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Ant8519 Offline
#1 Posted : Thursday, March 17, 2011 11:59:39 PM(UTC)
Rank: Newbie

Joined: 3/17/2011(UTC)
Posts: 1
Hi folks

I have just found this site and it seems maybe jamcast might be a useful product for me. I wonder if anyone here could answer some questions...

Firstly my current set up is a Squeezebox Duet running from a QNAP TS109 NAS drive. This has been a nice solution and allowed me to rip all my CD's and play them through my stereo at a very high sound quality, certainly the equal of my decent CD player.

But time marches on, the process of running the SB via a NAS was highly troublesome and although it has been reliable (up 'til recently) there are issues.

The main one is that all of my new music is now in WMA DRM format (downloaded for free from NOKIA as part of their OVI unlimited service - sadly this apparently is soo to be axed, but that's another tale)

The sting with WMA DRM is that the SB cannot decode them and being DRM they are "locked" to my laptop (and my mobile phone, a Nokia 5800). This is clearly not a good thing, as I need to play them back through my nice stereo.

I bought the SB 3 years ago as a solution to playing any of my thousands of tunes in my living room, without needing the laptop in there. Then I only had cd's, ut now with WMA DRM's forming the larger part of my collection a new solution is needed.

So, is Jamcast the solution?

I have a Sony BDPS-370 DLNA Blu-ray player. A fine machine. This is attached to my TV and stereo (and my router via ethernet). I would intend to play the WMA DRM tunes held on my laptop through this machine.

Q.1. What is the sound quality like? How does Jamcast send the data from A to B? Is Jamcast using the DAC in the DLNA machine, in which case has it converted from WMA DRM to a format that the DLNA machine will happily read, before sending this info stream? (I assume it must...)

Q.2. What kind of interface exists? Is it necessary to control Jamcast via the laptop on which the music lives, or does it appear within the GUI of the DLNA machine to which it sends the music stream?

Q.3. How does it cope with browsing very large directories? (several thousands of albums)

Q.4. Obviously the laptop with the WMA DRM tunes has to be on to run Jamcast, but is there any way of waking it from standby (WoL) from the Sony interface? For reference the laptop will only be connected wirelessly.

Doubtless more questions will materialise but for now many thx to anyone who takes the time to answer...

BW, Ant
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Scott Online
#2 Posted : Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:19:49 AM(UTC)
Rank: Administration
Scott

Joined: 1/25/2009(UTC)
Posts: 1,615
Location: Orlando, FL, USA
Hi Ant,

Thanks for your interest in Jamcast. Hope I can answer your questions...

First, a quick distinction with regards to WM-DRM protected audio tracks: Jamcast does advertise the ability to play these natively, but as you've already discovered for yourself the DRM playback must be support on both the server and playback client. Jamcast is indeed licensed by Microsoft to stream WM-DRM tracks to licensed "PlaysForSure" devices, but the Sony BD device you mentioned specifically is not one of those. Your solution here *could* involve purchasing some inexpensive hardware (like the Roku Soundbridge, or maybe even an Xbox360), so if you're interested I can talk in that direction...

Jamcast also of course has the Virtual Soundcard which can stream anything that is playing on the PC to your Sony DLNA device, including the DRM-protected tracks, so that's what I'll assume you were initially interested in.

To answer your questions:

1) With the Virtual Soundcard, it's capturing audio being played on the PC. With your DRM tracks, they would be decoded by Windows Media Player, then the raw LPCM audio is captured by Jamcast and sent across the network as such. You can optionally use the MP3 (lossy) version of the stream, which is configurable but by default 320kbps (high quality MP3). The encoding occurs on the server, and is decoded by the device.

2) Once the Virtual Soundcard stream is playing on the Sony device, you'd be using Windows Media Player on the laptop to control all playback. The device has no idea what the source of the audio is so you only see generic "Virtual Soundcard" info displayed on the device.

3) You're doing all of the browsing on the laptop, so this is a function of Windows/WMP.

4) This I'm not entirely sure about, I think this is possible if your laptop has wake-on-LAN capabilities but this kind of thing is beyond my expertise. Smile

Hope this gets you started. Let me know what else I can do to help.

Thanks!
Scott
Jamcast Technical Support
Docs: http://www.sdstechnologies.com/Wiki/
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