I have 3 Turtle Beach Audiotron’s. They are now discontinued MP3 HiFi devices that play music files located on a server. They have served me quite well for quite a number of years.
Well, now that I have made the transition to an Apple OS I have to figure out how to do things differently. I thought I had because I had imported some new songs and got them into my playlist and on to my Audiotron’s but alas, it didn’t work.
Let me be more specific to my setup.
I keep a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device on my network. It’s primary purpose is to keep a copy of my music files to serve my 3 Audiotron’s. I didn’t want to slow down any computer that I may be using plus I didn’t want to leave computers on all the time. I manage my music on my computer though I keep a separate file structure that I don’t let iTunes muck with.
My problems were many fold.
1) One of the biggest problems was a setting in iTunes. I have the settings in the Ripping tab in iTunes set to MP3 and also set to some custom variables. Specifically, they need to be for me 320K and 44 sample rate. My problem was simple but took me forever to figure out and that was that I had the sample rate set to 48. I suspect it was a mouse error on my part cause I know better. The reason it was hard to figure out is that the songs would play ok on my Mac and then would play ok on a Windows PC but would play off tempo on the Audiotron even though they were the same file. Obviously it was due to the sample rate because once I fixed it, they played correctly.
2) I didn’t get any of the ID3 Tags. These are the bits of information that are attached to Music files (MP3 files specifically) which give programs like iTunes and other music playing programs information like song title, author, genre, album name, and even comments on the song. This was really frustrating because on all the discussion boards I kept hearing how everyone always returned to iTunes as their ID3 Tag editor because of how reliable it was yet, this wasn’t reliability – it was the exact opposite. There was a solution or rather a work around. It involved a 2 step process of going to the Tools Menu, choosing Advanced, then Choosing writing ID3 tags, and writing ID3 v2.2 out. The 2nd step is going to Tools Menu, choosing Advanced, then Choosing convert to MP3 file. This last step has several caveats. You need to do this even if it is already an MP3. And you need to make sure you now use the newly created MP3 and not the old one – this got tricky.
2a) I’m not sure this step is required but I also used another program called ID3 Editor and wrote out ID3 v1.0 tags to the file too.
3) Editing files on a Mac save them in a OS X format and you need to save them with a Windows ASCII format for them to work with other simple devices like the Audiotron. This means things like Playlists (M3U files). A simple thing but another hoop to jump through.
4) I still haven’t created a program on OS X to make the required Audiotron files to make Audiotron boot up go fast. This means that I have to use my wife’s Windows system or boot camp to create this.
5) I originally had only 1 Audiotron. I had the setup on this Audiotron refined so it would only search out the NAS and no other computer systems on the net. The other 2 Audiotron’s were not set up this way. I forgot about this and it took me a while this morning to remember this and get this setup. Basically, the Audiotron is very inefficient at looking at other systems that it may or may not have permission to browse through music files on. This makes the boot up process very slow. If you set it up to only browse through a specific system or two, then boot up because fast. Boot up is required when files change on the storage device.
I think this about covers the issues. I hope I have refined it though I still have some work to do.