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Finally built a CMP (of sorts). Long post with some questions.

Hi,

I finally put together a CMP-like machine the other day. I used hardware that I had on hand; decent stuff but not the same as recommended here. I used an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, an Intel E6600 CPU, Corsair RAM, Corsair 520HX power supply, and a good case. The machine has no internal discs and uses a separately powered external SATA drive to hold the operating systems. I actually put three different operating systems on this disc so that I could eventually compare CMP on XP to optimized Linux and Vista configurations. There is also a partition for another operating system that is not yet being used.

I followed all of the OS recommendations except I didn't shutdown networking because my music library lives elsewhere on the network. (I know, string me up and tar and feather me, but for the life of me I can't figure out why running networking would be worse than running extra local discs, a monitor, a keyboard, and a wireless mouse.) I followed bios recommendations where I could find similarities with the bios on my motherboard.

I am using the box headless - no monitor, mouse, nor keyboard, which brings up a slight issue I'll explain later. I have two different DAC solutions I am trying with it, an internal Lynx 2B via the Lynx drivers, and a Wavelength Cosecant v3 USB DAC via ASIO4All. I put the Lynx card in so I could try upsampling, but after a brief comparison I am listening mostly via the USB DAC.

I am trying to get the headless system to not need to run VNC server. I can do this because I made a network capable version of my CPlayListEditor program. I can run a server instance on the CMP box, and run a client version on any other computer in the house. The client version gets the libraries from the server, and can build playlists from those libraries, and then sends the playlists to the instance running on the CMP box which then launches CPlay with the playlist loaded. I am able to control CPlay on the CMP box via the network client of my program because I added pause, next and previous buttons to my application, which sends messages to the server instance which then sends the command on to CPlay.

While I haven't yet directly compared this solution to my battery Fit-PC Slim running an optimized version of Linux, I can say that I am thus far very impressed with the sound quality. It is the best I've achieved out of a full sized PC.

So, here are my issues and questions.

1) The "Don't use welcome screen" recommendation keeps me from being totally headless and running VNC server because it forces a password dialog box on boot-up. I only have one account on this machine, so leaving 'use welcome screen' enabled allows the computer to boot up directly into that account without displaying the welcome screen. I see a couple of ways around it but don't know enough about CMP to make an informed decision:

* I could boot directly into XP mode with the welcome screen enabled, then automatically start my CPlaylist Editor application and automatically start CMP mode. If I start CMP mode after boot-up with welcome screen enabled, will there still be the lockup problem?

This brings up two other questions...
- Is there any in CMP mode, other than behavioral differences, when CMP mode is started from XP mode as compared to when CMP mode is booted into directly? I am only interested in technical differences that might affect sound quality.

- When already in CMP mode, is there any difference in threading when the CMP explorer (or whatever its called) starts CPlay as compared to my application starting CPlay, or will CPlay start optimized to the CMP settings no matter how it is started when in CMP mode?

* My second option would be to boot directly into CMP mode, but I would need a way to do this that would not bring up the password dialog box when the welcome screen is disabled. Is there any manner to do this? This would also require a way to automatically start my CPlayList Editor application within CMP mode. Is there some batch file that runs automatically when CMP mode is started that I could edit to start my application?

Thanks in advance for any information related to these questions.

Alan


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