Apple Mac mini as 'Upnp' Server?

This follows some of my current thought process Simon;   I'm expecting to change NAS sometime in the future & as its going to be just for music - other stuff is stored elsewhere, & I do have a back up routine - I see no point in RAID & multiple bays,  I was sucked into that one when I first went streaming.  Question is do I go with any of the usual brands,  maybe SSD,  is Melco a contender,  does max available CPU & RAM bring audibly tangible benefits.   Whatever, these are all thoughts for deep dark winter,  once I get back from southern latitudes & its past Christmas.      

Derelict posted:

nbpf posted:

raym55 posted:

Nice one Derelict. Glad you are sorted.

As a side issue, have you thought of getting a NAS drive instead of using the Mac to store your music. Its amazing that once you start ripping 2Tb could soon fill up especially if you buy regularly.

For starters, you WILL need a backup of some sort and a NAS could centralise all that.

just a thought for you to ponder.

Generally speaking, I do not think that it is a good idea to buy a NAS to backup data and run UPnP servers. The macmini is perfect for running Asset or, even better, MinimServer. Backups are better kept on two or three external drives in two or three different locations. Ideally, these drives are attached to computers that can be accessd remotely. Backup is then done via rsync scripts. This saves time and bandwidth and the attached drives will spin down and go sleeping after a backup is completed. NAS are very useful devices but they should not be used for the backup of critical data, in my view.

Hi nbpf, correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't a NAS with say, 4x 3TB drives running in RAID (meaning 4 copies of the same files) be pretty failsafe?

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Sure, a NAS in RAID mode provides failsafeness but failsafeness has only marginally to do with data backup and restore. If you use a NAS both to secure your data and to run UPnP services, you will be in a rather bad position if the NAS has a failure.

I very much prefer running UPnP servers on small SBCs like the raspberry Pi. You can easily clone the micro SD card of any such systems and replace it in minutes if the PI's hardware or software fails.

For securing my data, I prefer DAS over NAS. I have two HDDs connected to a desktop in my office, one HDD connected to a Raspberry Pi wired to my router and a SSD connected to the Raspberry Pi that runs my UPnP server.

When I rip a CD or download music files, I first do all the metadata editing on my laptop. When I am done, I send the data to the various HDDs by just launching an rsync script. This is simple, fast and safe: no need to faff around with graphical user interfaces, drag and drop, etc.

Derelict, as always theres more than one solution. The trouble is these days we are spoiled for choice and sometimes it can get a bit confusing as to which solution would suit you best. Doesnt matter which way you go, NAS or USB drive but whatever you do, back it up with at least 1 copy. More if you can manage it. ????

Mike-B posted:

This follows some of my current thought process Simon;   I'm expecting to change NAS sometime in the future & as its going to be just for music - other stuff is stored elsewhere, & I do have a back up routine - I see no point in RAID & multiple bays,  I was sucked into that one when I first went streaming.  Question is do I go with any of the usual brands,  maybe SSD,  is Melco a contender,  does max available CPU & RAM bring audibly tangible benefits.   Whatever, these are all thoughts for deep dark winter,  once I get back from southern latitudes & its past Christmas.      

Separation of concerns shall be your guiding principle here. As you have discovered, you do not need to be concerned with RAID systems if your aim is just to replay and backup a music collection and none is going to sue you if a UPnP service is temporarily down!  

For replay of your music collection, just store one or more copies of the collection in the form that best suits your replay system. If this relies on one or more music servers like the Melcos, the Naim Core, the Antipodes, the InnuOSs, Raspberry Pis, etc, just store a copy on each of those devices. If these devices are in your listening room, use SSDs, otherwise HDDs.

For backup of your music collection, just attach two or three HDDs to devices that can be accessed remotely or buy some cloud storage. When new data arrive, do the metadata editing and renaming job on a laptop or computer you feel comfortable with and then send the new data to your music servers and to your backup drives.

