Much to my wife’s dismay I have an enormous collection of recorded live music, which occupies an entire closet, one my wife wishes she could reclaim. As my collection has gotten larger two issues have come into focus. (1) The continuing change in formats means that a good bit of the collection is always in danger of obsolescence, and (2) it’s cumbersome to locate recordings. I’ve resorted to tagging things with numbers so I can look them up, much like in a library. So the idea of storing music on a hard disk and and simply browsing for it has long held appeal. One challenge is that my collection does not fit the usual itunes paradigm, in that I don’t have songs and playlists. Each concert is an integral whole, and is most easily represented as a directory containing an ordered sequence of flac or shn files. So any solution that is just a bag of songs is useless to me, I need connected series of songs.
Last year I prototyped a solution. I got a popcorn hour A-110, which is basically a network-to-hdmi bridge. It lets you stream video, pictures or audio from a network connection to yours stereo. This lovely device presented the problem of how to get the network to it. The stereo is on a different floor than the wired network, so I would need a wireless network. I put in a dedicated 80211N link to avoid contention with our normal wireless network. Particularly video stresses the network to the maximum. Obviously I can’t stream Blueray this way, but fortunately that’s not one of my requirements. The next question was how to organize and transmit the music. I opted for llink which lets you organize your media in a directory tree, then lets you browse it with via web pages and transmits it via http. This solves a couple of problems. http is by far the fastest protocol to devices like the popcorn hour. The hierarchical presentation is ideal for my kind of collection. For now I simply put the files on my pc.
This first solution worked ok. It did exhibit a number of problems. First of all, for unknown reasons, the popcorn hour often couldn’t see the PC, forcing me to restart the llink service and/or reboot the A-110. Second, it wasn’t real fast, with considerable gaps between songs, which is a problem if the music is continuous. Third, I was running out of disk space. And finally, most critically, I was depending on a single disk drive, which could fail at any time, with no redundancy or obvious provision for backup.
After having studied the matter for a long time, I finally bought a Synology DS-509 NAS. I populated it with 5 1TB Samsung Raid-class drives. I decided on a Raid-6 setup. Raid-6 degrades write performance, but my filesystem is mostly read-only. Conversely, if one disk does fail, the rebuild can take almost 18 hours at this size of file system, and the stress from that rebuild could well push another disk over the edge, so being able to recover from two failed disks is important. So now I have a 3TB of disk space, in a tiny, compact, silent and cool box. LLink installed very easily on it (fortunately you can ssh into the DS-509, it’s just linux).
So far I’m very pleased with this setup. It’s scalable, fast, and reliable. And if I manage to run out of disk space, I can add an expansion cabinet. The web based interface makes it easy to administer. It’s much faster than my old setup, and is always instantly recognized by the A-110. A lot of the quirky behavior I attributed to the A-110 seems to have just been interactions with my Windows PC. The A-110 has been much better behaved since it’s connected the DS-509. Interestingly, when copying files to it, I often wind up using ftp instead of the explorer, because ftp is so much faster.
Next steps are upgrading my wired network to Gigabit ethernet, chiefly by replacing the routers. This will let me stream video more effectively, as right now the wireless links are faster than the wired connections! I’ve ordered an C-200 from popcorn hour, a device which I find fascinating if they can only make it work, but that’s a story for another day.
