Question for users of less expensive music streamers - How are you using them?

[Brian Hall]

When I want to listen to Atmos music, I can use Amazon Music Unlimited or Tidal on a Google TV streamer in my living room where I have a dual setup. Atmos or Stereo.

 

[DavidEdwinAston]

Re: NAS:

1) Installing a NAS would make sense, but I've been too lazy to try to implement one. I looked online for a step-by-step, but what I've found seems to be for networking professionals and is too technical for me.

2) My old router has a USB port (USB 3.0), so I think it should work for connecting a drive to make a NAS. I did a quick RTFM to see how to do that, but it doesn't look as easy as they say it is...

Does anyone know of a particularly good (well organized, easy to follow, to the point) online how-to for getting a NAS drive working on a simple home network?

I will just mention that my 600 odd cd's have been successfully accessed from a Seagate hard drive for the last three years. (Via Sonos).
However, perhaps three months ago, the library disappeared from the app. I can see that they are still there on the Seagate, but, play them, not a chance up to now!

 

[rongon]

Thanks everyone for the ideas and insights. It's interesting hear what people are doing. It seems a lot of us have a higher tolerance for dealing with software user interfaces and networking than I do.

In the end, I think things here are OK the way they are.

In case anyone is wondering...

I back up all my music files to a 4TB HDD, duplicated on a second 4TB HDD. That satisfies the maxim that data doesn't truly exist until it exists in three places. None of the drives have died yet, but I really doubt all three will die at the same time unless some kind of major catastrophe happens, after which I'll have bigger things to worry about than digital music files.

For new music I rely on radio stations (special shout out to WKCR-FM in NYC!), friends and family, word-of-mouth, just like I've always done. I find I don't enjoy listening to algorithm-curated streaming services like Spotify. I don't know why.

For mobile music I have a 256GB uSD card in my phone, with a bunch of 256k and 320k MP3s on it. Websites give me radio stations from around the world, and I can stream music from YouTube if I really want to. I don't worry about ultimate sound quality from the phone. In this case things are good enough for the car, in a hotel room, etc. Not to mention how horrible it is to try to listen to music in a plane. In that situation I'm happy just to shut out the world for a few hours.
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[amper42]

Re: NAS:

1) Installing a NAS would make sense, but I've been too lazy to try to implement one. I looked online for a step-by-step, but what I've found seems to be for networking professionals and is too technical for me.

2) My old router has a USB port (USB 3.0), so I think it should work for connecting a drive to make a NAS. I did a quick RTFM to see how to do that, but it doesn't look as easy as they say it is...

Does anyone know of a particularly good (well organized, easy to follow, to the point) online how-to for getting a NAS drive working on a simple home network?

Your RPI4 with a Samsung Fit Plus USB drive attached and DLNA enabled is a simple NAS setup that can share your music around the house. It works great for this.

 

[audioguy272727]

I have a Mac mini 2 separate with 2 RAID shares (for everything like photos, music, documents). I also keep a separate USB SSD as a backup for those - overkill, yes. But I have lost drives in each of the last two decades at least once. RAID helps but ....

From this repository strategy I have a specific folder of FLAC files - from that I copy them to two separate USB SSD drives which are each attached to separate RPi3s running Moode Audio into a Topping E50 and Topping D10s. I also have a parallel ALAC folder for my iPod classic - now 512 gb.

Observations: while it sounds like a ton of work to maintain, it is not. Any failures or updates now are pretty low maintenance. I had a NAS and when it worked it was great but I ran into networking issues in a mixed setup of Apple, Linux (RPi) and some third party devices. I also found connectivity issues would often require RPi reboots. So the dedicated drive to a PI device strategy is super reliable, very stable, and requires reboot only very rarely. And while I have no scientific proof, it seem like music sourced from a USB SSD attached to a RPi is a better audio experience. NAS was good when it was working, and streaming from an iPhone over Air play is noticeably less pleasant - similar to using Apple Music in my car into CarPlay - good but not excellent.

I do like the Moode Audio solution - the evolution over time (Thank you Tim and Moode team!) has been significant and for me it is the perfect solution for stored, streamed, and internet radio sourced music. Living in a place where I have approx 1000 cds digitized, 300 cassette tapes, 900 lps and a significant Apple Music library going back to early iTunes days. I was a guy who had a car hard drive music storage system in 2001 - streaming the hard way back then . So its has been a long. long journey, but my 20-something kids are now exposed to a world where music when and how you want it is simply a click away. But, when we are listening to music in my living room, the discussion about the anytime anywhere approach usually stops quickly and they like music as an enjoyment participation exercise instead of a background commodity. I like that, but I have no idea howling that will last given the pace of changes now, and the emergence of AI "make your own" music trends that are not very far away - like my car mirror says: "things may be closer than they appear" .....

 

[Cogito]

All my listening is via streaming (Tidal) using my Cambridge Audio MXN-10. It does support NAS if needed. It's a very popular streamer for CA, so I expect support to continue for quite a while.

