MusicCAST Recording CDs and Managing the Library

First of all, I have to say that this is the greatest feature of the MusicCAST system. It is so unbelievably easy to record your CDs into the server that you wonder why all PCs can't do it as good (they can, but depending upon what software you are using it could take quite a bit of setup and elbow grease to accomplish).

The MusicCAST method of getting CDs into its music database and hard drive is akin to the Macintosh experience circa 1999: It just works. And that's refreshing. Stick a CD into the server's CD-R/RW tray and push the "CD AUTO STORE" button and you will accomplish the following:

• The drive tray closes automatically
• The disc is read by the server and identified by the included Gracenote CDDB database (artist, album, title, and genre are assigned)
• If the CD is not recognized by the onboard database, the server uses the Internet to find the disc contents online. I tried some very obscure discs, like The Exit, which is a CD made by some friends of mine in Merrit Island, Florida, and the information was retrieved correctly.
• The disc contents are recorded to the hard drive in their native PCM format. This takes approximately 5 minutes for an entire CD!
• The entire disc is now able to be played by the server and streamed to clients (at least one client is able to stream the PCM data prior to completion of the MP3 encoding)
• Once the PCM data is copied, these tracks automatically begin getting transcoded by the server into MP3 (according to the bitrate settings in the setup menu)

When I first experienced the efficiency of the MusicCAST server in digitizing some CDs, I was determined to feed it as much of my collection as I could. I have now loaded over 1500 songs from 90 artist with 128 total albums. It is so easy I couldn't resist having the music at my fingertips. I still have many CDs I never loaded, but its certainly not due to the complexity of the process!

You can use the Main Menu to access the Recording Menu and "Store from CD" function, but since you have to insert the disc anyway, I've found it best to just push the button on the main interface. The only reason I've found for going through the menu to record is that you can select particular tracks to record from a CD. Since the 80GB drive is hardly enough to store gobs of PCM data (we're talking about 120 albums or so), this might actually be something you would want to do. Another option, however would be to blow all the material into the unit and then delete what you do not want later.

I'm Loaded Up - Now What Can I do?

Well, you've got your songs in the system - now what can you do? Lots. First of all, you'll want to check over your library and correct any problems with album titles and genre selections. One of the funniest things I find are albums called "Greatest Hits" I had about 6 of these, which made navigating by album particularly difficult.

Using a Keyboard or Manually Editing Titles

The front of the MCX-1000 provides a handy PS/2 port for connecting just about any standard PC keyboard for making edits to track and album titles. You can also make these changes fairly easily with the remote control, but a keyboard makes for an easier time - trust me. Just borrow it from your PC, it'll save lots of time off the process.

Managing Hard Disk Space

One of the things you may need to do in order to fit your entire collection on the 80GB drive is decide which music to keep in its native PCM format, and which to play utilizing only MP3 audio. It's a good bet that your son's Barney & Friends Sing-a-Long tracks probably won't suffer much playing through at 320 kbps. I have taken the approach of deleting the PCM data from discs for which I do not expect to do any critical listening. That would be all my wife's stuff... I can say this with the utmost security, because although she loves music and enjoys a good action movie on the home theater, she almost never reads my reviews!

You can delete PCM audio from either an entire album, an entire artist, or just a single track. All you do is navigate to the particular level that you want to delete and bring up the MusicCAST sub-menu by hitting the SUB MENU button on the remote. At this point, hitting "Delete" will bring up a dialogue box that will allow you to either delete ALL audio from the selection, or allow you to check a box so that you merely remove the PCM digital audio. Remember, for each album for which you delete PCM audio, you regain approximately 600+ MB. Deleting PCM audio allows you to retain the MP3 audio for playback on either the client or server. I have to admit, the implementation of this feature was pretty ingenious. It could have been a tremendous pain or limitation if you were required to delete one song at a time, but instead, MusicCAST allows to to utilize the flexibility of the database structure to delete songs as well as listen to them.