Time to take the plunge, so how do you do it?

[Moon_Man]

So after 40 years of audio and more recently trying to ignore digital, I find I can no longer do so. I currently have about 100 live performances on my laptop hard drive and access to thousands of high quality performances of all genres available for the taking. I've burned enough to CDs for the truck and home play and don't want to take the time to burn, create labels, catalog, etc.anymore. It's clear I need to get organized and develop a system for downloading, storing and accessing this music through a purely digital format.

So rather than go through false starts and wasted money, I look to the AK community for their experiences. How do you handle and access your digital music? I have FLAC files, laptops, portable storage, and mostly '70s era equipment.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Olecranon]

You need two things to get started.

1) Media software

I personally use Jriver Media Center 21, but there are lots of good alternatives out there. Jriver works great for me because it has theater view which allows me to use my HDTV as a monitor for navigating through the application (selecting and queuing songs) from my couch. It also plays most movie and music formats. I use a program called Foobar on a different PC which is also great.

2) A DAC

You could simply connect the sound/speaker out on your laptop to an AUX in on your receiver. You'd just need to buy a 3.5mm stereo plug to RCA cable for that connection. You certainly won't get the best sound quality going that route. Depending on how deep (aka how much money) you want to go, you could get an Audioquest USB Dragonfly for $150. A DAC plugs into your USB port and converts the digital audio to analog for your receiver. You would still need the 3.5mm stereo to RCA cable for the dragonfly.

There are a multitude of DACS available.

 

[drew_t]

Moon man, do you want to use a laptop as the control mechanism, or would you be interested in being able to punch up the tunes from a smart phone or tablet?

 

[Moon_Man]

I plan on using a laptop. That way I can rip CDs to the hard drive as well as FTP files and just leave it sitting where my system is. This would be all I use this laptop for - a music server.

 

[N8Nagel]

When I rip CDs I use EAC and have it set up to automatically organize my folder structure as so:

Music
-Artist
--year - album title

then in that folder, I have all the FLAC files (properly tagged, of course) in the file format 'track number - track name.FLAC' e.g. '01- Strange Brew.FLAC', the EAC log file, the EAC cue sheet, and the album art titled "folder.jpg"

I try to follow that convention when bringing in files from other sources as well

If you set it up like that the files are generally readable by whatever front end you choose to play back.

Now for mp3/mobile playback I have found a few more special instructions, mostly having to do with Ford Sync (ptui) when I had a Ford for a company car I had to convert my files to mp3 twice, once for most devices and one for the Ford. I think the difference was the number of leading zeros on the track numbers. I have EAC set up for two digit track numbers (e.g. 01, 02 ... 09, 10 etc.) which works for most devices but my memory says Ford wanted 001, 002 ... 009, 010, etc. but that wouldn't work on some other devices.

I can share my EAC config files if that helps you get started

 

[BigElCat]

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is recommended by several AK members. I tried to make it work and failed.

A question about EAC; What kind of interface do you end up with, is like a spread sheet?

I partial to the appearance of Windows Media, but I couldn't get the FLAC add-on to work.

 

[Moon_Man]

Thanks, I'll let you know.

Unfortunately, most of what I FTP has the tracks listed as "Track1D1" or similar meaning the first track on the first disk, etc. There's always a text file that has the version history and lineage along with the song listing and technical notes. Of course, these are live recordings (usually) and therefore do not have album titles, etc., just artist, date and venue. I could go through them to rename the tracks but that would literally take all my time and it's simply not worth it for shows that will number in the thousands.

I am satisfied with keeping a list and separating by artist or genre subdirectories.

 

[N8Nagel]

EAC is only useful for ripping; for playback you'll need something else. I use Foobar2000 because it's free and I needed to install it anyway to convert my FLAC files to MP3. It worked well enough for what I wanted to do. The real point is to make your file format and structure one that will work on a wide variety of front ends. I'm betting that the FLAC format will remain popular for a good long while and if we eventually adopt something else that it will still be popular enough at that time that batch converting will be easy.

