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What music servers do members use

Ron Party

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I have two different set ups, one at home and the other in my office. At home I have a 4 bay QNAP TS-453 Pro. I have 4 6TB drives. I've almost run out of space - I currently have almost 17,000 albums stored on it - and very shortly I will have to expand. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to go about it. I use jRiver on a custom made silent PC as well as jRiver on my laptop to play music.

In my office I use external hard drives. I have several 5TB drives and several 4TB drives. I have all of my almost 17K albums in my office as well. Again, I use jRiver to play music. Since this is an office environment, there was no need for a custom built silent PC here, just a regular workhorse PC.

For my tastes and the way I like to access music, Roon is cumbersome for large music collections. I prefer a tree structure for finding music. JRiver does the trick.
 

Fitzcaraldo215

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Not a Roon guy. I use JRiver with files on a 54TB Synology NAS. The PC is an aging, unexotic I7 tower running Win 7 Pro 64 in the neighboring utility room. No problems, and I am quite happy. It is 4-5 years old now.

I much prefer JRiver to support tagging of my large, mainly Mch classical library of dsf files. Plus, it does video files and TV, too, in my prepro-less MultiMedia PC setup straight to my USB DAC.

I just don’t think there is anything at all to be gained sonically from PC/OS/Networking/NAS/HDD/power supply/cables, etc. on the hardware/software side, as long as they have adequate capacity and speed to move the data, which is not very hard or expensive to achieve. Most popular, recognized library/player software is bit perfect so it also won’t make much difference sonically, I don’t believe. Player software is mainly just about features, capabilities, GUI, etc.

Vast armies of computer audiophiles and their sighted listening anecdotes online haven’t convinced me of any compelling need to change my views or my system.
 
OP
Jerry Sobel

Jerry Sobel

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I have two different set ups, one at home and the other in my office. At home I have a 4 bay QNAP TS-453 Pro. I have 4 6TB drives. I've almost run out of space - I currently have almost 17,000 albums stored on it - and very shortly I will have to expand. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to go about it. I use jRiver on a custom made silent PC as well as jRiver on my laptop to play music.

In my office I use external hard drives. I have several 5TB drives and several 4TB drives. I have all of my almost 17K albums in my office as well. Again, I use jRiver to play music. Since this is an office environment, there was no need for a custom built silent PC here, just a regular workhorse PC.

For my tastes and the way I like to access music, Roon is cumbersome for large music collections. I prefer a tree structure for finding music. JRiver does the trick.
Silent PC?
Do you mean fanless?
 

Ron Party

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Hi Jerry.

Yes. Fanless. Ordered from silentpc.com
 

esm

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Nothing too amazing here:
  • kodi for movie and music indexing and playback in the living room, now running on an Android TV device (Shield TV).
  • mpd + upmpdcli for the office desk setup; mix of local media and upnp. Repurposed laptop with a USB-attached DX7s and a 2.1 JBL LSR 305P/310S setup.
  • A bunch of scripts and glue for podcasts, offline Tidal downloads and playlist mirroring, etc.
  • All Fedora Linux machines with a few TB of storage, now on a synology, shared around the network.
Kodi has been pretty amazing for movies (especially for it's library handling, and seamlessly merging in external metadata), but it's music indexing and playback capabilities have left a lot to be desired for my purposes ("large" recordings often cause indexing issues, and some formats seem prone to causing kodi to get confused or lock up). I have a bunch of debugging I need to do here; I get the impression that multichannel music isn't something the Kodi devs spend much time on. (Dec 2019 edit: things have improved pretty substantially here.)

mpd does a great job of doing bit-perfect audio playback, but not so great for library management or handling any sort of ad-hoc streaming; putting upmpdcli in front of it greatly improved that situation, and gives me a lot of flexibility about what media sources I feed it.

I don't have any MQA media, and I pull down music from Tidal in flac format. Someday I'll care, but today is not that day.

I don't recommend doing any of this unless you actively get a kick out of it like I do. ;)
 
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March Audio

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My QNAP is not SSD. I care about sound quality as Roon interface runs just fine with QNAP. I have a Benchmark DAC and am very happy with it. Thank you
Yep, I ran mine on a non ssd synology nas and was quite happy with performance, but it is quicker on my 24 core ssd xeon . I'm confident your Benchmark will not show the slightest audio quality difference between a nas and an other pc server.
 

DuxServit

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Currently my server-side is an old MacMini, running Roon core. I’m using an old MacBookPro as a Roon Bridge, feeding into my DAC via USB. The MBP also has Audirvana and Jriver.

One advantage is that I can move around the MacBookPro as the Bridge, connecting to multiple DAC/amp setups.
 

watchnerd

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I use Roon running on an iMac in my office. The sources are either my NAS or Tidal.

The endpoint is my Devialet, over wifi in the living room.
 

jhaider

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Current (for the last several years) Mac mini, using iTunes for playback. It works just fine, seamlessly syncs with our iPhones, and generally hasn't given me a reason to use anything fancier for 2-channel music.
 

pierre

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I recycled an old pc under linux: 4 Sata disks and 2SSDs aggregated with zfs. Roon core is on it and steams to wherever I need it to (phone included). Linux is rock solid, current uptime is 2 years (last move).

