Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

81,000 songs on my phone rn. I have a couple of smart playlists that break things up based on albums I haven't listened to yet: albums I haven't listened to in over a year, New albums released in the last three years, etc. Hitting shuffle on all of it is the best radio station I ever wanted.

Using soulseek rn, I found the entire Waylon Jennings discography in about 30 seconds - including the big Bear Family box sets in FLAC.

They have a 1.5TB micro sd now??? I swear the last time I checked was only a month ago.

This thread is a goldmine and I've followed for several years. I've now reached the time, on the wrong side of my mid-50s, where I finally have to take decisive action to liberate the many files accumulated on a 4tb storage drive, and be able to play them through my existing hifi set up.

I would dearly like the patience, confidence and know-how to build a player or diy system as koogs and others on here have done, but I think I will be opting for an off the shelf streaming player, after I've done the requisite weeks of working out what's the best sound and bang for my buck - so any recommendations welcome if there are people using a similar set-up.

A nagging noob question though: is the choice of hard drive important, is it better to use a NAS drive, or will a simple hard drive / SSD do the trick just as well?

Not really, any HDD will do. 3.5" HDDs are noisier, 2.5" HDDs are nice, but at current price points you might as well get a 4 TB SSD.

Make sure to do backups - HDD or SSD, they can fail at any time.

It's kind of crazy scanning through this thread and reading about my long-forgotten home streaming systems.

Just in case my current simple set-up might be useful to someone else, here's what I'm doing now:

My library of music files lives on my iMac, organized with the Music app, streamed with Plex server software to the Plex app on my phone or on a couple of smart TVs connected to home theater systems.

I don't stream outside my LAN. The music library gets backed up along with everything else on the iMac by Time Machine and monthly rsync updates to a HDD I keep off-site.

I don't have the ability to synchronize multi-room playback anymore, but I don't miss it.

I still haven't solved the issue of waking up my iMac remotely, so sometimes I have to walk all the way into my office and hit a key before listening to the Plex server. I could probably find a solution but I imagine this hardship builds character.

I don't have the ability to synchronize multi-room playback anymore

Not really, any HDD will do. 3.5" HDDs are noisier, 2.5" HDDs are nice, but at current price points you might as well get a 4 TB SSD.

Make sure to do backups - HDD or SSD, they can fail at any time.

― Siegbran, Thursday, January 11, 2024 7:50 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cheers Siegbran!

I’m still using my homegrown Raspberry pi solution. I upgraded the audio card to a better Hifi-berry card and went through a small period of Linux configuration hell but I figure that builds character.

still using a Seagate 5TB USB drive running through a Dragonfly DAC directly into my home stereo mixer, I have hardwired speakers in the living room as well as the listening room/office, but that's all

Do you have a computer in the chain somewhere to control it?

i really should back everything up better than i do but not sure buying a 12th(!) external drive is wise and it's time to look into a proper NAS.

xp oh yes, sorry, a Mac Mini, USB-C out to Dragonfly

This sort of blurs piracy/preservation, but are there backup pools where enthusiasts back up each other's personal collections through some kind of distributed scheme (other than private bittorrent, ad hoc soulseeks, etc...)?

I don't have the ability to synchronize multi-room playback anymore

Doesn’t Airplay take care of this automatically now?

Alas, the only Apple devices involved are my iMac and (potentially) my phone ... the TVs/home theater systems I'd like to synch use Roku in one case and Chromecast in the other, so I can send different Plex streams simultaneously to each with no problem, but I don't see a way to get them on the same page.

My setup is similar (2011 Mac mini, iTunes, 4TB of lossless ALACs) but I send it locally thru optical out to a component DAC in my stereo, and across the network to old Airport Express routers as Airplay sources. Very clean lossless outputs, can be synced, etc. Controlled from apps on the phone, iPad, and remote screen from my laptop; Mini also accepts basic play and skip commands from one of those white remotes that used to come with iMacs. It's been a long process but I nailed it about 3 years ago and nothing has changed since.

