Four Questions For New Setup

[Roy Boy]

I just recently purchased a Lumin and Synology DS1813+. I am a long time audio guy but am new to streaming. Most of my digitial music has been played via Oppo BPD-95 or streamed via iTunes AppleTV. My son has a big itunes library and we do use itunes to synch Ipods, so I do not see getting away from iTunes. I have installed minimserver on the DS1813 and plan to use my wife's Macbook Air with external Blu-ray drive for ripping music to the NAS. I am also new to NAS...I did get the system up a running an playing music this weekend. I just copied an iTunes library directly off a external hard drive I attached to the NAS. Everything sounds great. I have a few newbie type questions

 

1) minimserver does not seem to recognize the album artwork from Itunes (itc2 files)..What would be my best approach to get

artwork associated with that itune library I copied (all AIFF files)? I am hoping that it is something as simple as a tool that can

rescan the library and find the artwork on the various artwork sources on the web?

 

2) I need a recommendation on what software to use on the macbook air for ripping music. I want to be able to rip CD, blu ray audio, DVD (like Reference HRX files). Someone recommended Jriver. Can JRiver rip blu-ray audio? Is it a good choice for my environment (running minimserver)

 

3) Since my son will maintain his iTunes library...I am thinking I can dump a copy of his itunes library onto the NAS to act as a backup for his itunes, but I can also take advantage of it and stream to Lumin. Is this a reasonable thing to do?

 

4) Since I am at the front end of building a digital music repository, are there recommendations/best practices concerning the file structure on the NAS for Music? Right now I have one shared folder called Music...Do I put all the music in this one folder with no sub-folders? Should I have more than one shared folder? I do plan to stream DSD as well as other high res PCM if that matters.

 

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[Audio_ELF]

In answer to (1) Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ♫ Embed Artwork v2.0 should help you. Run it on iTunes then upload the files to your NAS.

 

If you have Windows; PerfectTunes (from dbpoweramp) is also a good tool for embedding artwork - caveat never tried it with AIFF files.

 

Eloise