Building a music server - tutorials...?

That is the best of both worlds.

As a new owner of a Naim XS system I started listening to music much more and re-discovered many old CDs. Sadly, I many have deteriorated with age, esp. those bought in mid-80s in Japan. The actual metal foil on which the grooves are printed developed visible holes and cracks. So, before the rest of my collection shares this fate, I decided to take a plunge and digitize all my CDs onto a music server. It will be a bit of effort (put 2000 CDs into a PC one by one), but I don't want to lose any more valuable CDs. Two questions:

1. Can anyone recommend an online tutorial on setting up a music server, maybe using a standalone NAS device (as potentially less noisy and power consuming than a PC)?

2. Any hardware/software recommendations (keeping in mind that whatever I buy must work flawlessly with my ND5 SX & n-Stream)? Pls note I can't afford Naim hardware, it will have to be 3rd party.

PS. I did do my Google homework, but emerged only confused with a multitude of acronyms... I also searched this forum, but didn't find a topic like that, maybe I missed one?

I think you have better chances to find specific information if you cut down your problem into a few specific subproblems. I find it useful to distinguish between:

1) The problem of ripping a CD collection and build a digital library. This can be cut down to the problem of selecting ripping software, workflow, file formats, directory structure and naming rules.

2) The problem of maintaining and expanding such collection. This can be cut down to the problem of retrieving missing metadata, (re-)tagging your files, secure your data.

3) Setting up and running a DLNA server for your ND5 XS client. This can be cut down to the problem of selecting your network layout (this essentially depends on whether you can have a wired connection between your router and your ND5 XS or not), hardware, OS and DLNA server.

For 1) I found the following links useful:

  http://www.stereophile.com/fea.../308mp3cd/index.html
  http://www.oreillynet.com/onla...etween_mp3_flac.html
  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubyripper
  http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/wiki/Manual
  http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

With your ND5 XS you can already enjoy your music right after you have started building your collection ! Just store your first 500 rips into a 500GB SSD drive and connect the drive to the front USB port of your ND5 XS. You can then browse through your folders with n-Stream.

For 2) I have found the following links useful:

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG
  http://rsync.samba.org/
  http://www.albumartexchange.com

For 3) it very much depends on your network layout. If you are after a flexible, low budget DLNA server you will find very competent advice in this forum:

  https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...raspberry-pi-and-ndx

I am running an MPD server and two DLNA servers (minidlna and Asset UPnP, just for test purposes since I still have not bought a streamer) on a minimal Debian stable installation on a fit-PC3 low power:

  http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/
  http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/sh...PnP-for-Raspberry-pi
  http://www.debian.org/
  https://store.tinygreenpc.com/...pc3-1/fitpc3-lp.html

I have found the followng link particularly useful:

  http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/HW/PC.htm

One last word...

Whatever you do, keep a second (backup) copy of your music files.  When a mirrored NAS drive 'falls off its perch' (dies) you can so easily lose both mirrored disks & your data with them.  It doesn't happen often, but it happens !

Remember the three certainties in life... death, taxes and every hard drive will fail 

...boy am I feeling cheerful tonight !! 

Not cheery but good advice 

nbpf, I owe you a beer! You have approached my questions in a very logical and methodical way and took the time to point me into excellent resources on the 'net. Please drop by Warsaw, Poland to claim your beer  You ask about my home network: key components are wired by CAT5 in addition to wi-fi. I like cable But the topology is kind of accidental and reflects various needs over 10 years, not something logically planned. So I think I'll use this Naim adventure as an opportunity to re-wire my house.

PS. It's funny how it all started with my old CD player (Arcam Alpha 9) breaking down before X'mas. Arcam service couldn't fix it, no more parts for 15 years old model. So I went to a hi-fi shop to buy a new one. This lead to getting Naim 5XS. Which lead to getting a Nait XS to go with it. Which lead to replacing my old Celestions A3 with new speakers. Which, amazingly, lead to getting ND5 (speakers sounded so good, I had to have Radio Paradise playing, too), then to re-discovering my CD collection, which lead me to the NAS idea, which will probably lead to re-wiring my house network, and who knows - if in the process I discover the rooms are not optimally laid out, to building a new house???

Keep it simple

Stop over complicating things

Enjoy the journey.

