NAS as an audio and video juke box

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NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by Hermit » Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:01 pm

Gawdzilla Sama wrote:
Hermit wrote:You might also want to invest in an external backup drive. The two terabyte Western Digital offering costs about 150 dollars in Australia. Other brands have similar products, but I stick with this one because it's the only one whose hard disks have never failed me (yet).
I just bought a 3T naked from Amazon for $139USD.
I've been looking at NAS devices in the past few months. The aim is to create a juke box for all my CDs and DVDs. There are close to 1000. A Synology DS1812+ box with the requisite number of Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB disks would provide 16 (probably weasel) terabites of storage, mirrored. It'll also set me back 2300 Australian dollars and a lot of hours decrypting and transferring all those digits. Also, none of this is particularly useful without a database with which particular titles can be searched for, and I don't really know a lot about databases, particularly relational ones.

I hope Bella becomes adventurous and retrieves the HDD and info thereon from her dead laptop herself. Apart from saving a significant amount of money, it'll give her the satisfaction of having learnt and achieved something new.

Split from "Computer go boom" thread:

http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42615
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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by klr » Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:30 pm

Hermit wrote:
Gawdzilla Sama wrote:
Hermit wrote:You might also want to invest in an external backup drive. The two terabyte Western Digital offering costs about 150 dollars in Australia. Other brands have similar products, but I stick with this one because it's the only one whose hard disks have never failed me (yet).
I just bought a 3T naked from Amazon for $139USD.
I've been looking at NAS devices in the past few months. The aim is to create a juke box for all my CDs and DVDs. There are close to 1000. A Synology DS1812+ box with the requisite number of Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB disks would provide 16 (probably weasel) terabites of storage, mirrored. It'll also set me back 2300 Australian dollars and a lot of hours decrypting and transferring all those digits. Also, none of this is particularly useful without a database with which particular titles can be searched for, and I don't really know a lot about databases, particularly relational ones.

I hope Bella becomes adventurous and retrieves the HDD and info thereon from her dead laptop herself. Apart from saving a significant amount of money, it'll give her the satisfaction of having learnt and achieved something new.
That should be taken care of as you rip the CDs, assuming you are connected to the internet as you do it. Most CDs can be identified via an on-line database - freedb.org is the most-used. You just configure whatever software is doing the ripping to look that up for each CD. There'll still be the odd issue with unrecognised CDs, or (more often), multiple entries for some CDs. All the information will be stored in tags in each MP3 track (or whatever), and there are plenty of programs for managing that information.
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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by Hermit » Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:48 pm

klr wrote:
Hermit wrote:none of this is particularly useful without a database with which particular titles can be searched for, and I don't really know a lot about databases, particularly relational ones.
That should be taken care of as you rip the CDs, assuming you are connected to the internet as you do it. Most CDs can be identified via an on-line database - freedb.org is the most-used. You just configure whatever software is doing the ripping to look that up for each CD. There'll still be the odd issue with unrecognised CDs, or (more often), multiple entries for some CDs. All the information will be stored in tags in each MP3 track (or whatever), and there are plenty of programs for managing that information.
Thanks for the link, klr. In addition to being able to search by title, I'd also like to be able to search by composer, performer, director, actor, year of publication and content (the latter being retrievable from a field containing tag words and / or synopses). And being able to bookmark particular highlights within a piece would be nice too.

Also, I don't intend to compress the music files into mp3 format, nor the video ones into divx or whatever. Straight copy for the sake of my ears and eyes.

Looks like I have quite a bit of learning to do.
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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by Jason » Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:54 pm

Amarok will update the ID3 tags so long as your track titles are correct.

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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by klr » Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:57 pm

Hermit wrote:
klr wrote:
Hermit wrote:none of this is particularly useful without a database with which particular titles can be searched for, and I don't really know a lot about databases, particularly relational ones.
That should be taken care of as you rip the CDs, assuming you are connected to the internet as you do it. Most CDs can be identified via an on-line database - freedb.org is the most-used. You just configure whatever software is doing the ripping to look that up for each CD. There'll still be the odd issue with unrecognised CDs, or (more often), multiple entries for some CDs. All the information will be stored in tags in each MP3 track (or whatever), and there are plenty of programs for managing that information.
Thanks for the link, klr. In addition to being able to search by title, I'd also like to be able to search by composer, performer, director, actor, year of publication and content (the latter being retrievable from a field containing tag words and / or synopses). And being able to bookmark particular highlights within a piece would be nice too.

