Where do you guys get your music?
- Thread starter urquell
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I usually stream music via Sirius or Spotify. But lately my favorite app for streaming is YouTube Music.
Big fan of Plex and Plexamp, i bought the paid version it's like $160 for a lifetime licence.
Plex isn't the best tool for everyone so it depends on what you're looking for but from your previous posts it looks like it could work for you.
Some infos to explain how i got there, hopefully it will help you.
Some years ago i decided to digitalize all my music, so all my CDs are now in FLAC and, as i mentioned, i usually buy new music in the same uncompressed format.
All my music is in a 4 hard drives synology nas, i would strongly recommend having some redundancy (so at least 2 hard drives) cause hard drives all die at some point, sometimes there's a warning, sometimes not
I started with a Sonos setup cause 10 years ago they were kings of the hill and i was using the sonos app
Long story short, Sonos are good at hardware (speakers) and REALLY suck at software (i could say more about sonos but that's not the topic for the moment)
So i moved to plex which is a multimedia app and then to plexamp which is specific for Music
Recently i updated my synology Nas to be able to get the "sonic analysis" feature from plex, basically it analyzes your music library and associate every song/album/artist with other similar sounding song/album/artist based on the real sound not on a theoretical genre association.
The result is sometimes strange and debatable but you can create your own radio based on your own library, so usually songs you enjoy.
It's of course very useful if you have a big library like i do cause you sometimes "forget" older stuff.
As an example, Plexamp will associate Queen's "Radio gaga" with song from artists like Depeche mode (people are people) or Jean-Michel Jarre or even Kraftwerk (as i said it's debatable but interesting)
If you take "hammer to fall" from the same Queen album, it will be associated with AC/DC, Led Zeppelin or the more recent band Rival Sons to give you some example.
So yeah i'm quite convinced with plex.
As i said i'm slowly moving from sonos and i tryy to find software that works with this app as much as i can.
Hope this helps
Big fan of Plex and Plexamp, i bought the paid version it's like $160 for a lifetime licence.
Plex isn't the best tool for everyone so it depends on what you're looking for but from your previous posts it looks like it could work for you.
Some infos to explain how i got there, hopefully it will help you.
Some years ago i decided to digitalize all my music, so all my CDs are now in FLAC and, as i mentioned, i usually buy new music in the same uncompressed format.
All my music is in a 4 hard drives synology nas, i would strongly recommend having some redundancy (so at least 2 hard drives) cause hard drives all die at some point, sometimes there's a warning, sometimes not
I started with a Sonos setup cause 10 years ago they were kings of the hill and i was using the sonos app
Long story short, Sonos are good at hardware (speakers) and REALLY suck at software (i could say more about sonos but that's not the topic for the moment)
So i moved to plex which is a multimedia app and then to plexamp which is specific for Music
Recently i updated my synology Nas to be able to get the "sonic analysis" feature from plex, basically it analyzes your music library and associate every song/album/artist with other similar sounding song/album/artist based on the real sound not on a theoretical genre association.
The result is sometimes strange and debatable but you can create your own radio based on your own library, so usually songs you enjoy.
It's of course very useful if you have a big library like i do cause you sometimes "forget" older stuff.
As an example, Plexamp will associate Queen's "Radio gaga" with song from artists like Depeche mode (people are people) or Jean-Michel Jarre or even Kraftwerk (as i said it's debatable but interesting)
If you take "hammer to fall" from the same Queen album, it will be associated with AC/DC, Led Zeppelin or the more recent band Rival Sons to give you some example.
So yeah i'm quite convinced with plex.
As i said i'm slowly moving from sonos and i tryy to find software that works with this app as much as i can.
Hope this helps
That does help somewhat, although I'm hoping you can clarify a couple of things. I'm assuming that you use plex to categorise stored video media too, but you didn't mention that, so I'm not sure. All of my music is digital as well, although not everything is FLAC, however I use my music primarily through car bluetooth or headphones at home so the music side isn't as important to me as I gave up my sound system years ago. I have about 3000 movies though, in 2-3 different video formats, and my understanding is that Plex will need something to interpret the video formats/codecs etc, as a go between in the middle of the HDD/NAS and the TV. Since I don't really care about the smart features of the TV and am more likely to use a streaming device anyway I was considering using the Nvidia Shield Pro both as a streamer and as an HDD interface for the movies, then use Plex to create the library index in the tv. I was wondering whether that's something similar to what you do, and if so then what the experience has been like for you.
