ernestcarl
Major Contributor
Even if you use a NAS, better make sure to have an offline-offsite backup in case of a catastrophic disaster e.g. lightning storm or fire. My offline backup is updated yearly.
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What does it take to manage 8TB of music?
- Thread starter SPOautos
- Start date
- Thread Starter
- #22
I'm not following you. I do not have a Tidal account so probably why I dont understand your suggestion. I thought Tidal is basically like Spotify. How can I stream my own music through Tidal?
Ohhhh are you saying just dont worry about my own music, get Tidal and whenever I want to listen to something type it in because all my music is probably already on Tidal and I can just listen to it there?
What is the sound quality through Tital? Is it comparable to something like a SACD?
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Personally I use a low powered server for hosting my several terabytes of lossless music (and other assorted media), and back it up to a (not overly) local hosting provider. I've opted for the DIY route because I find it fun to tinker, not because it is the cheap solution. The only real gain I have from doing this is a sense of certainty that I will never lose access to my most cherished music.
For hosting files locally, I'd do it as simple as possible to rule out as many potential problems. People tend to treat RAID as backup for example. It is not, and unless you opt for something like RAID10, it is fraught with a lot of potential pitfalls (but if you know what you're doing, go for it I guess). Personally, I use single disks without any sort of volume management (except for LUKS because I am a privacy nerd).
To make it somewhat secure, you need offsite backups and checksums of your data to verify the integrity of your data (including checksums of the offsite backup as well). I unfortunately know of no simple solutions to this (due to my fondness of DIY), but I think most NAS devices these days offer some choice between different offsite backup providers. If you checksum your data manually, you won't need to worry about your backup software not doing its job checksumming properly.
Once you do have your backup up and running, don't forget to test restoring it. If you have never tested restoring your backups, you have no backups.
As for playback, anything works really. Personally, I use MPD for playback of my data because it is about as simple as headless playback gets. But I don't think I know of any modern music player that chokes on large libraries so use whatever you like (my MPD is using memory meaured in the megabytes for my collection for example, and is using <1% of the CPU on my RaspberryPi). UPNP can be used as well of course, which gives you a whole slew of options - never used that myself though.
With all this said, most of the time I listen to music streamed from Apple Music with shairport-sync. I can't hear the difference between my lossless files and Apples MP3s unless I do my darnest to not listen to the music and try to find compression artefacts instead (which is quite hard - so why bother?).
So, hosting things locally incurs a high upfront cost, and unless you want to risk losing data, also incurs a monthly fee (a fee that is probably higher than the subscription fee for streaming services) for offsite backup. Unless you are absolutely sure you want this or you have a collection of rare music, I can't recommend bothering with it. If you do, do get that backup up and running ASAP.
For hosting files locally, I'd do it as simple as possible to rule out as many potential problems. People tend to treat RAID as backup for example. It is not, and unless you opt for something like RAID10, it is fraught with a lot of potential pitfalls (but if you know what you're doing, go for it I guess). Personally, I use single disks without any sort of volume management (except for LUKS because I am a privacy nerd).
To make it somewhat secure, you need offsite backups and checksums of your data to verify the integrity of your data (including checksums of the offsite backup as well). I unfortunately know of no simple solutions to this (due to my fondness of DIY), but I think most NAS devices these days offer some choice between different offsite backup providers. If you checksum your data manually, you won't need to worry about your backup software not doing its job checksumming properly.
Once you do have your backup up and running, don't forget to test restoring it. If you have never tested restoring your backups, you have no backups.
As for playback, anything works really. Personally, I use MPD for playback of my data because it is about as simple as headless playback gets. But I don't think I know of any modern music player that chokes on large libraries so use whatever you like (my MPD is using memory meaured in the megabytes for my collection for example, and is using <1% of the CPU on my RaspberryPi). UPNP can be used as well of course, which gives you a whole slew of options - never used that myself though.
With all this said, most of the time I listen to music streamed from Apple Music with shairport-sync. I can't hear the difference between my lossless files and Apples MP3s unless I do my darnest to not listen to the music and try to find compression artefacts instead (which is quite hard - so why bother?).
So, hosting things locally incurs a high upfront cost, and unless you want to risk losing data, also incurs a monthly fee (a fee that is probably higher than the subscription fee for streaming services) for offsite backup. Unless you are absolutely sure you want this or you have a collection of rare music, I can't recommend bothering with it. If you do, do get that backup up and running ASAP.
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Yes, thats what I am saying (although as others have pointed out, no service will have 100% or your existing music, so you would either accept that or workaround)
You didnt say what format/ quality your files were in - I assumed ripped CDs or similar.
