Getting music into Auralic Aries Mini

[Strictly Stereo]

I remember past advice not to fill a hard drive too full as it affected it’s performance.

Does this advice still hold with an SSD?

I have approx. 350 GB of music on my Mac and although I may buy some more it probably won’t be much. l’m wondering if I could manage with a 500 GB SSD instead of 1TB.

Kevin

The more music you have in your library, the longer it will take to index it. SSD drives can speed this up considerably. Magnetic drives can slow down as the disk fills up and files become fragmented. This is only likely to become a problem for music storage if you regularly replace some of the stored music with other music. In practice, most people just continue to add more music over time, so fragmentation is unlikely to be an issue. The other benefit of SSD over magnetic drives is the absence of any mechanical noise.

 

[beammeup]

.... The Aries Mini has software volume control. I believe it uses the ESS on-chip attenuation. You have fine grained control over the volume level (0-100) using the slider in Lightning DS or the buttons on the front panel.

No, it's labelled as an Analog Volume Control - this is the title of the selection when using the Lightning App - this is probably why you can only adjust the volume by steps of 10, because of the analog volume choice. Yes the slider option is there and I am aware of that, but having that finer control means engaging digital attenuation - so the coarser volume control is analog it would seem - try it for yourself.

 

[Strictly Stereo]

No, it's labelled as an Analog Volume Control - this is the title of the selection when using the Lightning App - this is probably why you can only adjust the volume by steps of 10, because of the analog volume choice. Yes the slider option is there and I am aware of that, but having that finer control means engaging digital attenuation - so the coarser volume control is analog it would seem - try it for yourself.

Are we both talking about the Aries Mini? It uses the ESS Sabre chip's built-in attenuation. This works entirely in the digital domain. The Aries Mini has 100 steps available.

 

[kevinrt]

OK, I’ve got an Aries Mini now.

I have managed to do the basic setup and can stream Apple Music to it, via wi-fi, from my iPad.

I am struggling to set it up to play my CD collection. The collection is stored on the hard drive of my Mac Mini using iTunes. I have tried moving the song files (each file has the suffix.m4a) onto a external USB drive and then plugging into the back of the Aries to make them accessible there. I run through the ‘set up new library’ process and it seems to recognise that the USB drive is attached but then reports the drive size as ‘0M’ and music as ‘0 songs’. Trying to move to the next stage brings an error message.

Any thoughts from someone who has managed this successfully?

thanks

Kevin

 

[jan tomczak]

kevin,
i recently purchased an aries mini with the psu from lee at strictly stereo and had issues with my itunes library(om my pc) not shaking hands with the aries mini.
after some tweaking lee had configured it perfectly...so perhaps give him a call. top marks for lee's after sales service regarding my issues.

 

[kevinrt]

I have tried putting a single song file on a USB memory stick and using that. The Aries recognises it and plays the music, but it won’t do the same with an external 1TB USB drive.

Could it be something to do with the formatting of the drive?

This USB drive has worked perfectly OK attached to my Mac Mini.

Kevin

 

[beammeup]

Are we both talking about the Aries Mini? It uses the ESS Sabre chip's built-in attenuation. This works entirely in the digital domain. The Aries Mini has 100 steps available.

Yes we are - the Mini - the option for Analog Volume control is in there - but in reality it's probably a digital volume control; if so why label it as such?

 

[Strictly Stereo]

Yes we are - the Mini - the option for Analog Volume control is in there - but in reality it's probably a digital volume control; if so why label it as such?

I believe it is labelled as a "hardware volume control". I will check though and if I am wrong then I will flag this to Auralic. In some other Auralic products the hardware volume control would indeed be an analogue volume control.

 

[beammeup]

I believe it is labelled as a "hardware volume control". I will check though and if I am wrong then I will flag this to Auralic. In some other Auralic products the hardware volume control would indeed be an analogue volume control.

Sorry you are right -it's a hardware volume control with choice of software volume control if you want it...

 

[kevinrt]

I finally got this working this evening.
The issue has turned out to be the formatting of the external USB drive. I could only get this to work if it was formatted as MS-DOS (FAT), despite advice on-line (on Auralic’s site, I think) that said that it would work with other types of formatting, which I had tried.
I hope this may help someone else avoid the problems which I had.

I cannot claim to have fixed it myself. My local hifi shop where I bought the Aries, Oxford Audio Consultants, had a demo day today for the new dCS Bartok and it was one of the dCS people who figured it out for me. So thanks to him (wish I remembered his name to give him full credit) for helping me out, to use a competitor’s product.

Kevin

 

[Strictly Stereo]

Have a look at the bottom of page three. Could that account for the problem you had?

http://www.auralic.com/download/LightningServerFAQ.pdf

 

[kevinrt]

Have a look at the bottom of page three. Could that account for the problem you had?

http://www.auralic.com/download/LightningServerFAQ.pdf

It’s possible. I ran all of the verify/repair/ first aid options on the disk at some point with no effect but who knows.

thanks

Kevin