NDS USB Input

Bartman posted:

I’ve been having some good results with my NDS.  Since reconfiguring the network, it is behaving itself and the servers are not dropping out.  However, I’ve been playing with the USB input on the front of my NDS to stream DFF and DSF music, neither of which can be seen either by my NS01 server or my NAS drives.  I have tried some USB2 memory sticks with just 8gb capacity that fills up quickly, they play fine. I recently bought a 32gb SanDisc Ultrafit - nice and low profile on the fascia - more capacity so I can play 8 or 10 albums this way fine.  However when I try my 128gb SanDisc Ultrafit I get an error, no matter how I format it (on Mac or Windows, FAT32 or exFAT).  I’ve checked the manual and searched this forum to see if there is a max size of USB drive for the NDS, and found nothing.  Am I doing something wrong?

i have tried also some different memory sticks: some work some not. i have sandisk and lacie memory sticks with around 120gb which work .  ( sandisk ultra and lacie porsche design 120gb). The lacie 1to was not recognized.  I bought on amazon and returned the models not recognized.  But no way to know before if it will work....

Bartman posted:

I’ve been having some good results with my NDS.  Since reconfiguring the network, it is behaving itself and the servers are not dropping out.  However, I’ve been playing with the USB input on the front of my NDS to stream DFF and DSF music, neither of which can be seen either by my NS01 server or my NAS drives.  I have tried some USB2 memory sticks with just 8gb capacity that fills up quickly, they play fine. I recently bought a 32gb SanDisc Ultrafit - nice and low profile on the fascia - more capacity so I can play 8 or 10 albums this way fine.  However when I try my 128gb SanDisc Ultrafit I get an error, no matter how I format it (on Mac or Windows, FAT32 or exFAT).  I’ve checked the manual and searched this forum to see if there is a max size of USB drive for the NDS, and found nothing.  Am I doing something wrong?

I've used 256, 512, and 1024 GB ssd drives into my NDX with 0 problems.

• Bartman, forgive my ignorance, but what are DFF and DSF Music, and why would you want to use the USB input to the NDS as opposed to Ethernet?

Hi David,

DFF and DSF files are the file formats used to contain the DSD audio data in much the same way as WAV or FLAC files contain PCM data.

There is an important difference between the DSF and DFF formats which is that DSF files are able to include metadata (tagging data) whereas DFF files cannot. For this reason I always convert my DSD iso files to DSF rather than DFF. This may also partially explain why Bartman says that his NAS cannot see these files. Indeed, it isn't at all clear what he means by this. Can Bartman not see the files at all using the file manager on his NAS or are the files on his NAS just not appearing on the app? If the latter, then I think we need to know what server software (if any) Bartman has installed on the NAS and the make/model of his NAS drive before we can help him.

Twonky on my WD NAS Drive, Naim propriety on the NS01. In both cases the DSF and DFF are unseen by the NDS, but 24/192, 24/96 and 16/44 play fine.  I have ordered a different, larger USB drive for the DSF/DFF files, I’ll see how I get on and report back. They play fine on the 32gb I have but it would be nice to keep more albums ready to play  It seems a bit hit and miss but at least I  now know that’s the reason, so thank you for the feedback above. 

I've yet to hear anyone say anything good about Twonky, so maybe it's worth trying a different server on your NAS.

Does the NS01 run the latest Naim server firmware, which I think is 1.7? I can't remember if it was included in the last round of updates.

The Twonky NAS is just a backup, and yes the NS01 is at 1.7b. 

...and I meant proprietary software, not what I typed.

Support for DSD was apparently only added to Twonky in v. 7.2.7 so, if the version of Twonky installed on your WD NAS drive is an earlier version than this, this might explain why you aren't seeing these files.

I've been using the 128gb SanDisc Ultrafit in my ND5 for about a month.  It worked fine, streaming Wav and mp3 files. 

Claus

Try Minimserver - it decodes DSD and DFF