The Squeezebox Touch has an internal music server which allows you to connect a USB disk to the touch and then stream from that. You say you have a large collection, and the concern is that the server capability of the Touch is somewhat limited, and the performance with a "very large CD collection" may not be that great. That prompted the suggestions to run an external server. The Vortexbox Appliance is a pre-built Linux computer with the Squeezebox server software pre-installed, as well as pre-configured ripping engine. It also works like a NAS in that it sits on your network and is available as a file server. Many NAS solutions are able to run Squeezeboxserver, but are rather underpowered for this application. A full-fledged computer setup as a file server generally works better. The Vortexbox is relatively low power consumption. The reviews of many users on this forum is very positive. I run a "DIY" server, but it has similar hardware to the Vortexbox, and it works excellent. As far as storage requirements for FLAC files, I don't have actual numbers handy, but FLAC compression should be about 30-40%, so for a 45 minute CD that should result in about 400 Mbytes (if my math is correct). You say "compressed" vs. "uncompressed", but FLAC IS compressed. There are different compression levels available, but -5 compression is the normal and is suggested. The benefit with FLAC is it is LOSSLESS compression- that is, when uncompressed you end up with IDENTICAL information. That is not the case with MP3 for example, where there is some information loss involved in the compression.
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