Tog

Hi Gajdzin

I'm also using a Synology 2 Bay NAS , which is located inside a cupboard two meters away from where I sit and listen to my UnitiQute/NAP100/KefR100 system. I've never had any problem with it running too loud. Also you can set the fan speed in the Synology software to have it run fast for better cooling or slow for less noise.

Rip your CDs with any old PC or Mac in FLAC format, Or my preferred choice AIFF, and copy them onto the NAS. Most ripping software will be able to automatically, (when a disc is inserted) rip a CD with embedded metadata, write the files to your chosen location, eject the CD and quit. I use XLD but that's only for the Mac.

Good luck.

Dominik

Another good post Marcin -- am glad you've joined the forum!  Funny how one thing leads to another, and next thing you know...

It was the same for me about five years ago.  Dipped a toe in the water with a Nait XS, and soon found myself deep sea diving!   Hopefully you will sell a bunch more books, and easily fund this new setup (not to mention all of the very tempting upgrades you'll hear recommended on this forum)!

I see you are getting a lot of great advice here, and clearly there are lots of different, equally valid ways of ripping, tagging, storing and serving music files. The good news is that you not need to make all of your final decisions in order to get started.  In your shoes, I would pick FLAC (with minimal or no compression) as my format of choice, and I would try out dbpoweramp, J River MC, or my personal favorite, MediaMonkey, and just start ripping.  Also, make sure you turn on the option for "AccurateRip", so you can feel assured that your rips match what others are seeing.  Even if, for now, you rip to a local, internal hard drive, you can always move your files to a NAS later (and then remove and re-import them into your ripper's database to keep it in sync with their new location).

Like others, I agree with using a NAS so that your files can be shared from an "always on" device. And before you accumulate too many rips, make sure you have a solid disaster recovery plan (e.g., a backup on an external USB drive). I am a big fan of Asset as a UPnP server -- it is easy to set up, and I recommend you take advantage of its ability to convert FLAC to WAV on the fly.

Best of luck, and I hope you can avoid getting paralysis from analysis!  ;-)

ATB.

Hook

Cannot boot MicroServer with boot drives > 2TB, unless you use a smaller system drive (must be > 100GB for Windows Home Server variants), FYI.

If you install an optical drive for disk ripping in the top bay, you are stuffed for space for the factory-supplied 250GB drive.

UEFI-compatible BIOS is required for boot from drives > 2TB; the MicroServer uses an older AMD embedded processor that lacks this.

Hense why I said to use the supplied 250gig drive as the boot drive.

As I suggested that it was noisy I would not propose to use it as a ripper therefore the need for a cd drive becomes redundant.

I maintain that for your money this is a much better solution than a similarly priced off the shelf nas, but does require a little bit of hand dirty.

FLAC!  Benefits are ubiquity and tagging.

I am fairly confident in saying that (1) flac has become a format that all hi fi music player developers are supporting.  Notably, Apple does not directly support it.  But the serious hi fi companies seem to support it.  And (2), when a player does support it, it supports the standard way metadata is embedded into the files.  The later is the issue with .wav; there has not become a standard way of handling metadata.

I too am fully comfortable with flac, and my own flac rips are with 0 file size compression.

Yup, PC and Bart pretty much answered the question!  Because FLAC is open source and royalty free, it has the widest variety of tools for lossless ripping, tagging and organizing music files.

Why iTunes does not support ripping to FLAC (along with AccurateRip) is beyond me.  But at least there are UPnP players for iPhone/pod/pad that can easily play FLAC files streamed from a UPnP server (e.g., I've had good luck with PlugPlayer).

ATB.

Hook

In principle you should be able to convert FLAC to WAV and WAV to FLAC and get the identity:

wav2flac (flac2wav x.flac) = x.flac

and viceversa

flac2wav (wav2flac x.wav) = x.wav

In practice things are a bit different:

$ flac -d test.flac
$ flac -f test.wav -o testback.flac
$ ll test*
-rw-r--r-- 1 nicola nicola 19969994 Dec 26  2012 test.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 nicola nicola 47910792 Dec 26  2012 test.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 nicola nicola 20172649 Dec 26  2012 testback.flac

When working with high resolution files in FLAC and ALAC formats, I obtain the most consistent results using dBpoweramp (sadly only available for Windows, no Unix version).

