First about today's (say November 2015) general idea about the Audio PC and it's physical setup :
A PC with as few in there as possible, ultimately not even an OS device (like disk, ssd, USB-flash).
When we play music, the PC plays as lean as possible and it is not connected to anything (even LAN connection is not present, software-wise). A D/A concerter connects to it, but this seems unavoidable.
It is in this context that we "stream" music from a Streaming Service, with the currently possible example of Tidal;
It means that we "Prepared" the Stream(ing) in advance and turned it into the playback of a file. This file is copied to the RAM the Audio PC before playback commences.
Now :
This also means that you won't be Preparing Streams on the Audio PC during Playback; it would be SQ counter productive when we would go about with it like that.
When observed closely, we read in the above that we use another - external - means to store the music files. This can be a NAS, but this is not a wise thing to do in the "Streaming" situation; it better be another PC which can do a few things for us during the Playback of Audio;
It can Prepare Streams on its own - completely outside of the Audio Playback.
And it is 100% harmless to SQ.
Think like this for a scenario :
You are once again playing Adele;
Meanwhile you think of the new Bond - Spectre. You go to the Music Server (which is a PC), start XXHighEnd on *that*, and Search Tidal for it. Supposed you find something, you start the Prepare Streams for it; you may watch for 30 seconds whether all goes fine, and next switch back to the Audio PC (control).
In there the Adele album plays along, until you feel that 3 or 4 tracks of the Spectre album have been prepared;
You now go to the
physical folder of the Streaming Files (the Gallery entry for it is not there yet) and which you do by means of the [ B ] (Bookmark Retrieval) button in the left pane with the Library Area active - and where you ever back used the [ B ] button near the bottom of screen to Bookmark that Streaming Files folder ... find the Spectre album by means of entering its title in the Search field (as usual) - find it, load it and ...
And you see that 3 tracks appear in the Playlist Area; so those 3 have been prepared and the remainder not yet.
Now you can play those.
When all 3 have played, undoubtedly the remainder, say 10, have been Prepared, and you can load those easily by means of Rightclick on one of the 3 tracks and choose "Load Whole Album".
What you actually did here was running two processes in parallel (play Audio and Prepare Streams) while SQ remains as it is and you seemlinglessly can find Albums to play while Playback is going on - and play that later with the interruption of "in between two albums" as always.
Nice ?
