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By LRW
#372893
Hey guys, I know we have a lot of very clever IT based people on these forums (special mention goes to RC).

I'm wanting to finally drag myself out of the 20th century and get rid of all my 600+ CDs and put everything onto a central storage and then wirelessly stream out using a few Sonos speakers.

I've not actually invested in any hardware yet, just trying to plan the system. Started doing some research, and to be honest there is so much info out there I don't know where to begin. At first I was going to just wipe an old laptop and use that for my storage but its only 350Gb, so I don't think it's big enough. So I might keep that just for initial downloading (remote downloading while at work) / burning and then transfer to some sort of NAS storage. But then I get totally lost.

So any of you guys got any decent set ups at home that you want to share for my inspiration ......?

:) thanks in advance......
#372936
Honestly, the delivery mechanism is up to you. you can go through a large variety of route to get the music streamed to the speakers.

The MASSIVE undertaking is getting the 600 or so CD collection ripped. It's going to be time consuming and laborious. I did my pain a few years ago when I invested in the iTunes library. Spent many a weekend importing everything. I ripped all of it at a high sampling rate ≥ 256 kbps. Normally 320 MP3 so that you're not just creating a library tied to Apple's AAC default sampling.

Unless you listen to every song on a CD, don't bother ripping it, it's just going to sit there and take up space, and if you don't listen to it anyway... if you do that, then 350GB should be plenty. But come on, with the price of storage, why skimp. Word of advice however. Once you got through the ripping process, the work hours spent will become very valuable to you so don't just keep the database on one drive. I've got mine backed up in three different places and back up at least one copy every month as I add new music.
#372954
In addition to WB's points (especially finding a good backup solution):

1) the storage space you need slightly depends on the quality at which you rip the CDs. But even at the highest "lossless" quality, a standard 1TB drive will be more than enough for 600 CDs. For this reason, I would recommend future-proofing your collection and rip everything in a lossless format (FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc) from the beginning. This way you won't ever have to re-rip any CD's since that's the biggest pain in the bottom, like WB mentioned.

2) If you want to do the ripping in the most efficient way possible, invest in a full-sized desktop CD drive to rip the CDs. A full-sized drive will more than halve the time it takes to rip your CDs. Any old cheap one will do - you can probably even harvest one from old desktops relatives or friends may have, or if you need to use a laptop, you can get an external drive.

3) As for the software you use, that's really up to you. I'm personally an apple person, so I just use iTunes for all music management. I stream music to apple TV's, iPhones, and iPads. It's all available to me whenever I want with relatively little management on my part. But if you're a windows/android person you may opt for something different.
#372980
I have a pc sat in the shoe cupboard that is running constantly that is cat5 connected to my router. The pc stores all the data for me. I use ps3 media server on it. So I can view anything and listen to everything in my ps3, android phone, laptops, android tablet.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 4
#374558
I have a WD myNET N900 router which has two USB ports onboard to connect hard disks, it has the ability to file share and act as a DLNA server to stream music to multiple devices. In my setup I have a 2TB external WD hard disk, which holds all my movies ISO, music, 256kbps mp3 and general files, and I have room to expand to a further 4TB with the second USB port on the router. This works brilliantly for streaming to laptops, my PS3 and Android devices.

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