Disappointingly, I bought a NAS just about a year ago with Twonky installed and I can't recommend it. Navigating by folder is fundamentally broken; it displays tracks in track name alphabetical order not in order of filename or track number which would make sense. Navigating by 'artist/album' is a workaround but makes classical problematic e.g. is what I'm looking for filed under Chopin or Van Cliburn?

Finally, backups! My NAS is configured RAID 1 and all my FLACs are also stored separately on a portable HDD. It would take me WAY too much work to do this again, and my current collection is the third time I've done this, and this time I did my girlfriend's sizeable collection as well.

 

[uofmtiger]

The way I do it is to store ALAC files on a drive with iTunes. Make backups weekly of those files to a NAS. To access the files, I have a Mac Mini running Bitperfect connected to two systems (A DAC via optical and a receiver via HDMI). When I am not using one of those systems, I have Airport Express and other Airplay servers around the house. I use an iPad to control what plays where.

Since you are using FLAC, you can't go this route without converting the files (which I had to do years ago to be able to take advantage of the iPod Classic's 160GB drive). In that case, I would try JRiver. It accepts more files types than iTunes, you can use JRemote to control it, and it has different settings that might help you get the sound you like.

If you hate that interface, you could also run Plex which gives you more of a WMC look.

Note: If price doesn't matter, I would highly recommend Roon. There is not another interface on the market that comes close, but it comes at a steep cost. (~$120 a year or ~$500 for a lifetime).

To be honest, there are tons of ways to do what you want and a lot of it comes down to personal preference.

 

[mac mini]

Moon Man, I went through this in 2009. I understand you're wedded to FLAC but here's my two cents. My first system was PC with Windows XP and it was just clumsy in the way it handled music. At the same time there was the issue of virus's and the constant never ending updates of the operating system. So I stepped back and bought a MAC and have been a fan boy ever since. It's not perfect but it is very good. No external software, players, or hardware needed.

Here are the advantages:
It offers a lossless CODEC. You can output the music optically or via USB port. You don't need any external software or players but there are choices if you want them. iTunes identifies 99% of the CD's I put in to it automatically. I can stream to MAC's airport to my boomboxes in basement and garage. For mobile devices I use an IPOD classic and can take my 25 days worth of music on the road (with room for expansion to 50 days). Lastly, I can use my iPhone as a remote.

This is my hardware:
mac mini> Gustard USB to SPDIF converter also with AES, coax, and IIS outputs> Adcom GDS DAC, Rotel preamp and power amps.

Have fun and good luck.

 

[Moon_Man]

What I have access to is in FLAC or SHN format, and converting would be way too much work. I'm hoping to find a good front end that will handle playing these formats and be not-too-obtuse in file organization.

 

[uofmtiger]

What I have access to is in FLAC or SHN format, and converting would be way too much work. I'm hoping to find a good front end that will handle playing these formats and be not-too-obtuse in file organization.

I was in the same boat and batch converted all of them over a couple of weeks (I did a few thousand songs at a time). It has been a while, but I believe I used a plug-in for Foobar, but there are probably other options like dBPoweramp that can go through that process easily now. Being able to convert losslessly to other lossless formats is one of the best features of having lossless files.

It wasn't a lot of work, but in my case, I needed more hard drive space since I didn't want to delete the old FLAC files. With drives being cheaper these days, it isn't as much of an issue.

BTW I am not saying you need to convert them for your situation. I just did it because it gave me compressed lossless files for my iPod 160GB (I had a Kenwood Keg/Phatbox before the iPod and it had much less space and adding more was expensive. It did handle FLAC, though). I haven't regretted the change at all. However, you could still run across a non-Apple product that can handle FLAC that cannot handle ALAC.