AirPort Express routers still work / supported? Wow

Yep, somewhat embarrassingly I run the entire house on a wired network of Airport Extreme / Time Capsule / Express units, they work without a hitch and seamlessly hand over from area to area. They were cheap to pick up after discontinuation and the last gen Express audio out is impeccable. Might be a security concern, the last software update was maybe 2021.

These do the same thing fwiw

https://www.belkin.com/audio-adapter-with-airplay-2/P-AUZ002.html

any thoughts on maintaining a subscription based digital "collection"?

i find I'm still collecting with streaming, in a way more than ever, always exploring and filing into folders and playlists

i used to have more or less one massive playlist for my singles collection, but recently i've started branching out, so I'm doing dedicated mood/genre/period lists

every once in a while I come across something that doesn't fit any list but that I can't let go off, some kind of collector mania - and so I'll file it under "uncategorized"

this collection is of great importance to me now, some years ago my account was hacked and the person who did it deleted all my playlists, I was shocked... thankfully support was able to recreate them... sometimes i think abt converting them all to some other format but... that's a lot of work

my whole thing is curation

the main thing i lost when i had my recent hard drive crash was the last three years of my music library, everything else i'd migrated to the nas

but in truth it wasn't something i had the time or motivation to really maintain anymore

my relationship with music has changed so much in the last few years... i guess like having a collection, a library, is something that... isn't important to me? like it feels like imposing order upon chaos and it's just... not something i'm up to do, making a coherent narrative out of my life through music

to answer the question from the original revive, it sounds like Roon might be the easiest solution to what you want to do, although it costs about the same as spotify per month (there is a "lifetime" option but that costs $830). roon will also sell you the streaming box you want to stream music to your hifi.

if you're a little more DIY-inclined, you can set up your own music server with a NAS and an application like navidrome or plex. there's a small period of configuration hell but that builds character, per prior posters. sample plex instructions are here, if this makes you want to faint from terror give roon a try instead.

between plex and navidrome, plex is not really music-native (i.e. it was originally designed for movies/tv) but plenty of people use it for music and it has the advantage of being accessible outside of your network, i think you can stream from your phone when you're away from your house for example with ease. plex also has the advantage of being supported by a ton of streaming players.

you can do that too with navidrome but it's more involved and you risk opening your nas/network up to the outside if you don't know what you're doing. navidrome is based on the subsonic protocol so you'll have to look for players that support that protocol if you want to stream to a standalone player etc.

whatever you do, make sure you have 2-3 backups of your music collection, preferably following the 3-2-1 backup principle. and here's your daily reminder that RAID is not a backup, a NAS is not a backup, etc.

something like this looks like a no-fuss, not-hugely-expensive digital player (and cd and tuner...)

https://www.richersounds.com/denon-rcd-n10-black.html

but then you read the manual and it says 'Browse the music on your PC/NAS and select something to play.' but how is scrolling through 3000 lps on a 3-line display going to work?

(also, no ogg support so...)

"If the image size (pixels) of an album artwork exceeds 500 × 500 (WMA/MP3/WAV/FLAC) or 349 × 349 (MPEG-4 AAC), then music may not be played
back properly."

lol

you'll need something with a decent control app

I'm on a bluesound powernode, node will do fine if you prefer your own amp

it let's me browse the music on my nas, also whatever I put on a thumb drive

supports roon

I'm using MALP (mpd client) on my phone for the pi setup i currently have and that works fine, can scroll to the bottom in seconds. am also rolling my own web-based interface i can use with the pi connected to the TV and a wireless mouse - grid of album covers (needs more work because it struggles with 3000 images on a page)

i guess the denon could have something similar, or might expose an API that'd let other people write one

I know stems are popular with the remix crowd, but does anyone use them for personalized playback setups (e.g., panning drums to dedicated "drum" speakers, dropping vocals that are unfortunately at the resonant frequency of your coffee table)?

why is a NAS not a backup? why is a RAID not a backup?
I have a local drive on my music Mac which holds the whole collection. Regularly backed up to the NAS, which is regularly backed up to an external RAID drive. Three copies (admittedly nothing offsite but I will address that) running on independent hardware. I've had drives fail in the NAS and the RAID and they've been rebuilt successfully. What am I not getting?

with RAID i think they mean that just because you’re mirroring with RAID 1 it doesn’t count as a backup of because data corruption would affect both disks equally and there’s no rollback mechanism

I think it's supposed to mean that even though (in most configs) a disk in the array can fail without you losing data, you could still e.g. accidentally delete a directory and then you wouldn't be able to restore it.