Tidal, Qobuz and Amazon HD offer lossless (cd quality) and above (up to 24/192 PCM) but no, to the best of my knowledge no service streams DSD so if thats what you are after, scrap that idea!
- Thread Starter
- #25
So all the music is on the nas but whatever you use to find and play music (such as Roon or something else) is on the PC and so the PC doesnt have to actually be turned on all the time?
So if I had a storage with all my music hooked to a router, and a PC with a software to organize it all, categorize it, etc.....I wouldnt need the PC on to play the music through the wxc-50.....the music would be in its organized state on the storage drive and I could sift through it using the wxc-50. Is that correct?
- Thread Starter
- #26
How much 24/192 is there on Tidal? If you have the High Res subscription is all of Tital streamed at 24/192 or just a small selection of music? Any idea if theres a noticeable difference between Tidal high res 24/192 vs listening to a sacd of the same recording?
None.
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I'll clarify again. Tidal streams (mostly) lossless, with an element of content at various rates of mqa encoded content. I'll let you search on here for the arguments for and against that EDIT( hint, it's mostly negative.)
Qobuz and amazon HD have the bulk in lossless and a proportion that is in higher res than 16 /44.1. I don't know the precise stats for how much. The hi res stuff will likely be 24/96 and some 24/192 with some other rates depending on the source. It isn't encoded like tidal and its mqa so can be played back on pretty much any recent dac.
Spotify is yet to embrace lossless /CD quality nevermind higher.
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(following on from previous post)
I'm not trying to get you to do anymore than try streaming. Couldn't care less which you pick if any. I use tidal because it's (mostly) lossless and has a multi user family plan. I'd actually rather use qobuz but they currently have no family plan.
Amazon HD doesn't integrate with roon so that's out for me (but it's the cheapest)
There may be others to try. They all offer a reduced /no cost trial period which is easy to cancel. Your phone and the yamaha should both work with the relevant provider app or other 3rd party apps
No idea how good any of it sounds compared to dsd/sacd. Never owned or streamed any. If that is what you are after, current streaming offers aren't for you.
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- Thread Starter
- #30
Well I'm thinking about giving Tidal High Res plan a try since it already has a app on my wxc-50. Then I could just take only my highest quality music from sources like sacd and put them on a 1TB drive plugged into my router to use with the wxc-50.....with only a fraction of my music I wouldnt need anything elaborate.
FeathersMcGraw
Member
If looking for a combined DLNA, NFS and SMB server on the cheap, one might
consider an ODROID-HC2 or ODROID-HC1 with a suitable drive and your
operating system of choice. Both have but a single drive bay, so backup copies
of the media content would be prudent.
Not a lot of CPU power and RAM, so just-in-time transcoding and other CPU
or memory intensive activities should be avoided. I'm not a fan of just-in-time
transcoding, so will do one time transcoding via the likes of FFMPEG prior to
adding esoteric and potentially incompatable media content to my media library.
Less of a problem these days if using quality playback devices.
consider an ODROID-HC2 or ODROID-HC1 with a suitable drive and your
operating system of choice. Both have but a single drive bay, so backup copies
of the media content would be prudent.
Not a lot of CPU power and RAM, so just-in-time transcoding and other CPU
or memory intensive activities should be avoided. I'm not a fan of just-in-time
transcoding, so will do one time transcoding via the likes of FFMPEG prior to
adding esoteric and potentially incompatable media content to my media library.
Less of a problem these days if using quality playback devices.
- Thread Starter
- #32
I may be confused about something.....say I have a 2TB storage drive with music plugged into my router. If I installed plex on my phone would I be able to see that music in the plex app of my phone and sort it, make lists, ect since on the same network? Or does plex have to be installed on the same device the music is stored on.....meaning it would need to be a nas or computer so the plex software and music can be on there together......then I can also install on my phone and the 2 plex software's link together.
I suppose a issue for me, is I dont want to get out a computer.....now a days I never want to open a computer at home unless I have too. I want to pull the music up on my phone, select a playlist or just let it play random and it just go.....no computers involved.....I dont mind using a computer to set something up, but dont want to get on a computer to listen to music.
I suppose a issue for me, is I dont want to get out a computer.....now a days I never want to open a computer at home unless I have too. I want to pull the music up on my phone, select a playlist or just let it play random and it just go.....no computers involved.....I dont mind using a computer to set something up, but dont want to get on a computer to listen to music.
