Olive Opus: First Impressions - Page 6

Guys. I need some help. My computer crashed and back up failed so I lost all my back up rips of my CD collection. I still have everything on my Opus.

Can I use the USB port on the Opus to copy everything on the Opus and then import it into iTunes? All the files on my Opus are in Aiff so there should be no compatibility problem.

Thanks for any reaction.

Hmm. Sounds good. First I have to set up properly file sharing again. That was a bit of a hassle the last time around and now that I have completely reinstalled the operating system I will have to do it again. The hassle is that i have a few computers on the LAN and IIRC you have to set one computer to "take the lead" otherwise if you log computers on and off the LAN the file sharing gets messed up.

So once I do that and my desktop sees the Olive I should be able to open iTunes and see the Opus and import all the files just like that? Nice if it works. Maybe I'll have time to fiddle with it tonight when I get back home.

thanks.

Olive tech support said I should be able to do it by attaching a USB drive to the Olive and copying over. Then I can plug that into my desktop and import into iTunes.

I'll keep you posted so if it happens to someone else there will be a record of how to deal with it.

Geez! Turns out the hard drive has to be formatted with FAT32 to work with the Opus. VISTA or XP, however, will not allow one to format a disc larger than about 30GB with FAT32. So now what do I do? This is a big fat pain!

Also Olive seems to have indicated that it will not be possible to import the songs into iTUNES even if I manage to pull them onto an external hard drive. I don't see how that could be. Once they are on a hard drive attached to my desk top I am pretty sure that I can import them.

Hmm. Maybe I can find a pre-formatted one too. Thanks for the tip. Probably these guys at Best Buy and Compu USA won't have a clue about the formatting. Maybe it will say somewhere in the fine print on the box.

OK FYI: I picked up a 500GB Maxtor USB drive but it was preformatted with NTFS. I found a great site that has a little program to format a drive with FAT32 and step by step instructions.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ind...at32format.htm

Basically you have to delete the partition on your new drive. Then from Windows Disc Manager you assign a drive letter but do not format the drive. Once you do that, you open the little program from a dos prompt and tell it to format your disc. Boom!

As for the Opus, you just turn it on, and then plug in the USB drive which will show up on the main menu. Then go to your albums view, mark all of them, add them to a list and choose the USB drive as the list to add them to just like as if you were making a playlist. I'm in the process of copying my entire library to the USB drive now.

I'll let you know later my experience about reading the library into iTunes. I REALLY hope it works!

Yup. The sad fact is that I have about 5 external drives connected to my pc but the backup strategy was "less than optimal."

Here's another question. Have you noticed that there is no mention any more on the Olive web site about streaming music to other rooms? They used to sell a device that you could connect to a system in another room and stream from the Olive. If it's on the web site I couldn't find it. So was that a bust? They couldn't make it work and gave up?

Update: Olive confirmed to me that they are not currently marketing the hardware that allows you to stream from your Olive to other rooms (I forget now but I think it was called Sonata). They said they are upgrading it and expect the new version to be available in early 2008. In the meantime they said you can use third party devices like Roku's to do streaming.

Good grief! The Opus has been copying files to my backup drive for 12 hours!!!! I have maybe 250GBs of material but... still. Well I could see this morning that the copy indicator is moving and it's going from song to song. Just hard to believe it's so slow.

OK. So just to let you know: It can be done. I copied my library from the Opus to a USB drive. Then I plugged the USB drive into my computer and imported the library into iTunes. No problems just a lot of time consumed.

Nope iTunes cannot deal with FLAC. It's a real bummer. I ripped everything in aiff and left then in that format to load both to my Opus and my iPod so to avoid additional conversions.

I guess I have a modest enough collection because it almost fits uncompressed on the new 160 GB iPod (just have to select several albums not to load) and of course easily fits on my Opus.

I couldn't live without an iPod. Use it in my car, working out, on planes......The new 160GB seems to have better DACs than the older ones. At least it sounds better to my ears.