Does anyone have any experience of the Brennan B2 CD Ripper? It claims to hold 5,000 CDs in lossless format.
My problem: Since the first lockdown I have been bringing in armfuls of CDs from my garage and uploading to my Plex server, from which I am able to play music on my Sonos system. The NAS on which my Plex server is installed is getting rather full and I still have a significant number of CDs to upload. I wondered whether the Brennan would be a useful add-on to may system.
An interim approach I’ve taken is, rather than rip every single CD, to prioritise the ones that are special to me and that are no longer easy to find. For the remainder of the CDs I stream them from Spotify where my Album Library is effectively my CD collection. I’m quite comfortable with the non-lossless sound quality for these non-special CDs and I’ve chosen a streaming service that, hopefully, is unlikely to go belly up. However, I’m still interested in whether the Brennan is an avenue worth exploring.
ATM : Brennan B2
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There was a thread on here a few years ago about Brennans. I can’t find it now, rendering this post unusually pointless even by my standards.
I don’t have any first hand knowledge of the Brennan, but I based on the claim of 5000 CDs, I guess that it has an approx 2TB Hard Drive inside.
Which begs the question – how big is your NAS and would the simplest solution just be to upgrade the storage in that. Most NAS systems have the ability to swap out the hard drives. Even if this is not possible with your model, I would guess the cost of a new NAS with a much higher capacity would be much cheaper then the Brennan system and would allow you to maintain your current Sonos setup – just copy your old files to the new NAS and ass more……
‘Add more’ (the edit function seems to have disappeared)
Yeah right.
Are these the systems some smug-looking bloke used to advertise in the back of Private Eye a few years back?
Yes…the consensus on here was that it’s for people who can’t be arsed with computers.
As a very rough rule anything advertised in Private Eye is for people who find the modern world (ie anything since 1890) very confusing.
Plenty of red trousers, though…
A stairlift with built-in Sonos speakers would be cool, though…
Of course, now we have the Sonos Roam, this is actually a realistic proposition.
And she’s buying a stairlift to heaven.
Those Brennans are, in engineering terms, a load of old pony.
You and your abstruse technical terminology…
They’re basically a car radio with a had drive instead of a cassette player. 15 Watts per channel – welcome to 1982.
Dully, I built several prototypes of something very similar 15+ years ago. We all tried them at home for a bit and decided they would never catch on. The display is too small to find what you want, the amplifier too weedy to drive decent speakers. So we redesigned it to take out the amplifer and the disc drive, gate it an Ethernet connection, and… Squeezebox beat us to it.
They are indeed. The current model is built on a Raspberry Pi 2B (a fairly old model) with a DAC connected to the I2S bus, and the drives connected via USB 2.0 (the Pi 2B doesn’t have USB 3.0). I presume the screen and buttons are wired in via GPIO somehow.
As for the software, it’s most likely something based on Mopidy, which many Pi based media servers used, with some custom code for ripping and the screen.
Brennans are vastly overpriced for what they do, it seems to me. Designed for sale to well-heeled technophobes.
5,000 CDs is not that much in terms of disc storage, unless the files are all completely uncompressed .wavs. And if 5,000 albums is the most the database software/the device’s firmware can handle then it’s a pretty poor show IMO.
I have well over 100,000 tracks in my digitised library and my PC software, Media Monkey (paid lifetime gold licence, currently $49.95) handles it all with ease. The files are all housed on a Raspberry Pi 4 NAS, 2GB ram model with a USB3 4TB hard drive, on my home network. I also have another similar one as backup in case of disc failure. Cost, about £190 each complete (Pi + heatsink case + PSU + Micro SD OS card + 4TB 2.5″ USB3 HDD). The space occupied by each NAS is about 120mm long x 80mm wide x 50mm deep. I have one (main) tucked away next to my hifi amp in the living room and the other (backup) is out in the hall.
You need the use of a monitor, keyboard and mouse during initial setup but after it’s up and running these are not required until you need to safely shut down or reboot your NAS for some reason.
