I know that one of the features I would like to see in future version of the software is a decoding module that can deal with uncompressed redbook audio. I care about leaving my CDs safe at home (rather than getting scratched in my car) and fidelity more than anything else. I already encode to 256 kbit since 128 kbit MP3s sound like crap. 256 kbit and 20G gives you the very reasonable capacity for about 200 platters with about 5:1 compression over the original data. Since it's only a matter of a couple of years before HD tech will permit that much music to be stored un-mangeled It'd be nice to have the software ready in time.

The biggest problem I see with this is the small 8M of RAM on the box caching might be a bit hard, but I have no issues with leaving the drives spun up for streaming in such a mode. The spin-down is only marginally useful as it is when playing 256 kbit MP3s. Heck, spinning up and down every 10-15 seconds like they do when playing 256kbit files may be more harmful than leaving them up.


--- Carl