danielbray

My wife is currently incubating a daughter for the new year, which means that my old office at home has to go. In fact, it’s going downstairs; down into a tiny alcove between the toilet and where we keep our fruit and veg. I can live with most of this, but we don’t have the space to store my thousand or so CDs any more.

I know, a thousand CDs… I wasn’t always married, you know.

So. What did I to do? I can’t afford to make the house bigger and I can’t persuade my wife to even consider using the shed out in the back garden as a nursery, so I had to bite the bullet and store them all as MP3’s and listen to them (somehow) over the network.

When I started this, I had a few requirements:

1. I didn’t want to have a computer switched on in order to listen to music.
2. It couldn’t cost an arm and a leg.

That was pretty much it.

I didn’t want to leave a computer on all the time, ’cause I’m pretty tight and don’t fancy the idea of my electricity bill going through the roof, also, even ‘though my wife has a masters in computer science, it’s very much in the “science” end of the spectrum, and so doesn’t know all that much about computers, and I didn’t want her to have to deal with switching on two things just to listen to some music.

I figured that these were pretty reasonable requirements, but they threw up some pretty hefty brick walls, but like Randy Pausch said: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.”

And I didn’t want to spend too much money… really badly.

Eventually, after much searching, I decided upon this setup:

• I store my music on a NAS drive that’s plugged straight into my wireless router.

The benefit of this is that it’s sitting there all the time, and hardly drawing any power at all, unless its being used. I chose the half-terabyte Buffalo LinkStation Live. I could have gone for a simple external hard drive at half the cost, and just plugged it into the media server, but everyone I know who bought an external hard drive, and moved it, had a broken external hard drive in about a year and a half. This is because external hard drives, for reasons i don’t understand, don’t come with fans, and so tend to be a bit brittle.

Also, I didn’t want all of my music sitting on a hot external hard drive within reach of my daughter’s clumsy, sticky hands.

• I stream my music through a media server, that I’m also using as a DVR to store TV.

It’s funny, but every audio-only media server i could find cost an absolute fortune, so I went for a more general media server in the Neuros OSD. It’s open-source, and so it’s a little rough around the edges, but it does everything that I need it to.

There is a slight niggle with it, in that it doesn’t come with a wireless antennae, so, rather than run cat-5 cables all over the house, I got a ethernet-wireless bridge. The first one I got was the god-awful D-Link DWL-G810 802.11g Wireless Bridge, that I won’t bother adding a link for because even ‘though the website said it supported WPA, their support said it didn’t (I got my money back on that one). After that debacle, I went for another Buffalo product: their Wireless Media convertor. It was cheaper than the D-Link, and had the added bonus of working.

• I rip my CDs to a “high enough” quality.

You don’t get to own a thousand CDs without becoming an elitist music snob. I know this about myself, and I wasn’t going to let my snobbery fool me into ripping my CDs in a completely lossless format unless I could actually tell the difference between FLAC and MP3 encoding.

So I did a few experiments: I ripped a few albums in different formats (FLAC, MP3 96K, etc), mixed the songs up so I didn’t know which format was which, and then listened to them all a few times, trying to guess which song was in which format.

Hey, I have a science degree, and this was my first chance to do a double-blind test, so I was going to take it.

Anyway, it seems that I have a good enough ear, but not fantastic, in that I can spot the lower quality MP3 encodings easily enough, but towards the upper end I’m right only about 60-70% of the time, and when I get to 320K VBR and FLAC, I’m right about half the time (i.e. I can’t tell them apart).

The upshot of all of this is that I’m ripping my CDs as 224KBs VBR, (my double-blind test showed that I can’t really tell these apart from FLAC with any real consistency) which means the half-terabyte NAS drive should be big enough to store this all with plenty of room to spare.

• I rip my CDs with a good tool.

I’m using Exact Audio Copy for this. They describe their tool pretty well, but simply put, it gets you a good copy of the music by repeatedly checking sections of music that it thinks “smells” a little, until it thinks it has gotten it right. It’s slower at ripping than your usual tool, but I figured that once my CDs are in the attic they won’t be coming down again, so I want as good a soft copy as I can get.

EAC is quite configurable, but I’ve gone with the flow and am using LAME as my MP3 encoder.

• I’m managing my media with a single, good, tool.

There are so many media tools out there and I just wanted one that was small and light. My PC is four years old now and after years of upgrades it’s starting to show its age, so something like iTunes was going to be way too heavy for my liking.

In the end I let file hippo point me towards media monkey; partly because it’s small and light and fast, and partly because I really like monkeys.

And that’s pretty much it. The Neuros is working like a charm, although I’m running it with a beta firmware, because the latest official one has some niggles I’m not too fond of (I said it was a little rough).

All I need to do now is find a cable splitter so I can pipe the sound from the Neuros through my stereo, since I don’t like having my TV on all day just so I can listen to music (I said I was tight).

Oh yeah, and I need to rip all my CDs. It’s quite interesting to listen to music alphabetically, but I’m only as far as Bach.