I have to say, if you have a sizeable library then I'm impressed that you've gone to both the time and the expense to either purchase/download/substitute all of your music. I don't like all of my music enough to do that for everything, lol, and I love music. Still trying to wrap my head around Queen, Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk all being "comparable" musical sounds though. As for the backups, I've had both physical and digital backups via HDD of the movies, and 3 different backups for my music, so not to worried there, but am still thinking about NAS (which I don't currently use) since my video collection is sitting at about 14TB of data now. Storage starts to get expensive at that volume of data, which is why I haven't done it to date. Starting to try to learn about shucking to see if that can ease the cost burden a bit. SPs aren't the only things that cost these days!
Let's just say most of it was purchased
and yes it took me about 2 years to rip my CD to FLAC and categorize them. i reached Sonos's number of songs limit which is at 63.000 to give you an idea.I moved from Sonos to Wiim (pretty cool tool) and a couple of active speakers, clearly not an audiophile setup but a very affordable one and enough to listen to music while working.
If you're not familiar with Queen's work and the songs i mentioned it may be a bit obscure yes but Queen is/was a very versatile band and some songs sound like Depeche Mode while others like AC/DC, in the same album. Check the songs i mentioned on spotify and it will be clearer hopefully
I have 4 Nas each with a different purpose but i'm a bit of a nerd (emphasis on "bit"
) and yes storage can be quite expensive i agree.Yes that's a whole different topic, my answer was regarding the music management part of plex but yes it's a media management solution so it can classify and order also movies tv shows or anime collections. As a matter of fact for movies i use Plex classification not my own (as opposed to the music classification which was done manually hence the 2 years work).
Plex used to a bit picky regarding some video sources but, from what i understand, the latest version corrected some of this stuff but i'm not sure. For example i recently tried to read some AVI files with plex and it worked which wasn't the case before.
Anyway i use Roku and the native plex app on my TV (samsung smartTV with and android based interface), why do i use both you'll ask?
Well that's a bit weird, since Roku gives me better results for more recent files while the plex app works better with older files, don't exactly know why but i suspect it's more subtitles related than video, i may be wrong.
A lot of people seem to recommend Nvidia shield, i never tried it but it seems to be a good option and it would basically works the same way than what i do with roku or the plex app:
-HDD/NAS to store files
-Plex server to manage library and classify data, there's a notion of categories and collections in Plex, very useful.
-Playback can be done with the plex app if you have a smart tv or nvidia/roku.
In my case Roku wasn't absolutely necessary but it's not super expensive, it's a must have if you don't have a recent tv or if it's not "smart".
There are alternatives to plex but for the time being it works well for me and there are a lot of updates so i don't feel the need to change.
Let's just say most of it was purchased
I moved from Sonos to Wiim (pretty cool tool) and a couple of active speakers, clearly not an audiophile setup but a very affordable one and enough to listen to music while working.
That's a lot of tunes. I should be raiding your music inventory instead of looking for good online sources! lol. It is time consuming, for sure. Took me a couple of years to digitize the movies too. I still have to convert older formats to MP4s if I want to watch on tablets or phones.
I've been using an old Boxee Box to do the same thing, as I've been using a 1080p dumb tv, but it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade. I don't really care about smart features for the most part, since I'm less likely to use the tv UI for some stuff anyway, but the picture quality....
Do you know if there's a data limit to what can be processed by PLEX? I know there's a metadata limit tied to the internal memory of the passthrough vehicle (Nvidia in this case) , but not sure about external memory connected to the tv. Or to the Nvidia for that matter.
it is a large library and there are issues that come with that, mostly you tend to listen to the same things, plex helped me rediscover some stuff i forgot i have.
I don't think there's a limit to the number of medias and there shouldn't be in fact, there's one in sonos because it was originally badly conceived.
I have about 3000+ movies on Plex and no issues yet.
i have no idea if there's a limit to file sizes that can pe streamed to be honest, i've never tried to play a 60GB bluray rip for example but i would think the issue would most likely be with the playback device, the server or the wifi, probably not plex itself.
i often buy movies that i know i'm going to watch several times in 4k discs (Dune, Alien, Lord of the rings....)
do you mean the number of files or size of said files?
I don't think there's a limit to the number of medias and there shouldn't be in fact, there's one in sonos because it was originally badly conceived.
