On 18/02/2018 20:38, dennis@home wrote:
On 18/02/2018 16:59, Bill wrote:
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first
by going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by
phone.

It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected
it to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the
connector as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight,
and the back is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the
back panel and guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to
go in fully and it worked.

Why is it so expensive?

Because it's a packaged solution,a nd not everyone can (or would want
to) build it.

If you have a PC or a RPi you can plug in a CD drive and do what the
Brennan does using free software.


That's what the Brennan *is* doing, of course. cdparanoia, abcde maybe.
Quite clever really; a few commodity PC parts, a RPi, and a DAC in a
nice box. Free software and a few scripts, job done.

I just put all my CDs as FLAC on my NAS drive and the musiccast system
can play them without any problems. As can all my android and PCs.

Well, yes. A seriously time-expired laptop with a CD could do the
ripping and encoding with no trouble.