A Lansonic installation

1237 Views 10 Replies 2 Participants Last post by ccooper, Sep 10, 2002

ccooper

Discussion Starter · Oct 24, 2001

I chose the Lansonic to use both for my home theater and for my whole-house music distribution system. I had initially expected to go with AudioRequest, but the Lansonic unit's openness made the difference. Here are a few of the things I like best about the DAS-750-PRO unit, and a few things I have fixed.

The MusicLoader is a life saver. I'm recording in two formats, .wav and .mp3. I can put in a bunch of CD's and come back the next day and they are done (in one format only). The main problem is that the CD's are played in real-time. If they had a built-in CD-ROM drive, they could rip the CD's much faster. Since I have about 400 CD's, that would save a lot of time. A very rough estimate is that each CD takes an hour, so I have 800 hours of recording to do.

I decided to go with a small (30GB) internal disk and save the majority of my files on network attached storage. I have 280GB in a rack unit. Lansonic's ability to access these files across the network makes this possible. It also makes backup, mirroring, etc. easier. The problem I have found is that the unit won't keep up with writing a .wav file in real-time across the network. Lansonic has promised a fix for this soon. Therefore, I have to save to local disk and then move the files, and that takes nearly twice as long.

Another problem is that Lansonic decided to use the freedb database instead of the more complete cddb database for lookups. I fixed this by telnetting into the system and adding a cddb server to the list. This is easy if you know Unix. Now my unknown disc lookups go against the much better cddb database -- I had about 20% "unknowns" before. Lansonic also ships with a startup database, and all discs are looked up against that internal database before going on the net. I removed that just by renaming the directory where the database is stored, and now all lookups are against a live database.

I have yet to plug this into the production system since I'm still loading discs. All signs so far are that it will work well.

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pruskowski

· #2 · Aug 30, 2002

How did you go about changing the lookup database? I have just received a Lansonic Pro device and would like to make sure this is setup correctly prior to loading music. I have the device networked and am able to telnet to the device - what I need to know is what file you modified, how you went about modifying it (is there an editor on the system), and what you changed.

Thanks in advance.

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ccooper

Discussion Starter · #3 · Aug 30, 2002

It will help if you know Unix commands. Here is what you must do.

cd /etc/config //change to the directory

cat mldbservers.cfg //this shows the list of servers, which you will add to

Now create a file called cddb.patch which contains only the line(s) you wish to append to the mldbservers.cfg file. There is no editor on the system, so you have to do it on the command line. The line to add is in the same format as the others, but points to a cddb server. I believe what I typed is something like this:

echo "20=sj.ca.us.cddb.com cddbp 8880 - N037.21 W121.55 San Jose, CA USA" >cddb.patch

Now you need to combine the two files. Something like this should work:

cp mldbservers.cfg mldbservers.cfg.orig

cat mldbservers.cfg.orig cddb.patch >mldbservers.tmp

cp mldbservers.tmp mldbservers.cfg

Finally, you need to use the Lansonic setup to choose your server. When you do this, you should see 20 servers instead of the 19 you started with. Just choose the last one and you should be ready to go.

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pruskowski

· #4 · Aug 31, 2002

Thanks for the quick reply. I can handle the UNIX stuff, but I'm confused as to where the server is actually setup. The manual refers to a "CDID Options Dialogue", but I can't find this in my menu system. How did you go about selecting the default internet server?

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ccooper

Discussion Starter · #5 · Aug 31, 2002

Rotate the dial until you get to "ML", Music Loader. "CDID" is one of the buttons. Selecting it allows you to specify the server to use.

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pruskowski

· #6 · Aug 31, 2002

Last night I took a look at the system and the mldbservers.cfg file was there, but had no entries. Also, when pressing the CDID button, it will scan against the internal db for information, but does not do anything (ie, no other dialogue pops up). I wonder if there's a difference in the software (my version is 2.2 pro).

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ccooper

Discussion Starter · #7 · Aug 31, 2002

I'm using 2.1.6. If they have "fixed" things so my changes won't work, that is a very good reason not to update for me. I don't know what to suggest for you...perhaps call Lansonic. 2.1.7 is the latest update listed on their site.

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pruskowski

· #8 · Aug 31, 2002

I sent them an e-mail, so we'll see what they have to say. ANother interesting item - when I added a server to the mldbservers.cfg file, I rebooted the Lansonic device and the file was empty again. Apparently it is rewriting this file for some reason. In your first message you mentioned that you deleted the internal CDID database - what is the file that you deleted? Maybe if I got rid of this file it would force the system to use the net for retreiving info.

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ccooper

Discussion Starter · #9 · Sep 3, 2002

The files are in the directory /var/hda3/db. I just renamed it to db.orig and created another db directory, with a db/local subdirectory as in the original.

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pruskowski

· #10 · Sep 10, 2002

I finally spoke with someone in Lansonic and now understand what's going on here. They no longer support CDDB access over the net - due to all of the major CDDB sites now charging license fees for real-time access. Their answer is to include a snapshot called CDID, with the problem being that it is not really complete nor up to date. In the future, they will be updating the database in a quarterly basis (which I think is still not timely enough). However, with the exception of this problem, I have found the box to work perfectly and be very easy to use. It fits my needs very well and I guess I'll just have to live with the database being somewhat out of date for loading new CD's I believe this will only be a major problem when loading CD libraries and the benefits of the box far outweigh the problems.

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ccooper

Discussion Starter · #11 · Sep 10, 2002

I'm not so sure that the benefits outweigh the problems. If I were doing it over again, I would probably just dedicate an extra PC that I have laying around to running Media Jukebox or Winamp or something similar. The biggest advantage that Lansonic had for me was the automatic loading of hundreds of CD's. Without an up-to-date CDDB database, that loses its appeal. Creating playlists on the Lansonic is troublesome if you have a lot of CD's. I create them on Media Jukebox and copy them to the Lansonic. They are limited to playing .wav's and .mp3's, which is adequate, but I would rather use other formats such as .ape, and I can't with Lansonic.

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