Some help gratefully received!

[UK Dave]

Hi, first many apologies for asking questions which I am sure many of you have heard before, or for which many may have asked before me, but I am confused, know little on this subject, and the advice I have already read confuses me still further!!

I am looking to buy my first NAS. The main reason is so that I can stream music to my two Roberts WM-201 wi-fi internet radios with upnp without having the computer turned on.

Another thing I would like to do is to get some backup system going. I have nearly 200GB of mainly music and videos on an old Buffalo external hard drive and I know I will be in serious trouble if it ever dies on me.

In the future, I would look to stream video through my TV, perhaps by buying a Popcorn device or something like that.

I would also like the NAS very silent and fanless if possible.

Other than this, there is nothing else I am particularly interested in doing with it.

I am very tempted by the QNAP TS-109 (either version I or II) as this is fanless and seems to have a lot of RAM compared with similar products, such as Synology, but my greatest fear is buying one of these things and it not having the power to stream properly, so I keep getting drop-outs, as I read so many complaints about such devices not being powerful enough for various tasks. Does anyone else stream regularly and if so, am I just worrying needlessly?

I would be grateful for your help

 

[thiggins]

Audio streaming has very low bandwidth requirements, usually around 100 kbps (that's bits not bytes). Any NAS, even the first generation ones, are fast enough to handle this (and so are all but the slowest Wi-Fi connection).

The bigger question is whether the NAS UPnP server is compatible with the Roberts radios. The UPnP spec (and I believe this would be UPnP AV) leaves plenty of room for variation in implementation on both the client and server end. So the only way to know would be to try it or get feedback from someone who has used the combination that you propose to use.

I don't know anything about the UPnP serving capabilities of Windows Media Player 11, but the WM-201 FAQ (#19) says that it will work but only for MP3, WMA or WAV file types only. But you can also supposedly play directly from SMB shares, i.e. Windows shared folders.

 

[UK Dave]

Thanks very much for your answer ... and your comforting words about streaming speeds generally on a NAS.

However, I didn't realise it might be a problem for my radio to be able to use upnp from a NAS. It currently does this quite happily using Windows Media Player on my computer, and I did install Twonky on my computer once when it also worked, playing a variety of formats (well, mp3 and aac which is all I am worried about).

I assumed if Twonky on my computer works, Twonky on a upnp enabled NAS would also work. Or am I mistaken?

Windows Shares wasn't really practical from my computer, as the radio insisted on reading through all my music files before it would play anything, and quite frequently it hung before it got to the end, meaning I had to start again.

 

[thiggins]

I assumed if Twonky on my computer works, Twonky on a upnp enabled NAS would also work. Or am I mistaken?

I have found that you can't assume anything when it comes to UPnP AV / DLNA. There is just too much variation in implementations, versions, etc.
Again, only way to know for sure is to try it or find someone who has.

 

[UK Dave]

Hmm interesting, well I did a Google search about Qnap devices for example and found this guy below who seems to think the Roberts radio works with Qnap:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DWM9R0I5XIJQ

and the second poster here has a Qnap and Roberts radio which work, but the first guy doesn't seem to have any joy with Roku radio and Qnap:

http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6022&start=360&sid=689bd144fad12d7813947826c49db6ec

so it's looking promising with Qnap, although I did a similar search for Synology and found less promising news:

https://www.reciva.com/index.php?option=com_joomlaboard&Itemid=77&func=view&catid=3&id=33166

So maybe I get Qnap, but it is a bit of a risk buying something that might not work ... I thought upnp was a universal standard and that was the whole point of it?

 

[thiggins]

I thought upnp was a universal standard and that was the whole point of it?

"Standards" that are developed by industry consortiums provide for lots of wiggle room for vendors' pet features and implementation. As Capt. Barbosa said in The Curse of the Black Pearl "they're not really rules, they're more like guidelines...".