As mentioned by other members, FLAC supports flexible tagging options (you can easily batch tag your FLAC files with "lltag", "easytag" or "dBpoweramp"). If you feel more comfortable with WAV and you do not care so much about tagging go for WAV. You can then always batch convert to FLAC (and back to WAV) later.

Music files for download are most often offered in FLAC format (check for instance eclassical.com, gubemusic.com, hd-klassik.com, highresaudio.com, linnrecords.com, naimlabel.com, prestoclassical.co.uk, universal-music.co.uk), sometimes also in WAV format.

In my view naming rules and directory structure are a more critical choice than file formats. It will take you more time to rename your files (if you later revise your initial choices) than to convert to a different (lossless) format.

N.I.H. (Not Invented Here).  FLAC is an open standard which Apple doesn't have control of.  Whenever possible, always try to lock your customers into proprietary 'standards' rather than open ones.

In regards to apple and flac, they thought they could do it better whilst they were cresting the wave.

Once sales start declining, which is probably soon, they may change their mind. 

The frustration I guess is that itunes is not the only player on mac, people that use macs are kind of promoting everyone elses view of us, i.e. stupid people taking what we are given.

A quick look round macupdate will show a wealth of audio players which are not itunes.

The other frustration is that windows does not support flac either, so why apple gets singled out is odd, it has 6% of the computer market.    

To the OP, I think by now you see there are the three basic elements to a streaming music server. The ripper, the streaming software and the storage.

There are all in one solutions, or as used by many of us component solutions, such as PC/MAC for ripper and NAS for storage.

For the streamer server, many run upnp apps on the NAS. I prefer to keep that seperate as I have multiple NAS. 

I use a Raspberry Pi at around £35 for the streamer. Largely very straightforward, I overheard a conversation on the train the other day where a very non technical person got it working by following advice on web and was streaming media to their TV. The advantage here is it's discrete, cheap to buy and cheap to run and simple. There are many UPnP server apps for the Pi, but Asset works well with Naim.

Simon

OK, FLAC it is. I read up on WAV vs. FLAC, because I was surprised why would FLAC be developed in the first place, since WAV is 10 years older and is a single, undisputed standard in the recording industry. DAW software like the ubiquitous ProTools or Cockos Reaper (that I use in my studio) record and edit WAVs by default (although you can import other formats to it).

Well, I found that the main benefit of FLAC is the losless compression it offers. Interesting that nobody mentioned it here, unless I missed it above.

Anyway. I'm convinced to rip to FLAC. Later today my very first PC will be ripped. The first I ever bought, actually, when in 1986 as a university student I landed in Tokyo, Japan, and used my very first salary to buy a Sony Diskman - an unbelievable technological marvel, especially for someone who has just arrived from the dark ages of communist Poland. Next, I bought my first CD: "Born in the USA". Followed by "The Wall", "Abbey Road" and "Rio". Abbey Road sadly deteriorated with age so I recently bought a new CD, the recent remaster. The other ones from that first music shopping spree in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, are still in good shape

If you're looking for an uncompressed format then AIFF is the better choice in my opinion. It is supported by all systems (Mac and PC) as well as most high end streamers, it supports embedded tagging/artwork and metadata and is 25 years old, if that matters. 

 I've ripped my music to FLAC for 3 years now, but recently started to use AIFF, I can't hear any difference in SQ but storage is so cheap these days, there is no need to use compression type file formats. Even if they are lossless.

That includes Linux as well, just tried an AIFF file on my Ubuntu running laptop.

Most of us have succumbed to the 'storage is cheap' mantra. File size is pretty low on the list of priorities for me.  That's why you don't see it discussed any more. 

It IS still relevant for portable devices, and is a reason that for my iPhone or iPod, listening in the car or on a plane, 320kbps mp3 or 256kbps aac are "good enough" for me.

Want to blow your mind?  Get the 24-bit Beatles remasters and stream them to your new setup.  Now I've not done an extensive a vs. b of the 16 bit vs. 24 bit versions, but the 24 bit ones sound phenomenal.

A little off topic but I was interested in the comment re transcoding flac to wav when streaming. Why would you do this and how would it sound better given that the data is coming from the original flac file? I'm using Asset to stream flac but not converting