I’d thought about a Pi based solution myself, particularly as its now possible to easily house the gubbins in a case that doesn’t make it look like a weird Heath Robinson string and elastoplast gizmo. A couple of questions for you:
1) I am assuming here that the MediaMonkey software is running on a full fat PC, and not on the Pi itself, which just handles the NAS. With such a relatively low power NAS CPU, what file format do you use (or to put it another way, will it gracefully and eloquently handle flac files?)?
2) How resilient is the system to power cuts? Foxy towers is in a village that has its electricity supply via a long piece of wire attached to another long piece of wire and as a consequence we probably get half a dozen or more power cuts during the average year; some last seconds, some last a couple of hours*. Do you have any experience of your system surviving such electrical indignities?
* our electricity supply is sufficiently pants that I’ve had to invest in a decent UPS, which I”ve now been using for the last twenty years.
My Pi NASs have survived one lengthy power cut and a temporary power shut-off (I forgot to shut them down properly when my flat’s fusebox was replaced just pre-COVID). I was expecting trouble but so far so good. On both occasions though, no files on them were being accessed at the time.
Both NASs are ethernet-connected to the network rather than wireless.
MediaMonkey natively supports music playback using MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, MPC, APE, and WAV. There are free plugins for more esoteric formats. Most of my music is now in .flac format but I have some WAV, MP3 and AAC files. I might even still have a few ancient .wma tracks.
Sorry to labour you with questions – if the Pi just runs the networked hard drive, and MediaMonkey is on a networked PC on the same LAN, what’s the advantage of using the Pi – why haven’t you just got the networked hard drive hanging off a USB on your router?
Because my router hasn’t got a usable USB, primarily. Plus I wanted another for backup, but not in the same location in my flat.
I was also considering getting rid of the prone-to-flakiness laptop which currently only gets used for playing my digital music into the hi-fi, to free up some desk space in my cramped abode.
I was toying for a while with installing one with a web interface in my car, controllable from a smartphone, but I’m not Linux/electronics -skilled enough to figure out how to safely boot it up / shut it down on car battery power. Plus all the headless Pi music server variants that I’ve tried so far are lacking in some respect or another compared to Media Monkey or MusicBee.
Thanks, understood now.
Thanks for your responses which pretty much confirm my initial feelings about the Brennan.
I still have issues with the Plex server. It can be a bit flaky (like today for example!) and I’d prefer a hardware solution as long as it integrates with my Sonos system. I might even be tempted by a Roon Nucleus but would prefer something cheaper. Any ideas?
I can use Serviio – which is a free open source media server- to access PC hard drive hosted (audio or video) files over wi-fi from my Sony TV (which sees Serviio as a connected ‘Device’), and then plug the audio out from the TV into an Aux on the hi-fi amp.
I don’t know what connectivity Sonos gives you, but would you be able to serve audio to a smart TV as I do, but feed the output into the Sonos system?
Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
I’ve tried a lot of software/server solutions but somehow they usually fall short which is why I’m looking at some sort of hardware solution. I’m not exactly a technophobe but I prefer not meeting around with settings, IP addresses etc and anything else that gets in the way of the music.
Serviio is fairly straight-forward. You install it, then tell it which folders you wish to expose via DLNA (industry-wide standard for sharing data over a home network) and that’s basically it. On the TV (on my Sony at least – they were part of the group that set up DLNA in the first place) you hit the ‘Home’ button, navigate to ‘Devices’ and, assuming that the telly has a wi-fi connection to your router, it will list ‘Serviio’ as a Device. Select that and you’ll see the folders you chose when you set up Serviio in a list on screen. Navigate to the folder you want, and you should get a list of the files (or subfolders) displayed on your telly. Select what you want to watch/hear from the list. The file formats you can use will vary with the age of your telly, but I know mine will play MP3s and WAVs with no issue. Can’t recall if it deals with FLACs – I should give it a go and see how you get on. The Serviio application is free, so all you can lose is a bit of time to download, install, configure and then see what your telly makes of it – if it doesn’t do what you want just bin it!
I regularly use it to watch stuff I’ve grabbed either from iPlayer, or from other *cough* similar sources.
Thanks. Sounds pretty straightforward. My TV is a Samsung but I’ll look into it. As you say, nothing ventured etc.