This can be easily done via rsync. You can write a simple script that does all the data transfer by just pressing a button. Do not forget to routinely check your data. With rsync, this is done by adding the --checksum option. This takes a lot of time but is worth doing from time to time to ensure the consistency of your copies.

Thanks for the post NBPF,  I'm pretty much on the same page already,  my post was really a muse about the subject & RAID in particular.  The only thing I need to get into is a possible alternative way with back ups & I intend to do that in the new year & prior to any changes in NAS.            

Mike-B posted:

This follows some of my current thought process Simon;   I'm expecting to change NAS sometime in the future & as its going to be just for music - other stuff is stored elsewhere, & I do have a back up routine - I see no point in RAID & multiple bays,  I was sucked into that one when I first went streaming.  Question is do I go with any of the usual brands,  maybe SSD,  is Melco a contender,  does max available CPU & RAM bring audibly tangible benefits.   Whatever, these are all thoughts for deep dark winter,  once I get back from southern latitudes & its past Christmas.      

I think the way Melco is intended to be used, at least with a main system, either with a direct ethernet connection to a player/streamer  (not a network: the Melco separately connects to a network if desired), or using a rendered output direct to a DAC. In those modes the majority of observations I have read seemed to indicate that it gives better sound quality than a NAS over a network.

Hi IB,  at the moment the Melco is a 'maybe' consideration.  Whatever,  Melco or new NAS it will not go on a network as such,  just the wifi hub & whatever it will be streamer at that time.   Back ups will probably be via USB something or other plus a chunk of Cloud,  but I intend to explore that some more.

Sounds like a plan Mike. Apart from a small issue earlier in the year with my Melco (quickly sorted by Alan A) it's been a super piece of kit that just works. 

To the OP, i'd avoid the Apple UPnP server solution - been there done that and it's a bit of a PITA. I still use iTunes for library management as it works well for me. I use XLD for ripping and UPnP serving is done via a Melco server. 

james n posted:

Sounds like a plan Mike. Apart from a small issue earlier in the year with my Melco (quickly sorted by Alan A) it's been a super piece of kit that just works. 

Looks like any change I'm thinking about to NAS and/or the Melco trail is on hold !!!!    I've just been reading about NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification)  Looking at spec's & performance it looks like its a game changer.    If my Synology hangs on for a few more years & assuming the leading NAS brands adopt it, it looks like SATA SSD's had the life span of a Mayfly.

Speaking as someone who moved from running MinimServer on a dedicated Mac Mini to a Synology NAS, the move was worthwhile for me, but not for everyone.  It took me a lot of fiddling to get Minim working on the NAS; and the updating is an annoying process I have had to write down.  It is nothing to me, as an IT pro, who, by definition, loves aggravation.  Minim on a dedicated Mac is a piece of cake.

Nick

Asset upnp on the mac has , so far, been unbelievably easy. I will just backup all music to an external drive every few months and disconnect. I cant imagine many people needing anymore control unless you had many terrabytes of music. I could even download hdtracks to the asset upnp directory and they would show up at the atom. 

I imagine minim server is the same.

I would only look at nas if this macmini dies and cannot be replaced with a similar machine economically. 

Thanks everybody for the help

NickSeattle posted:

Speaking as someone who moved from running MinimServer on a dedicated Mac Mini to a Synology NAS, the move was worthwhile for me, but not for everyone.  It took me a lot of fiddling to get Minim working on the NAS; and the updating is an annoying process I have had to write down.  It is nothing to me, as an IT pro, who, by definition, loves aggravation.  Minim on a dedicated Mac is a piece of cake.

Nick

But what is the point of running MinimServer on a NAS? Even if my music library was (among others) on a NAS, I would not even consider running MinimServer on that NAS. Instead, I would run it on a Raspberry Pi. Installing MinimServer on a Pi is straightforward and the device is very inconspicuous. The Pi has enough computing power to support transcoding 24/192 .flac files to .wav with very limited CPU load. If it has a failure (I have been running three 24/7 for years without any problem) you can replace it with a new one in minutes. Updating MinimServer via MinimWatch is a no-brainer.  