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I'll add my voice to the NAS chorus. A NAS device, (Synology seem to be the most popular), can store all you music files PLUS it can do other useful things such as backup you computers. Don't skimp on capacity (as I did). RAID 1 provides pretty good self-backup for the NAS but doubles the capacity you will need.
It depends on how much you want to learn, obviously. Personally, I'd use a homemade NAS and either a computer or the NAS as the playing computer itself; something like mpd works very well with a lot of different clients, including smartphone ones.
For the music-on-the-go thing, I'd keep it simple and transcode it myself in a good lossy format and play it locally.
About streaming, do these allow you to choose your releases (I like to avoid remasters, most of the time)? Because if you sell some placebo like HiRes but without giving the choice in what matters the most for quality, you're basically a joke.
For the music-on-the-go thing, I'd keep it simple and transcode it myself in a good lossy format and play it locally.
About streaming, do these allow you to choose your releases (I like to avoid remasters, most of the time)? Because if you sell some placebo like HiRes but without giving the choice in what matters the most for quality, you're basically a joke.
Vini darko
Major Contributor
I'm curious. How much music is 8TB? How many years would it take to listen to all that?
RAID is not a substitute for backups. Primarily, RAID provides high availability since it enables drives to be replaced with zero downtime. This should ideally be done before the drive becomes non-functional, typically when the number of spare sectors drops below some threshold. While sudden failure of a one drive (or more, depending on the RAID configuration) is tolerated, other failure modes are not recoverable. Examples include accidentally deleting/overwriting files and simultaneous failure of multiple drives due to a power surge or disaster (fire, flooding).
I do it monthly.
F1308
Major Contributor
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Be aware DLNA routers often have a limitation while reading files...My Sitecom router was announced as an out of this world machine, and indeed works very well BUT DOES NOT READ MORE THAN 10000 FILES. I had to spread the files along several drives...with the mess of accessing the unmounting menu... and then coping with the reading process....unbearable.
I discovered it the hard way...after ripping nearly 1500 cd I went for hearing Vangelis before ripping Verdi, but the listing stopped at Orff...No way to reach Vangelis...
Did not understand anything until performing a software update for the router that took me to PAST UPGRADES...then I just saw, to my disbelief, that the previous one had consisted in expanding the reading list from 1000 to 10000 !!!! Congratulations, Sitecom.
I discovered it the hard way...after ripping nearly 1500 cd I went for hearing Vangelis before ripping Verdi, but the listing stopped at Orff...No way to reach Vangelis...
Did not understand anything until performing a software update for the router that took me to PAST UPGRADES...then I just saw, to my disbelief, that the previous one had consisted in expanding the reading list from 1000 to 10000 !!!! Congratulations, Sitecom.
A Synology NAS is probably the easiest way to go. You could buy a single bay unit (e.g. DS120j) and put a single 8TB drive in it. I don't know where you keep your music now, but if you need backups then you can plug an external 8TB USB drive into the Synology periodically to do this (put the external drive somewhere else after taking the backup).
The Synology OS includes remote access capabilities and there are apps for both iOS and Android. Synology NASes are setup and managed via a web page. You can have a play with a demo of DSM, the Synology OS, here: https://demo.synology.com/
DSM includes is own media server capabilities, but other media servers like Plex Server can also be installed very easily. Plex is able to stream to multiple clients across your LAN and the internet if setup correctly. If you want to do a lot of this, then I would invest in one of the more expensive Synology devices with a better processor and more RAM.
It's also possible to run DSM on a PC, this can get pretty technical and fiddly, the details are on this site: https://xpenology.com/forum/
Personally, I run several virtual DSM servers instances under vmware ESXi on a Dell server. I backup my data each night to a 2 bay Synology unit in the attic (I also take occasional off-line backups to some spare drives in a USB JBOD enclosure).
The Synology OS includes remote access capabilities and there are apps for both iOS and Android. Synology NASes are setup and managed via a web page. You can have a play with a demo of DSM, the Synology OS, here: https://demo.synology.com/
DSM includes is own media server capabilities, but other media servers like Plex Server can also be installed very easily. Plex is able to stream to multiple clients across your LAN and the internet if setup correctly. If you want to do a lot of this, then I would invest in one of the more expensive Synology devices with a better processor and more RAM.
It's also possible to run DSM on a PC, this can get pretty technical and fiddly, the details are on this site: https://xpenology.com/forum/
Personally, I run several virtual DSM servers instances under vmware ESXi on a Dell server. I backup my data each night to a 2 bay Synology unit in the attic (I also take occasional off-line backups to some spare drives in a USB JBOD enclosure).
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