This was not any trouble and was actually quite easy.

The problem I see here now is that although the information is on the original disc regarding the song title, it does not appear after converting it. Each track's title is displayed simply as "TRACK1", "TRACK2", "TRACK3", etc. I was able to rename the tracks afterwards so that I can see the name of the song, but I wish I could find a better method. I just noticed, after renaming the files with their song titles, they are ordered alphabetically, instead of by track number.

Also, the very end of each song is cut short by a few seconds, so the song doesn't fade out, it just stops abruptly. Not a huge deal, but a little odd as it doesn't sound right.

Overall, it works. I just need to solve some issues.

RADAR

 

[B.J.]

My wife is the one who did all our CDs, but I'm pretty sure that there is an option for it to go onto the internet and download all the CD and song info, because when we play them on either our Roku, or on my wife's little audio gadget, or even on our Sirius receiver, the CD name, performer name, and song name are all displayed. I wasn't sure if the Azbox would do the same, but I just tried it, and when it plays a song, it shows CD artist title and genre I think the track was left blank, but since it had the title, I think that replaces track.
I think if that program can't access the internet, then it just leaves the song info blank. But again, I'm not real positive, because my wife did all the CD--> MP3 conversions.
Perhaps on your CD the songs overlap tracks somehow, because I've never noticed it cutting off the end of songs, but I'll ask my wife if she's noticed that.
I can't remember if we're using the free version of that program or if we paid to upgrade it, but it's worked perfectly for what we do. Really makes accessing many hundreds of CDs easy. We have them all on one hard drive, and move them to thumbdrives or those little memory cards, or just play them over the network. I'm not sure if the Azbox can detect one of those UP&P servers or whatever they call them, but we have a shareware server on the computer which has some extra features with respect to displaying and playing songs, if you don't want to just play one CD at a time.

 

[Jim S.]

The reason you have to convert CDs to another format is because unlike a DVD, a CD doesn't actually HAVE a filesystem on it. The .cda files are actually pseudo-files produced by Windows so you can browse a CD like any other disk.