Derelict posted:

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I imagine minim server is the same.

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It is not. MinimServer is much more flexible and customizable than Asset. If your music collection contains a lot of classical music albums, you want MinimServer. Otherwise Asset is fine. Just have a look at the MinimServer user guide.

Anyway, the choice of a UPnP server is at this stage irrelevant. If you are about to rip your CDs, the most important question that you need to ask yourself is how you are going to organize your metadata.

This is a question that only you can answer. But you need to be aware of the fact that, no matter which indexes you decide to fill in or to leave blank, your choice will have a strong impact on the ways you will be able to browse, search and finally enjoy your music collection.

If you have a lot of classical music, you probably want to fill in at least the Composer, Work (or Composition), Conductor, Ensemble, Period (baroque, classical, romantic, modern, ...), Form (symphony, string quartet, piano concert, ...), Genre (instrumental, vocal, jazz, pop, recital, ...) and, of course, Album and Artist indexes. Perhaps you have special interests and you want to be able to search your music collection according to indexes that reflect your interests.

No matter what you do, take your time and firts exercise your indexing scheme on a small set (30 to 50) of rips. Understand what are the ways you like to browse your collection and start mass ripping only when your indexing scheme is ripe and stable: cleaning up a large collection of poorly ripped CDs in the aftermatch is a time consuming pain.

Many of us have spent a lot of time and money in building impressive replay systems. But the best replay system will not help if a music collection is poorely tagged and searching and browsing it is a pain rathen than an enjoyment. For a listening experience that matches what you can achieve with vinyl or with CDs, you need perfect tags and the capability of opening the booklet of the currently playing album at a fingertip in your control point.

I also tend to keep my storage (NAS) seoerate from my applications. I use a RaspberryPi for my  UPnP media servers, and UPnP proxies for external web streaming conversion... really is straightforward... occasionally there are little issues like gradual memory or resource leaks with Unix OS libraries and applications that only show up over a few months of heavy UPnP use ... for me it just is not sensible to host this on the same system as my main storage... as such an issue could corrupt the NAS system... where as a simple refresh and update of a RPi is risk free... as I unmount   the network storage when I do such updates. Perhaps I am being over cautious, but a career engineering ICT systems has made me this way!!!!

nbpf posted:

NickSeattle posted:

Speaking as someone who moved from running MinimServer on a dedicated Mac Mini to a Synology NAS, the move was worthwhile for me, but not for everyone.  It took me a lot of fiddling to get Minim working on the NAS; and the updating is an annoying process I have had to write down.  It is nothing to me, as an IT pro, who, by definition, loves aggravation.  Minim on a dedicated Mac is a piece of cake.

Nick

But what is the point of running MinimServer on a NAS? Even if my music library was (among others) on a NAS, I would not even consider running MinimServer on that NAS. Instead, I would run it on a Raspberry Pi. Installing MinimServer on a Pi is straightforward and the device is very inconspicuous. The Pi has enough computing power to support transcoding 24/192 .flac files to .wav with very limited CPU load. If it has a failure (I have been running three 24/7 for years without any problem) you can replace it with a new one in minutes. Updating MinimServer via MinimWatch is a no-brainer.  

I liked running MinimServer on a Mac Mini, but found it more stable running on the NAS.  I’ve not gotten around to trying a Pi — I think they came on the scene after I was already up and running.  Simon in Suffolk was the one who first brought the Pi to my attention, on this Forum.

Nick

Hi Nick,  I too found Minimserver annoyingly complicated,  the program itself + Java + Minim Watch, & then the updates.    I'm now running Asset for Synology beta & it's an absolute doddle in comparison.   I'm not sure when & how it will get released but keep an eye open for it.

