Music Server format?

Hey @awoof,

You’re asking good questions and you have good timing. You’ll find plenty of choices in your price range. Take your time. I suggest focussing on getting familiar with building your library by starting to rip some cds using your existing PC. There’s plenty of free software that will give you the basic tools you need for ripping, orgainizing, and playback. I suggest the iTunes download from Apple as a start. If you set up the format to lossless, you can move these files to the server, once you get one.

Here’s a good resource to start learning some basics:.

http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/

There’s a lot of good info and wisdom on the computeraudiophile.com forum but finding it and sifting through a ton of opinions can be overwhelming at first. It is a great forum so I suggest you become familiar with it.

Ripping is a chore so you will want to avoid having to do it more than once to your collection. ( I am on my second pass. Ugh).

I use a MacMini with a 2TB USB harddrive to hold my 2500 albums or so. I started with iTunes for listening but now I use Roon. I still manage my library using iTunes, XLD, and TagEditor. I rip to AIFF because I am not concerned with storage size and the format is as universal as any I know. Back that library up!

You will enjoy finding the forgotten gems in your library as you rip. I have plenty of "What was I thinking when I bought this?" albums in my collection. But there’s many more that I find and wonder how I could have forgotten how much I liked them.

Good luck.

Thanks. Seems daunting. I did check into computersudiophile but hard to sift.
trying to move to full music file and avoid MP3/MP4 formats or anything that compresses original recorded music.
Like you say, don't want to do process over and over.
So hard to find expertise locally. Relying on on line forum help from those that learned as they go.

thank you again for taking time to reply.

Use Exact Audio copy to rip your CDs to individual tracks. Each song will be a track. EAC is free and will make a bit perfect rip. Verify your rip with the Accurip database to make sure it is error free. Rip your CDs to either wav or Flac. I prefer Flac, They are still lossless but take up less space. Also you can use tags. Since Flac is lossless you can always convert back to wav if you wanted. It is important to get things right the first time. You don’t want to end up ripping twice.

I like to use QuickSFV to make a sfv file. SFV is simple file verification. A track can become corrupt on occasion. It is nice to have a way to check the rip for errors.

Another handy free program is cuetools. You can use cuetools to verify rips in accurip, convert files from one format to another and a lot more.

Back up your rips! If a drive fails and it will, you don’t want to re-rip your CDs. I have copies of all my music files on both my server and another drive.

Good luck. Ripping is a lot of work but it is worth it in the end.

Thanks for the ideas!
What is this software Roon I keep hearing about? Not familiar at all.

awooof

By the way, you can build your own linux music server (minus DAC) for around $650 for a 2TB system.  Using Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite you can get iPad/Android support as well.

I use it with a DSD capable DAC and play PCM and DSD just fine. Here's my instructions if you want to roll up your sleeves:

http://inatinear.blogspot.com/2016/08/ubuntu-mytek-brooklyn-dsd-setup-guide.html