VortexBox 1TB Automatic CD ripping NAS
From VortexBox
Your entire music collection, available anywhere in your home! VortexBox is designed to store your entire CD and Media collection in one easy to access location. With an integrated CD ripping engine and a huge amount of storage, the VortexBox is a single device connected to your home network, allowing blissful music management. It really couldn't be any easier - simply insert an audio CD into the DVD/CD burn drive. The CD is converted within a few minutes, added to the media library, shared on your network. You can then access your music from your Logitech SqueezeBox , iTunes, Windows Media Player, or other Media Player. VortexBox is easy to configure: just plug it into your home router and browse to the easy to use interface through your favorite web browser. Available in 500 GB or 1 TB (1000 GB) capacities, VortexBox distributes your entire collection throughout your home and has plenty of room to grow. Watch anything, anywhere at home. VortexBox doesn't only stream music. Add movies, TV Shows, and other content to its storage to stream to any part of your house. Works with Logitech Squeezebox, Sonos, XBMC or ReQuest server. VortexBox includes Slimserver for media serving to any network connected audio device.
- Color: Black
- Model: vb-1000b
- Dimensions: 2.50" h x 12.00" w x 10.50" l, 8.00 pounds
- Hard Disk: 1000GB
The very best! A real problem solver at a great price.
I bought this gadget after a considerable amount of frustration with a Netgear ReadyNAs I had expected to use as a server for my Logitech Squeezebox Duet. The ReadyNAS supposedly performs this function but with a large collection of files it is simply too slow to keep up with indexing and searching etc. Plus ripping my 2,000+ CDs was a real chore. I read about this product and jumped on it.
Well, within a week of getting my Vortexbox appliance, all my CDs are in my mini storage, my Levinson 31.5 transport sold on eBay, and my entire CD collection is now available to me throughout my home without the slightest issues, disappointments or problems.
I initially corresponded with the manufacturer a few times with questions about configuring this device to suit my particular needs I got immediate, understanding an useful help. I cannot speak more highly of the builder. In fact, I sent a modest voluntary donation to them as I felt the help I got was above-and-beyond. Since I became familiar with this gadget, I have had zero issues, it has been up and running for over sixty days without a reboot, issue, glitch etc. You just pop a CD in the slot and it will rip it to flac and/or any almost any other format you care to have.
Useful tip: if you are ripping a large collection disable the creation of MP3 copies (the system rips to both flac and mp3 by default). This will speed up the tedious job of ripping enormously and you can go back later on and create MP3 versions of any or all of your stuff as a background task when you're done transcribing your collection. Info on how this is done is on the manufacturer's simple but very useful web site.
Anyway, this is a great product from nice people and if anything happened to it I'd buy another in a flash.
Great value for money NAS
I found out about this great device through the Logitech Squeezebox forums. After getting my iPhone to control my Squeezebox using the iPeng application I was looking for a better solution to store my digital media library and I found out about the Vortexbox operating system, which is basically a custom modified version of a Linux distribution. If my memory serves me correctly I initially thought Vortexbox was based on Debian but the website documentation now says it is based on Fedora.
Originally I was going to build my own network area storage (NAS) device using an old PC but I soon realized I was better off buying the Vortexbox Appliance. My old PC was too loud for my living room. I didn't want to hear PC cooling fans running all the time when I'm listening to music. Plus my old PC had issues as a Windows box so I wasn't sure if I could trust it to be reliable enough as the problems may have been related to hardware components going bad on the motherboard. The Vortexbox appliance is quiet and powerful and inexpensive. It is really tiny and easily fits on my bookshelf and the full-size CD tray is nice. There are just two lights on the front and they are unobtrusive. Did I mention this device is quiet? Even when the hard drives are spinning and the orange light is flickering on the front I can barely hear a thing. And its very low power consumption, only 25W. I leave mine turned on all the time and it never gets hot.
I plugged it directly into my wireless router using an Ethernet cable and turned it on and my Windows Vista machine recognized it immediately in My Network Places. I am operating the device headless (without a monitor or keyboard or mouse attached) so I access the files directly via Windows Explorer on my other computer. If I want to custom configure the Vortexbox Appliance I can teleport in and access a command line prompt using a free telnet/ssh client called PuTTY.
The version I have has an older release of Vortexbox on it so I will use the command line prompt to update it to the newest version along with updating to the newest version of Squeezecenter. The Vortexbox website documentation is good and getting better all the time and the support forum is very helpful. The only issue I have now is with figuring out how to manage my expansive library. The box is very versatile and the many choices mean you have to think about how you want to manage the data on the machine. You can custom configure it to sync with another machine. For example, I normally purchase iTunes songs on my Windows box. Right now I have been manually moving songs from the Windows machine to the Vortexbox but I would like to figure out how to automate this process. Another thing you have to decide is whether to use iTunes or Squeezebox to keep things organized.
Overall I am very happy with the OS and the appliance and it is very liberating to have my entire music collection at my fingertips. The Vortexbox appliance is very good value for the money. I am impressed so far and I hope it will stand up to years of use.
Great Device
I am not Network savvy (did not know what "NAS" meant prior to buying this device), but I have been very pleased with the operation and design of this device. As others have noted, setup is extraordinarily simple.
One caution for those intending to use the device with a Sonos home music setup: Sonos will look for a "share" only two levels deep. I wouldn't have known what that meant either two weeks ago, but in practice it means that Sonos looks for music in the Storage/Music directory, and because Vortexbox defaults to saving music in Storage/Music/Flac and Storage/Music/MP3, that means that Sonos pulls in _both_ the MP3 and the Flac, and there isn't an easy way to know which version of your music is playing. In truth, you can't tell much difference, but if you've spent a fortune converting all your music to lossless flac format, then you will want to know that it is that format which is playing on your home system. The fix was to go to Geek Squad and have them create a new share called "Storage/flac" which referenced the location of the music I wanted in Sonos. Not too difficult.
Aside from that hiccup, the operation to my ears has been flawless. I currently use the flac files on my home system and the mp3 files for my ipod... and I've done away with the shelves and shelves of music CDs.