 

[N8Nagel]

Another thought... I briefly tried Serviio and that seems to work much better than Twonky if that functionality is of interest to you (where you'd find this useful is if you, say, wanted to listen to music from a secondary system in a bedroom or home office and could use something like a network connected BDP that can read off a DLNA server as your source. That is how mine is set up, I can use a laptop running foobar2K to read directly from the directories on the media server or either of two BDPs can access the Twonky DLNA server as well. Sadly my oldest BDP supports neither FLAC nor .m4a but hey it was $20 (thrift store.). Knowing what I do now from having used all this stuff I'd probably have a dedicated PC with RAID 1 drives and install serviio not twonky.

 

[JimJ[VT]]

So after 40 years of audio and more recently trying to ignore digital, I find I can no longer do so. I currently have about 100 live performances on my laptop hard drive and access to thousands of high quality performances of all genres available for the taking. I've burned enough to CDs for the truck and home play and don't want to take the time to burn, create labels, catalog, etc.anymore. It's clear I need to get organized and develop a system for downloading, storing and accessing this music through a purely digital format.

So rather than go through false starts and wasted money, I look to the AK community for their experiences. How do you handle and access your digital music? I have FLAC files, laptops, portable storage, and mostly '70s era equipment.

Thanks in advance.

With Foobar2k, you can tweak the front end to look like basically anything you want. That being said, you need the metadata already there, so depending on how they were ripped in the first place, that may be more of a job than you're willing to take on - or just live with it.

 

[drew_t]

I'm not seeing why you really need to do anything more elaborate than installing VLC Media Player. Find the folder containing the show you want to play in File Explorer, right-click, select "play with VLC media player.". Or launch the player and click on Media, then Open Folder . . . same difference.

Then it's just a matter of selecting hardware to connect the laptop to an Aux input in your system.

 

[Moon_Man]

Actually Windows 10 handles FLAC files nicely. SHN files too. It's just not so great a front end interface.

 

[N8Nagel]

I haven't taken the plunge to Windows 10 yet but I wouldn't use Windows Media Player as a front end... if nothing else it is too easy to neglect to change a setting and it'll try to auto-"correct" all your tags, cover art, etc. I have a system that works for me and my files need to be transportable to other players (the built in system in my car, for example) and I've carefully set everything up so all I have to do is batch convert to MP3 and copy to a thumb drive. When I did it the first time I didn't know any better and just used WMP and ripped to mp3 and it was "fine" but if you are reading this I assume that you want all the fidelity that your CDs originally shipped with.

Foobar, JRiver, VLC etc. are probably all preferable.

It is possible to make WMP compatible with FLAC however even the older versions.

 

[beanoil]

I second JRiver, and like the Schiit line of DAC's. You may find a tube DAC such as a Maverick, Aune, or Grant more to your liking. Win 7, 8, 10 works, with 10 rumored to be more audio friendly. You can experiment for free if you have a spare laptop. Linux versions are open source, and a 30 day trial of JRiver is available. I run JRiver on Linux Mint, loaded on a basic ASUS laptop (i3 core, 4 gig ram, 750gig HD) and it has been trouble free and especially nice for entertaining over the holidays. Fire up the "Christmas" genre, and let it play unattended in the background. Or switch to whatever remotely from an Android or Surface tablet. Start your research here...Have Fun!
http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/index.html
http://www.ap-linux.com/
http://www.24bit96.com/usb-computer...ency-realtime-kernel-with-debian-and-mpd.html

 

[Tom Bavis]

If you need a backup drive anyway, you can buy a network drive with a media server pre-installed. WD has Twonky and Plex, depending on model. Other makers have similar products. Play back from any device on the network, wired or WiFi. Minimum play setup would be be Chromecast Audio and an Android or iPhone as remote.

 

[c.coyle]

The simple setup that works for me. I don't need wireless or anything similar:

1. I rip CDs with EAC. I prefer flacs.

1. The flacs go on a PC and outboard USB hard drive, used only as a music server.

2. Foobar on the PC to play the flacs.

3. Cloud storage to sync between home and office PCs. I use Spideroak, which is very similar to Dropbox. This also is my backup.

4. PC output goes to a Schiit Modi DAC. [EDIT: PC USB out to Modi DAC USB in]

5. DAC goes to my integrated amplifier.