Stephen Dawson investigates a new player in the network audio market – the AVA Media RIP-N-PLAY music server.

There are dozens, hundreds perhaps, of options these days for delivering high quality music over a network. Unfortunately most of them are daunting, complicated, fiddly and often result in compromised performance.

Enter the RIP-N-PLAY music server from AVA Media.

What is it?
This device provides high quality music over your home network and does so in what is generally the simplest possible way, requiring almost no fiddling whatsoever. Unless, that is, your tastes are a little askew. But we’ll get to that.

The device is a solid aluminium box (five of its six sides have no seams because it was seemingly machined from a solid block). On the front are a CD-sized slot and a couple of status lights. On the back there is an Ethernet port and a power socket for the unit’s 12V power pack. It turns out that there is more on the back: two USB sockets and a D-SUB15 computer display port, hidden under a removable panel. The purpose of the display port was unclear – it would produce no image on a connected monitor – but the USB sockets are to allow you to back up this unit’s contents to a USB hard disk drive.

Contained within the unit is the CD drive behind the slot, a 1TB hard disk drive, network support electronics and sufficient computer processing to allow the unit to encode music ripped from CDs and manage housekeeping. A 2TB version is also available.

Setting Up
As I’ve suggested, use could not be easier most of the time. You plug it into your computer network. You apply power. You wait a couple of minutes until the lights on the front are green. You insert a CD. Four or five minutes later the CD pops out and the unit is ready to start serving up the music.

Just about any device on your network – smart TV, many home theatre receivers or Blu-ray players, and anything that supports DLNA – can dial up the device, show its contents by the usual lists (e.g. albums, artists) and show on their attached displays the details of the track playing along with cover art.

There is no remote control for the unit because in normal use all control is from the client side. And if your music collection isn’t too radical then there’s no need to control it at all.

But, there are lots of advanced facilities accessible by means of a web browser on any computer (or portable device, such as a smart phone) on your network.

For the most part the web interface was fairly easy to use. The unit uses the Subsonic music application – this indexes and serves up music, and can transcode it on the fly. If your client does not support the standard music format used by the unit, then Subsonic will turn it to WAV or MP3 so that it will work.

You also use the web interface to do things like upgrade the unit’s firmware (one was available when I took delivery, and doing this only took a couple of minutes), perform the aforementioned backup, or check the logs to see what the unit has been up to.

The unit is Ethernet-only, with no support or even option for WiFi. But that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to put this unit near your home entertainment system. You can put it anywhere that a network cable from your router can reach. It’s better wired, anyway. FLAC music files require a bitrate typically of 50 to 60% of the uncompressed original … say 800kbps. Most modern WiFi networks are entirely comfortable with that, but it would still be a drain on their capacity. And remember, your client devices may well rely on WiFi as well, so it’s better to leave the airwaves as clear as possible.

Indeed, the unit can feed multiple streams simultaneously. I spent a little time with three different entirely different genres of music, all served up by the RIP-N-PLAY, playing simultaneously from three different devices in my office.

In Detailed Use

In honour of The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s death, reported the day that I first plugged in the unit, I inaugurated the unit with his 1983 recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Ripping went well and after a few minutes the disc popped out. I figured I’d start with the most navigable system in my house: my desktop computer. This runs Windows 7. I found RIP-N-PLAY quickly among the list of media devices on the network, labelled ‘Logitech Media Server [RIPNPLAY]’, so I guess we know where it sourced some amount of its technology.

I double clicked on that and it opened in Windows Media Player. I clicked on the device there, then on ‘Music’, then on ‘Artists’. And there I found not Ray Manzarek but Carl Orff. I selected that and started playing it, and the tracks were listed appropriately as coming from the album Carmina Burana, recorded in 1983 and with a genre of ‘Rock’ (I’d be inclined to quibble with that, but Windows Media Player’s CD database says the same).

The artist, however, was listed as Carl Orff. Nowhere to be found was Ray Manzarek.

It seems that the unit likes to use ‘MusicBrainz’ as its CD database. Having used this with such players as Foobar2000, I find it not very thorough, and it often omits such things as the music genre.

Fortunately, if it can’t find your disc there it’ll look elsewhere. One low distribution CD I tried produced the following log entry: ‘MusicBrainz does not know this discid! Using freedb instead.’ In fact, that happened a couple of times. I popped in Craig Schneider’s first CD, a fine jazz one that saw very limited release, and again the system had to resort to freedb, which loaded it up with track titles, album name and artist information, but omitted year and genre.

If you load in a disc which freedb doesn’t know either, then it will be ripped with ‘Unknown’ tags.

Fortunately you can edit tags, track names and so on. All you have to do is follow the instructions provided on the AV Media website.

Ha, only kidding! The instructions point you vaguely in the right general direction, but leave out such steps as where on earth you kind find the ‘Edit Tags’ option it mentions. (Hint: click on ‘flac’ on the left hand side of the Subsonic control panel, then click on the album name.)

You can open up the unit for file management in Windows File Manager, and presumably the equivalent under other operating systems. I was able to copy in other folders of MP3 music and these would become available, eventually. The unit took a difficult-to-determine amount of time to discover and index the added content. Usually 10 minutes or so was enough.

When you’re ripping CDs, take care. If you re-insert the same CD it will be ripped again into a duplicate folder (with a ‘1’ after the name), which is a waste of space. I could not find a way to get rid of the duplicated play information in the Subsonic control panels. I deleted the offending folder, but its play information continued to be offered up to clients, even though there was nothing to play there.

Speed and Quality
The unit did its work fast with CDs. When I first started it seemed to take about five minutes per CD, but after the firmware upgrade this reduced to four minutes. It will not rip DVDs; it just ejects them once it realises what they are.

In a sense, how long it takes to rip a CD doesn’t really matter. Just grab a stack of them and place them on one side of the unit. Take the top one, pop it in and go on with whatever you’re doing. Each time you go past, pull out the completed CD and put in the next one. And, again, go on with what you’re doing. It is the non-intervention part of this that makes it so simple. If it takes a couple of days all up to rip your entire collection, it doesn’t matter. You’ll only be doing it once.

It’s tempting to talk about how this unit ‘sounds’. But in truth, it is simply silent. It imposes no character on the sound of your CDs because it is simply a data server. The data emerges from its sole output – the Ethernet port – in packets, so they aren’t even really comparable to normal digital data streams, which are served up serially.

But of course the quality is excellent because the unit rips to FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Compression. So the playback result ought to be bit perfect.

If your client supports FLAC, that’s what it will receive. I didn’t have a FLAC codec installed into Windows Media Player, so the RIP-N-PLAY converted the FLAC files, on the fly, back to WAV so quality was preserved. It can also convert to MP3 if that’s all that a client can handle.

The unit really was super reliable. It appeared on every client device on my network and served up its music with complete reliability.

Conclusion
You pay quite a bit for this device, of course. For the same price you could buy a serviceable desktop with several terabytes of hard disk, install software like Foobar2000 and work out how to use it to rip CDs to FLAC, or WAV. But Windows Media Player won’t by default act as a server for FLAC, so…

In short, what this unit gives you is ease of use. Plus quality and reliability. The one thing that it’s really missing, though, is decent documentation that will help you cope with the less common things it is capable of doing.