NBBF’s advice re metadata is spot on. 

I made the mistake, through ignorance, of not even thinking about metadata: I first ripped all my vinyl, with no metadata at all. Originally that was to create CDs, but within a very short space of time I switched to streaming, the ripped LPs giving me a head start with music to play, while I set about ripping CDs. Those rips had whatever metadata was on the CD. 

At that point no problem at all: I stored all my rips in a straightforward file structure: genre-artist (surname first with people’s names, and composer for classical) - album (name giving anything that I thought I needed to know to identify the album (e.g. conductor, year etc). And when I started streaming it was with an ND5XS - which straightforwardly found all my music and displayed exactly what I wanted. That experience was the same first with Twonky on my NAS, then Logitech Media Server on the same NAS, then Serviio on Mac Mini.

Sadly that changed - for sound quality reasons I changed the ND5XS to Audirvana optimised on a Mac Mini, into a standalone DAC. But Audirvana can’t browse or list by file structure, and requires metadata to find anything - so, long tedious job of adding metadata to ripped vinyl, or replacing said rips with better quality downloads, the latter having embedded metadata. Great...?  No. It seems that amongst my CDs that I’d ripped,  metadata was inconsistent or had things required by Audirvana missing. Ditto downloads. Classical is the worst - for a start, for one particular piece of music genre, to me a primary sort criterion and for which I would simply want to choose ‘classical’, I found that whilst some gave genre as  ‘classical’, for the same piece of music but different recordings, others might have genre as ‘orchestral’, ‘symphony’, ‘romantic’. And then there are different metadata categories for artist: recording artist, composer, conductor, soloist etc - the correct info could be in the correct ‘tag’’, but the player’s search facility might be looking under a different tak from the one I expect when I search under ‘artist’.  Etc.

Coping with even no metadata is one thing that the ND5XS with the media servers I used did in a no-fuss straightforward way that I miss. When I did a trial of Roon 18 months ago it didn’t do any better than Audirvana with my collection’s metadata issues - and I think it is a great shame that things are so relient upon metadata, when a simple file structure can provide all that is needed to find a piece of music, while being so easy to set up and manage, without having to delve into things someone else may have coded dofferently.

But given that metadata is so important, atbleast on many platforms, the crucial thing is that to try to understand what metadata is used for what, ideally across platforms, as you want your music to be just as accessible if for any reason in te future you change anything - you don’t want to have to redo metadata across your collection to be anpble to play it. Checking metadata and correctin/adding/adjusting at the time of ripping or downloading is not a major task, but it is once you have 100s of albums to do. So, rip a few, maybe deliberately selecting a variety of genres and labels to maximise the variability, and have a good look at the metadata - and if confused about the plethora of, for example , artist tags and which are critical for common media servers I am sure you’d get guidance from this forum.

Hi, Innocent Bystander.

Good points, all.  I do not know how or if UnitiServe will serve to other players; but knowing it is likely ripping as WAV, and storing metadata in a separate database, I think the ND players are the surest way to go, with least liklihood of needing to repair metadata to work on a broader array of products.  

Fearing this, myself, I decided not to buy a Naim server, for all their virtues, and rip to AIFF with XLD, to nail metadata the first time, and allow me to go back to iTunes, if I ever wanted to.  (At the time, iTunes did not support FLAC.)

If BILL_NYC has a Naim amp or pre, and/or CD player, ND streamers will provide system automation to control all of them, including volume control, seamless source switching on the nDAC and pre, and full control of CD.  I do not know how to get these benefits from any other players.  None of this is a stated requirement, though.

Audio is a fun hobby; the variety of options and potential for different goals and interesting outcomes is part of that.  

Nick

NickSeattle posted:

Hi, Innocent Bystander.

Good points, all.  I do not know how or if UnitiServe will serve to other players; but knowing it is likely ripping as WAV, and storing metadata in a separate database, I think the ND players are the surest way to go, with least liklihood of needing to repair metadata to work on a broader array of products.  

