Not sure if I'm in the right forum for this - Music Server

stoofa

stoofa

stoofa

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OK, here is the current situation:

My wife and I each have our own PC's.
We also have a laptop.
iTunes is installed on each machine and each machine has it's own local storage of music.
Between us we own a lot of CD's - when we want to listen to one of them we either find the physical disc, or rip them.
If we then want to listen to the same CD on a different machine we end up copying accross.
All very messy.

I'd like to get to the following situation:

A small box on my home network.
When I say small, I want to avoid (if possible) another PC.
I would spend a day or two ripping all of our CD's to MP3 format on this box.
All of our music could be accessed from any of our three devices.

To get to the situation I want:

What hardware should I be looking at?
Some kind of NAS device?
What software should I be using to rip each of the CD's to MP3 format and then move onto this new hardware device?

Ta
 
A NAS, with itunes will sort you out and maybe drop a bit more on an airport express (if you happen to have a stereo away from your laptops.

Rip all the files to the NAS, via itunes, with the library stored on the NAS. The two PCs should be able to access the files, and with the airport express you can wirelessly transmit the music to another audio source. If you have an iphone, ipad or ipod touch you can even use that as a remote control to choose the playlist etc.

The NAS you buy may need to be itunes compatible, or labelled as an itunes serveri forget now, but idont think its neccessary if it is a true NAS.
 
I'd have said that building an atom based pc would probably cost around 200-250 in parts though so factoring in building it/offering a warrenty i wouldnt have said it was too bad.

By all means i would recommend building it himself if he preferred but the use of the freeware Vortexbox software is excellent in this application
 
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In answer to the Atom suggestions, I built a Sempron 145 based server for less than £80 (for the internals), it's great if you have the need for a bit more power. I use it to serve FLAC via Squeezebox, M2TS/MKVs to my Popcorn Hour, and run a couple of old game servers (ut2004, NWN) and Mumble.

For a cheap NAS, I like the Netgear ReadyNAS.
 
Right now it would be best to think about upgradability - ie how much storage are you likely to need, a year or two down the line?

I started with a 2 bay NAS approach a few years ago (QNAP which were considered amongst the best, albeit expensive) - however once you get over 4/5 bays most nas's get frightfully expensive (and also you have to hope the firmware is upgradable for use with larger and larger hard - disks)

Ready-built NAS's are really easy to set up - not much more than plug and play really, but without spare bays you have to start again or add 2nd unit to extend the storage.

Ive just built an Unraid server for about £600 (1/2 of that was hard disks cost) which caters for BR rips and music and currently filled 2TB + with another 5TB available. Probably overkill for music alone but worth mentioning for anyone else :)

Depending on how many CD's you are talking about a two disk nas with 2TB/4TB storage should be enough for you (with other disk there just incase 1st fails - Im sure you dont want to rip your whole collection a 2nd time un-necessarily)
 
Plenty of options for you to think about with hardware there, personally I went for a HP Microserver with WHS installed. But just to reinforce the above do not rip your music to MP3, rip it too a lossless format doesn't matter which one as then you will be able to re-encode to your hearts content as new formats arrive without having to go back to the CD's. Having ripped my entire CD collection twice it's something I never want to do again!
 
Hi all,

Thanks for the replies.
Couple of questions:

1. What format would you recommend that I rip my CD's to?
2. With a NAS, is it a simple matter of mapping a drive to my PC and then pointing iTunes "library" to that mapped drive?

Cheers again.
 
I'd recommend ripping to FLAC, however Itunes doesnt support this so it may be worth considering what music player you use.

That correct regarding number 2
 
Just one more question for the time being :)
The Synology DS211j is currently looking favourite.
Really good price.
I'm thinking of putting in a couple of 2TB drives and using RAID 1.

I've been looking down the list of "supported drives" for this device.
Nearly every single one of them is a "green" drive.
So 5,900rpm on the Seagate line, "Intellipower Speed" on the WD line etc.

Is that actually going to have an inpact on performance?
I'm guessing as I'm simply using this is a file server / iTunes server then those kind of spindle speeds will be quite alright?
 
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