Looks like I have quite a bit of learning to do.
Start a separate thread for this if you want - there's probably a lot of detail to go through.

What gets stored for a given CD or even track depends on whoever submitted the information. Certainly for classical works you would expect to see many/all of the above ID3 tags populated, but it's variable. For popular works, only the "basic" tags such as artist, album, track title, etc. are usually populated. Of course there's nothing stopping you entering or updating track information yourself for any local files you create.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3
Făkünamę wrote:Amarok will update the ID3 tags so long as your track titles are correct.
Amarok probably holds its own database of information which is built from whatever is in the tags for all tracks it has scanned. Most other music management programs (e.g., Media Monkey) work the same way. Ultimately though, it's the tags in the tracks themselves that are the most important information, because everything else is derived from them. That can include things like automatically generated file and folder names - e.g., artist\album\track_number - track_name.mp3
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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by Jason » Sun Mar 31, 2013 11:05 pm

Amarok uses online databases to update ID3 tags, but it can do neat stuff like reorganizing your music files in folders by genre/artist/album.

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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by pErvinalia » Mon Apr 01, 2013 1:19 am

@Hermit.... you don't need a relational database program to manage your music collection. There's tonnes of software out there that is specifically made to manage music collections. And plenty of good stuff is free too. I'm not familiar with any good ones, as music is the last frontier for me and digitisation and data management. I'm only just starting to get serious about digital music collections in the last few months or so.
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Re: Computer go BOOM!

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Mon Apr 01, 2013 11:36 am

I want a program that will find a tune based on a snippet of lyrics.

FIND: "And the line of cars ..."

FOUND: Radar Love. Search again?
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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by piscator » Thu May 14, 2015 5:33 am

It's called the internet.

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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by Hermit » Thu May 14, 2015 5:52 am

Update: My NAS project is on hold. I quit my job in February last year and have not found a new job since. Not many people are keen to employ people my age, especially not as truck drivers, and I have no other job experience to include in my CV. My last employer said during the interview: "We don't normally even look at people your age." That was about three years ago.
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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by pErvinalia » Thu May 14, 2015 11:48 am

Become a professional poker player. That's what I'm going to do when my photography career fails.
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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by piscator » Thu May 14, 2015 12:09 pm

Hermit wrote:Update: My NAS project is on hold. I quit my job in February last year and have not found a new job since. Not many people are keen to employ people my age, especially not as truck drivers, and I have no other job experience to include in my CV. My last employer said during the interview: "We don't normally even look at people your age." That was about three years ago.

Come to the States. American trucking companies recruit in prisons here.

Of course, you're probably too old to learn how to drive on the right side of the road. And couldn't get a visa anyway. Too ugly. :coffee:

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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by pErvinalia » Thu May 14, 2015 12:23 pm

He's also a Marxist. :coffee:
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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by Hermit » Thu May 14, 2015 12:32 pm

piscator wrote:Come to the States. American trucking companies recruit in prisons here.

Of course, you're probably too old to learn how to drive on the right side of the road. And couldn't get a visa anyway. Too ugly. :coffee:
Correct on both counts, but seriously for really, really reals now, were I given the choice to live in Somalia, North Korea, Iraq or the USA, I'd volunteer to live in Mawson's hut for the rest of my life.
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Re: NAS as an audio and video juke box

Post by piscator » Thu May 14, 2015 12:35 pm

The NAS would be easy. i3 with 16gb of ECC RAM and 4x4tb WD Reds would give you almost 12tb storage and could serve up 2x4k movies simultaneously across a gigE LAN to two different hosts without a stutter. Your little home router would probably shit the bed before your mITX NAS did.
Get OmniOS, then download NappIT. Gunther, the main guy behind NappIT, is German, and is fantastic. He has a support thread on Hardforum and IRC, and I've never seen him stumped.

1. Have a decent home network.
2. From any host on the LAN, point a browser at NappIT and make a Windows Share of your media library from NappIT with a couple mouse clicks.
3. From another host (like your HTPC), open the Share containing what you want to watch, or listen to, and double-click to activate your default media player for that file type. Crank it up and jam out on your new air guitar.
Last edited by piscator on Thu May 14, 2015 12:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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