Getting Downloaded Lossless Files to the B2

[Mark Bernstein]

I've been enjying playing my 20,000 lossless tracks on my B2 and especially enjoying not having to keep track of the 2000 cds they were on.  Ripping my CDs to the B2 was a lengthy but easy process. 

Now there are more and more albums that are available for purchase as FLAC files but I'm not sure as to the best practices for getting those files properly onto the B2's internal hard drive.   Any reccomendations? 

Thanks

Mark 

[Daniel Taylor]

There are three ways to transfer files to the B2 (other than ripping the CD):

1) Import from USB disk;

2) Upload via the WebUI;

3) Direct copy from computer to B2 as a NAS disk.

In all cases, it is important to have the music in a folder structure that has the top folder named for the Artist, which then contains various folders named for each Album, which each in turn containg the track files:  Artist\Album\tracks.  The cover art can be included as one of the files in the Album folder.  It should be a JPG file, or I think there is one other option, maybe PNG (not sure).

[Davywhizz]

I sometimes buy FLAC downloads and transfer them onto the B2. I put them on a USB stick or transfer via NAS from my laptop, as Daniel describes. I've never had to reformat into the artist/album/tracks format, the album art is always included and has never failed to transfer to the B2 without any tweaking. I've mainly bought from HD Tracks. Albums usually arrive as zip files, but I've managed to sort that out, despite not being much of a techie.

One thing to say, though, in case you're not aware, you shouldn't try to add anything higher than CD quality to the B2. Firstly it may not play (though at least some 24/96 files will) and, secondly, there's no benefit. Even if a file plays, the B2 will cap playback at 16/44.1 (CD quality) so you're wasting money and disk space on anything higher if the intention is only to put the tracks on the B2. I've converted my higher res files using dBpoweramp software for B2 use. It's a FLAC to FLAC conversion, but you can alter the bit depth and sample rate within that.