PULSE series and playing music from USB drives

The PULSE series have been designed as a streamer only device that is used mainly for the following scenarios:

1. You don’t have local music and mainly want to use streaming services.
2. You already have a separate music server and want to use the PULSE on another room, connecting to your main library.

For those who have a NAS, the PULSE series does allow to connect to the NAS and index the files there for the music library. Innuos has decided not to allow using USB drives as music library storage for the PULSE series for the following reasons:

1. The USB2/3 connection is fairly slow and provide a poor experience to manage the music library. In order to keep compatibility and openness, changes to metadata are saved not only on the database but on the files themselves. This is more prone to issues when using USB drives.
2. When using USB drives as the main music library storage, backing up becomes less convenient which means the probability of losing your music library becomes higher.
3. USB drives connected to the same USB subsystem as the DAC will affect sound quality in an audible way.

On versions 2.5.5 we will enable navigating and playing back from a USB drive. This music is not scanned into the music library and it’s useful for cases where you have music on an USB drive that you would like to explore and play for some time. If you wish to have a permanent local music library, we recommend either choosing one of the ZEN series music servers as this will provide you many advantages:

1. Automatically scans and adds to the Music Library any music you had to it
2. Much faster and reliable editing of album metadata
3. Easily backup the internal Music Library to a USB or NAS drive
4. Better sound quality
5. Tidier setup with less cables and boxes around.