For musicproduction i switched recently to Dante/AES67 and i’am very happy with it.
 

Old Listener

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Our music files are stored on a NAS in our home office. I play music in that room using my personal Intel i5 NUC and Dragonfly Red DAC. In my main system, An Atom class Intel NUC plays music through an Audioengine D3 DAC to active speakers.

I use JRiver Media Center as the player software on all our NUCs and a laptop. In the main system, I use a 10" Android tablet to browse and select music for playback using JRiver software.
 

elvisizer

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I'm running the old quad core i7 Mac Mini with silliness- an Uptone audio mac mini power supply and fan controller being fed by an Uptone JS-2.
Files are on a synology NAS, serving is done by Roon on the Mini.
 

alashikata

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Have been running Foobar2000 with Win10, AP-Linux-V.4.0, Daphile v17x, and VortexBox.
-Daphile v17x takes too long to load external 3TB hard drive, web browser interface
-VortexBox is good, web server interface, loading external 5TB usb hd very fast
-Foobar2000 : currently running this with monkeymote for ipad for control
-AP-Linux-V.4.0: love this bit-perfect server but need monitor or TV to play music
 

bobhol

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I'm not really sure what part of a digital system is the Music Server. My digital system is pretty crude in ways. I doubt if I understand what I currently have or how to easily make it all better.
Music is stored on a Synology NAS, which is hardwired to my Comcast modem/router.
In my basement/man cave I have a chromecast audio connected to a Topping D30 connected to my 2ch audio system.
I control music selection with an Android smartphone using Hi-Fi Cast.
This does what I want to accomplish but I dislike using the smartphone because before listening to music I have to 1) locate the phone 2) check if it's got any battery life. 3) Hope all is working in my little Wi-Fi world. I do have an old laptop that I'd like to use but it's running Windows Vista and it can't seem to find my NAS. Looking into updating it to Win 7. It's a Dell business laptop that runs very well still.
I like it that at work I can plug ear pods into the smartphone and access my NAS. I'm using software that came with the NAS (DS Audio).
My loft/family room system has my gaming PC hardwired to the modem/router than to a SMSL M8 DAC. I haven't settled on PC software to control my library yet so I just use whatever Win 10 (Groove?) supplies for now. The SMSL M8 is connected to a vintage 2ch stereo system.
If I need to use headphones I just plug them into whatever receiver/Integrated Amp is currently being used. Available power to my headphones never seems to be an issue.
Thanks for providing this forum.
 

itisljar

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Oct 29, 2017
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I have hand-built J1900 based PC in small case which houses few HDDs, with Kodibuntu (that's Ubuntu 14, IIRC) and latest Kodi. It serves as media player, with onboard audio as primary output. Folders are shared as read-only for mobile devices playback.
 

BillG

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Sep 12, 2018
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Universal Media Server running on a Windows 10 Professional PC... :cool:

The photos below are from experiments and stress testing I did with my setup (the server PC, 3 Android devices, and a Chromecast attached to a television whose analog output is being fed into a Sony soundbar) this evening: There were 3 active streams being served from my PC at the time, although I suspect I could have initiated several more without running into bandwidth problems as transcoding wasn't necessary as the client software and devices all natively support the formats I use - that being AAC, MP3, and occasionally FLAC. And just for fun, I had one of the Androids streaming into an integrated amp via Bluetooth!

43588757_2118247044854732_265002836532658176_o.jpg
43551181_2118248161521287_5814675700560429056_o.jpg
43687202_2118248231521280_4933791789485129728_o.jpg

It's freeware and comes with numerous renderers pre-configured:

https://www.universalmediaserver.com/

For client software on Andriod, I'm using BubbleUPnP and Hi-Fi Cast:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp&hl=en
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.findhdmusic.app.upnpcast
 
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thefsb

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Nov 2, 2019
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Logitech Media Server
Runs on Debian on a Raspberry Pi.
Player is squeezelite also on the RPi.
Remote controls are Squeezer on Android and iPeng on iOS.
 

Bamyasi

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Feb 19, 2019
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Plex Media Server (Audio files only)
Music Player Daemon (MPD)
Run on Allo USBridge network player (Sparky SBC / DietPi)

Note, the link above is for a more recent model, USBridge Signature player. The original USBridge has been discontinued, which is a pity since it was only half the price of the current model and yet works amazingly good. I still cannot believe this tiny single-board computer can run PMS and MPD in parallel with excellent response times and have a perfectly stable performance with no glitches whatsoever. Oh, and my USB DAC sounds wonderfully with it.

MPD's web interface I actually like better than most smartphone media player apps GUIs. Plex GUI is also nice but looks rather bloated. I mostly use Plex for accessing my music collection on the go. I know it should be possible to set it up with the MPD as well but I haven't tried researching this yet.
 
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