You can absolutely use a RAID or a NAS *as* a backup (eg as a second disk that you back files up to), but if it is your *sole* storage for those files, they aren't backed up.

lol yes that’s an actually comprehensible version of what i was trying to say

with your typical 4-bay NAS that's set up in RAID 5, one drive can fail and you're still OK provided that the RAID rebuilds the replacement drive before another drive fails.

however, suppose when you bought your NAS and the drives that 2 or more of the drives left the factory with the same defect that will cause them to fail in 3 years. if both drives fail at or roughly the same time, before you have a chance to rebuild the array, you are.... hosed

therefore, even if you have a NAS, that NAS should be backed up (maybe to another NAS, and to the cloud as well)

you might also be thinking, what is the likelihood that 2 drives would fail at once. great question! suppose you have just bought your first 4-bay NAS and you're just rarin' to fill that baby up with drives. you find out that there's a good deal on WD 14TB red's so you figure aw hell, why not and buy 4 at once. greater than 0 chance that those 4 reds came from the same batch from the factory! and what if that batch did have a defect. these horror stories exist. it's a good thing that the market for hard drives isn't subject to the same consolidating monopoly forces that other markets are and we have more than 2 manufacturers to choose from, right?

also you know, a power surge can fry every drive in the NAS along with the NAS itself.

stop scaring me

brb encasing my offsite backup in a Faraday cage with UPS

coincidentally i had to replace a failing drive in my RAID this weekend, at this point i think it's a RAID of Theseus

True, I know all that, but I use a Synology format and when one drive failed and I accidentally hosed another, it was still able to reconstruct. But yeah the other drives are in separate devices. I’m backed up pretty solid (phrasing) I think.

Synology's backup to USB disk feature seems pretty good. Of course i haven't had to restore yet.

all my media files are on an external drive that ONLY gets backed up remotely via backblaze.. but i don’t feel i’m living that dangerously w this? chances that BB has a problem at the same time the drive does seem infinitesimal?

all my media files are on an external drive that ONLY gets backed up remotely via backblaze.. but i don’t feel i’m living that dangerously w this? chances that BB has a problem at the same time the drive does seem infinitesimal?

good job i'd say. do that cost much?

The idea is that restoring from online backup is slow, so good to have a local backup to restore quickly from, and only resort to the online backup when both of them fail.

Tracer I’m glad that your post had a duplicate for backup

lol you can’t be too careful these days

maf it's 10 bucks a month

Siegbran otm, but nothing on that external drive is time-sensitive. unless you count S03 of reservation dogs. my mac mini's internal drive gets backed up via Time Machine as well as BB

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

i think backblaze is probably fine for your use case, it doesn't sound like you are a power user. you can google aroundfor 'backblaze restore experiences' and find plenty of horror stories natch. apparently backblaze needs to see a file at least once every 30 days or it will delete it. shouldn't be a problem if you're backing up every night but if you have an external drive you only plug in once every couple of weeks could be a problem. i'm assuming you don't have so much data that you'd want backblaze to mail you your data on a drive, which is a service they offer.

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

I think it's supposed to mean that even though (in most configs) a disk in the array can fail without you losing data, you could still e.g. accidentally delete a directory and then you wouldn't be able to restore it.

― stet, Monday, January 15, 2024 5:25 PM (yesterday)

i'm getting way ahead of my skis here but i *think* if you have your synology NAS set up in btrfs you can use the snapshot feature to mitigate this, which works kind of like time machine.

“not a power user” rip tracer hand, was good to know you

so your internal drive is important enough it gets its own local backup drive, but your external media drive doesn't? it's all just commercial media on that drive, yeah? no home movies, precious photographs of your kids, etc.? xp