Music setup/system advice please


Garrett

Garrett

Advanced Member
Joined
Aug 24, 2011
Messages
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Workington, Cumbria, UK
I'm currently in the process of transferring my entire music collection from analogue to digital & along with all the digital stuff I've already got on my desktop it amounts to countless TB of data.


What I ideally want to do is put it all on some kind of a small form factor music system that I can then attach some decent (possibly 5.1) speakers to, the player ideally will support different formats.. mp3, flac etc & be able to accept/play (or have space to install) external drives, I'm not too bothered about the aesthetics.


I know next to nothing as far as audio systems are concerned, and would appreciate any advice here.. make/model suggestions would be useful.


Thanks.
 
Look into setting up an mpd server. It will run on minimal hardware (anything with the grunt run a minimal Linux and play the music files that you have) and you can use almost anything is a remote, I use my Laptop, Android tabet, phone or Pandora, whatever is handy.


I run my main mpd server on a small AMD Geode based PC with 256mb RAM with the audio stored on a USB hard disk, it's in the living room and hooked up to the main hifi. I also share all of the music with a Samba share, so my Pandora can run and mpd server in another room, accessing the same music and playlists over the network. Right now, a Raspberry PI would make an excellent mpd server, I have one on backorder for exacly that reason.


If you really need 5.1, then you will need to do a little more reaserch to find suitable hardware, but as long as it is supported by Linux you should be ok.


If you run a Linux system already, then set-up mpd on it to see if it suits your needs. If not, then try installing Ubuntu on a VM (virtualBox supports audio perfectly well, at least for testing).
 
Garrett said:
I'm currently in the process of transferring my entire music collection from analogue to digital & along with all the digital stuff I've already got on my desktop it amounts to countless TB of data.
Click to expand...
Hardware is going to fail some day. Are you prepared to lose all your work?
 
double7 said:
Garrett said:
I'm currently in the process of transferring my entire music collection from analogue to digital & along with all the digital stuff I've already got on my desktop it amounts to countless TB of data.
Click to expand...
Hardware is going to fail some day. Are you prepared to lose all your work?
Click to expand...

Didn't say I was disposing of the analogue stuff did I..?
 
Linux-SWAT said:
Binky said:
double7 said:
RAID is no backup.
Click to expand...

Many types of RAID setup allow full recovery after disk failure - the contents of the lost disk can be reconstructed from either mirroring or parity disks.
Click to expand...
If, let's say, you have some bug that erase silently your data, it will be deleted from all the RAID array.


RAID is no backup.
Click to expand...

Yeah, RAID can deal with hardware failure, but not software/user errors - you'd want a true backup as well
 
For the music setup, avoid mini jack. Prefer cinch/rca.


For analogic signal, buy good cables, if not the best and most expensive.


If you can afford it, go for hardware that does 96000 kHz or beyond.


Consider sampling at 96000 kHz if you have disk space.


Even if it sounds unbelievable, resampling 44100 audio cd to 96000 gives a better sound.


I highly recommend this brand, if you plan to buy kinda soundcard :


http://www.rme-audio.de/en_index.php


It's not expensive compared to others, solid as a rock and got amazing sound quality.
 
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