continued from musicstorage [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7]
To support my original goals for a Whole-House Music Storage system, it looks like I'll need to support two methods to access my music: streaming and syncing.
Music players that are connected to a LAN or the intarnets can stream digital audio directly from a storage location. Streaming bandwidth would range from the >1Mb/s LAN/WiFi speed to <128Kb upstream DSL/Cable Modem speed. Over the LAN, digital audio can be streamed uncompressed or via lossless-compression, but via upstream internet, lossy-compression is required.
Portable music players and other devices that are not always connected to the net (such as in-car players and cel phones and PDAs with SD Cards) would need to sync digital audio from the storage location to be played later offline. Today, most of these devices have limited storage capacities which requires the use of lossy-compression. (In the near future, this will not be necessary). Many players use a variety of proprietary compression formats, but fortunately, nearly all offline devices support the mp3 lossy-compression format.