Fearing this, myself, I decided not to buy a Naim server, for all their virtues, and rip to AIFF with XLD, to nail metadata the first time, and allow me to go back to iTunes, if I ever wanted to.  (At the time, iTunes did not support FLAC.)

If BILL_NYC has a Naim amp or pre, and/or CD player, ND streamers will provide system automation to control all of them, including volume control, seamless source switching on the nDAC and pre, and full control of CD.  I do not know how to get these benefits from any other players.  None of this is a stated requirement, though.

Audio is a fun hobby; the variety of options and potential for different goals and interesting outcomes is part of that.  

Nick

Clearly posted to the wrong thread.  Apologies.  

Nick

Derelict posted:

So I tried dbpoweramp cd ripper ripping with Flac (just default settings) - Perfect! 

Downloaded and installed the 'Asset' UPnP program from dbpoweramp. - Amazing!!

This is EXACTLY what I wanted. Now to rip all the CDs, remove the monitor and leave the Mac mini as a little server box. 

Would be nice to have a auto rip and eject feature, so I don't have to reconnect the monitor and keyboard every time I buy new CDs (or inherit old ones friends and family are throwing out) 

Bit late to this, and others may have already said it but you don’t need a keyboard and monitor connected to your MM if you have another Mac at home - screen sharing works perfectly well. 

And for all it’s faults, one thing iTunes does much better than e.g. my Core is to ignore “The” when sorting on band names. On what planet does Teenage Fanclub come before The Beatles? Can’t be that difficult a piece of code to write... (it only ignores the first “The” of course).

davidsee posted:

Derelict posted:

So I tried dbpoweramp cd ripper ripping with Flac (just default settings) - Perfect! 

Downloaded and installed the 'Asset' UPnP program from dbpoweramp. - Amazing!!

This is EXACTLY what I wanted. Now to rip all the CDs, remove the monitor and leave the Mac mini as a little server box. 

Would be nice to have a auto rip and eject feature, so I don't have to reconnect the monitor and keyboard every time I buy new CDs (or inherit old ones friends and family are throwing out) 

Bit late to this, and others may have already said it but you don’t need a keyboard and monitor connected to your MM if you have another Mac at home - screen sharing works perfectly well. 

And for all it’s faults, one thing iTunes does much better than e.g. my Core is to ignore “The” when sorting on band names. On what planet does Teenage Fanclub come before The Beatles? Can’t be that difficult a piece of code to write... (it only ignores the first “The” of course).

I have a simple solution to this problem for you - it has annoyed me ever since I bought a Unitiserve, but now, I only ever listen to albums by The The, and my OCD is now totally cured.

Ha! Hence my comment about the first “The”...

ChrisSU posted:

davidsee posted:

Derelict posted:

So I tried dbpoweramp cd ripper ripping with Flac (just default settings) - Perfect! 

Downloaded and installed the 'Asset' UPnP program from dbpoweramp. - Amazing!!

This is EXACTLY what I wanted. Now to rip all the CDs, remove the monitor and leave the Mac mini as a little server box. 

Would be nice to have a auto rip and eject feature, so I don't have to reconnect the monitor and keyboard every time I buy new CDs (or inherit old ones friends and family are throwing out) 

Bit late to this, and others may have already said it but you don’t need a keyboard and monitor connected to your MM if you have another Mac at home - screen sharing works perfectly well. 

And for all it’s faults, one thing iTunes does much better than e.g. my Core is to ignore “The” when sorting on band names. On what planet does Teenage Fanclub come before The Beatles? Can’t be that difficult a piece of code to write... (it only ignores the first “The” of course).

I have a simple solution to this problem for you - it has annoyed me ever since I bought a Unitiserve, but now, I only ever listen to albums by The The, and my OCD is now totally cured.

Or just use a decent UPnP server! We can get used to (almost) everything, of course. But do we have to do so?