 

[Ears of Tin]

Music files stored on NAS connected to router and periodiclly backed up. Files stream by wifi to three RPis connected to tradional amp/speaker combinations. I use rAudio for streamer software, it has to cleanest, appearance in my opinion. Supports my internet radio stations and a CD player connection. Also use LMS so I can feed my Chromecast devices. Control everthing through phones or tablets.

 

[Theodore8]

You mean there are people with personal digital music collections who aren't running a NAS?

I realize this is a cheeky comment, but let me clarify that ripping a music collection into a NAS to be accessed by a Roon server running ROCK is NOT SUPPORTED BY ROON.

I thought people should know this.

I learned it at my expense.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

It never occurred to me until stumbling on this thread that an NAS would be something I'd want or need.

I've got ~875G of music files on an internal 1TB SSD drive which is regularly backed up to an external 5tb SSD. The ~200G of rare one-of-a-kind live recordings that I made back in the day is backed up a second time since that material is unreplacable.

The material is cataloged and played via JRiver Media Center, which has options for playing to various devices, including anything with a web browser and internet connection. So, I don't see the need to have access to the file system itself since JRiver does a fine job of deploying it. Back when I was working as an Oracle DBA we architected a RAID array with everything striped and mirrored, but that seems like overkill for my home. And I don't know that RAID/SAME is even in vogue any more.

For the car or anywhere that internet isn't convenient, I have a Sony NW-A306 with a 1tb SD card that holds more music than I need, and their player software recognizes the playlist m4u files. It won't play .ogg files, but so far, I've been able to live without that.

So, is there some compelling reason to go to an NAS? I'm running out of room on the 1tb internal SSD, so will be looking at solutions at some point in the not too distant future.

 

[rgpit]

I use a Linux mini pc with an internal 4TB NVMe running Lyrion Music Server. The NVMe contains all of my ripped CDs. Raspberry Pi 4s and 5s as endpoints with various DACs and Qobuz for streaming. Been doing this for years and still am very happy with this architecture. I've no desire to make changes but monitor and update my Linux, LMS, and picoreplayer software to stay current.

 

[The_Fall]

It never occurred to me until stumbling on this thread that an NAS would be something I'd want or need.

I've got ~875G of music files on an internal 1TB SSD drive which is regularly backed up to an external 5tb SSD. The ~200G of rare one-of-a-kind live recordings that I made back in the day is backed up a second time since that material is unreplacable.

The material is cataloged and played via JRiver Media Center, which has options for playing to various devices, including anything with a web browser and internet connection. So, I don't see the need to have access to the file system itself since JRiver does a fine job of deploying it. Back when I was working as an Oracle DBA we architected a RAID array with everything striped and mirrored, but that seems like overkill for my home. And I don't know that RAID/SAME is even in vogue any more.

For the car or anywhere that internet isn't convenient, I have a Sony NW-A306 with a 1tb SD card that holds more music than I need, and their player software recognizes the playlist m4u files. It won't play .ogg files, but so far, I've been able to live without that.

So, is there some compelling reason to go to an NAS? I'm running out of room on the 1tb internal SSD, so will be looking at solutions at some point in the not too distant future.

I just find it easier to work via the network interface rather than a USB type interface. Setting up a NAS on a dedicated multi drive enclosure, with its own motherboard can run without a PC attached. And running UnRaid allows hot swapping drives over time as maintenance or to expand capacity. I run 80TB of storage now, but that's also 10,000 movie files... not sure I would've set up a NAS like this if it was purely music. But I would also look into something like Backblaze if you're keeping archival recordings.

 

[popej]

Stereo is easy. Spotify and Internet radio available on AVR. For local files I use Openwrt router with SSD and DLNA.

Now the difficult question: how do you play multichannel music?

Tidal on Google TV is simply unusable.
Amazon Music on FireTV is usable, but selecting music is PITA.
Tried Apple Music on LG TV, but couldn't find a way to search for Atmos. I don't want to use TV for playing music anyway.
Atmos from Tidal and Amazon Music can be played directly on AVR, but I have a weird feeling, that this is processed stereo. Maybe I'm wrong.

Now local multichannel. I have music ripped from my DVDs on router, available on Samba and DLNA. This can be played on LG TV, Kodi on Google TV, Coreelec, Openelec or Moode (probably). I think Kodi or Coreelec would be the most convenient, but as for now I have no device connected to AVR.

 

[obsessive9119]

So, is there some compelling reason to go to an NAS? I'm running out of room on the 1tb internal SSD, so will be looking at solutions at some point in the not too distant future.

I don’t use a NAS but a media server (a mini PC with a bunch of drives attached - kind of a poor man’s NAS with more power/flexibility). I have scripts that back up to external drives, along with cloud backup.

I don’t think there’s any benefit of a NAS over a server, if you have your backups sorted (which you should do with a NAS anyway).