Any high quality music servers out there?

Mthomas makes a good point about the importance of the software interface. How the music is organized and its accessibility greatly effects your ultimate enjoyment of this storage format.

I have a Squeezbox 2 and just bought a 3. Just add a linear power supply and a good dac.

Sammie there is also another one called Zero One...server plus upsampling for what its worth...personally I think this just the beginning and its better to wait as more mfrs start producing music servers and as result of competition quality and pricing improves

Henry -- Yep, I agree. best to wait as companies are rolling them out fast. Here's Sony's offering:

http://products.sel.sony.com/xl1/index.html?DCMP=showcase_vaio&HQS=xl1_sonystyle

I had an interesting conversation with Mark Levinson today. We chatted about his Burwen Bobcat USB DAC and why it's a Windows only device - pretty obvious. Now, I'm a converted Windows to OSX fan but I'll point out the downside to iTunes.

Apple is fast becoming the more "evil" than the dreaded "evil Bill Gates". The word proprietary or closed comes to mind - at least Windows is open. This presents a pain for us who simply want a good system for playing back music. The Windows side of things gives you ALOT of flexibility.

What to do? Well, after talking with Mark since the Burwen Bobcat is one really nice piece of code, I started looking back to dbPowerAmp. This cool program converted my FLAC to WMA lossless and then iTunes imported so I thought could it go backwards from Apple Lossless to Windows Media Lossless? I don't know yet since I don't have a PC at home anymore so if anyone can confirm, would be great to know...

This is also why I'm down on FLAC. WMA lossless and Apple Lossless are just about par with FLAC but with the main advantage of application support. That's really what drove me nuts about FLAC and Winamp - they both were such a pain in the ass to configure and customize.

The MOST important thing isn't how good the server is or even the software mentioned but ending up with a music file with CORRECT tags! Once you start to amass thousands of high-quality files, you'll be sorry that you didn't pay enough attention to file management. The tag is EVERYTHING! Wait until your system crashes and you have to re-scan your entire collection - if that tag isn't what you want, you'll be editing files for months... I know, I did it!

If you're into Linux, FLAC is for you but if you just want a Windows based server, go with WMA lossless since it can convert to other formats where FLAC won't. iTunes for Windows would be a second choice.

Again, if anybody can confirm converting Apple Lossless to Windows Media Lossless, would be great to know your results and opinion...