I have about 3000+ movies on Plex and no issues yet.
i have no idea if there's a limit to file sizes that can pe streamed to be honest, i've never tried to play a 60GB bluray rip for example but i would think the issue would most likely be with the playback device, the server or the wifi, probably not plex itself.
i often buy movies that i know i'm going to watch several times in 4k discs (Dune, Alien, Lord of the rings....)
I meant the overall data volume. Not sure if there will be a bottleneck through either Nvidia or Plex. If you have that volume of movies and there's no issue then it shouldn't be a problem as far as Plex goes. In the Nvidia it will auto generate metadata for your movie collection for display purposes (artwork, reviews, etc) but you're limited to the internal memory which I think is 16GB. I'm not sure if that can be reconfigured so that the HDD works as the server for metadata or not, otherwise with large libraries of movies like you and I have it may tap out at a certain level. Some tech won't process memory over a certain amount, as you know, so if I'm using a single 14TB or 16TB currently I want to make sure there will be passthrough. For something so widely used it's uncommonly difficult to find useful info on the subject.
mp3-daddy. They don't always have true FLAC or AIFF but most of the time they are solid. no account needed, just search > pass the stupid captcha and if they are not down > download away.
Otherwise, soulseek but it's a weird p2p way to get music. You need to seed before people let you download. If you are not an audiophile or you don't need lossless grade audio files, yt-dlp is the way to go.
On a side note, invest in a cheap/decent (depending on your setup and budget) DAC or LDAC can go a long way to improve your listening experience.
Otherwise, soulseek but it's a weird p2p way to get music. You need to seed before people let you download. If you are not an audiophile or you don't need lossless grade audio files, yt-dlp is the way to go.
On a side note, invest in a cheap/decent (depending on your setup and budget) DAC or LDAC can go a long way to improve your listening experience.
You would need a HDD or multiple to run the NAS. A NAS is simply a computer/server that allows you to store media, or any file for that matter. You would still need a storage media to hold your file. Plexamp is actually excellent as it's able to decode/transcode FLAC (lossless compression) or AIFF (uncompressed) media files. I actually have a Synology and Unraid NAS running at home and the Plexamp app has been excellent for me, compared to other music client. When you compare the listening experience to Youtube Music, where the audio has been compressed to oblivion, you can actually hear the difference, especially with less speakers.
As far as NAS hardware/OS goes, Synology is the Apple of the NAS world where everything just works out of the box but their hardware selection can be left to be desired. You don't actually need to buy a dedicated NAS server, you can easily repurpose an old computer as your NAS. Just make sure that your streaming server, whether it be DS Audio (Synology/Xpenology), Ampache, Subsonic/Navidrome, Jellyfin (very underrated free and open source alternative to Plex) can transcode your audio files when needed.
To be honest i wouldn't know. My NAS acts as a server as @wiinston17 explained right above so it manages the whole library and as long as i don't reach the limit of data that can be handled by the server there's no issue. As i mentioned i don't have an Nvidia shield so i'm not exactly sure how it works so i don't know if there are specific limitations.
As my esteemed colleague
mentioned above you can build your server yourself, i did that in the years 2000 with windows server and it was a pain in the ass. It's probably easier now.A synology is most likely more expensive than building one but i'm buying peace of mind, never had any problems with those except failing hard drives but that always happens. I updated my nas recently to be able to better handle 4k files and also the "sonic analysis" feature.
To give you an example I have a DS423+, and it can handle up to 80TB and yes it is expensive. (around $700 on newegg)
Wiinston also mentioned Jellyfin (that was the name i was looking for), never tried it but i also read good thing about it, i wouldn't recommend DS audio (Synology audio streaming solution) cause it's not very good frankly. Don't know if i mentioned it but plex server is free also, i did buy the lifetime pass to have additional features but you can try it anyway.
Anyway my recommendation would be to either build or buy a NAS instead of several hard drives, the data management will be on the server side. My 2 cents.
Driving I use Apple Music. Home I put on a record or CD. The sound quality of streaming is seriously abysmal. If I put on music while cleaning doing laundry or vaccuming I will stream though.
Can you elaborate on your current/desired setup? Is your NVIDIA shield the regular (cigar holder) or pro (console) version? Are you plugging the HDD through an external caddy via USB? What is the brand of the HDD and is the external hard drive enclosure using USB 3.x?
There is generally no hard limit on the size of the hard disk, or amount of media. The bottleneck stems from your hardware and network capabilities. USB is known to be inconsistent as way too many uses devices/data, uses those bus/lanes which can cause interference with the metadata generation, playback and streaming.
The good thing with the NVIDIA Shield is that it can transcode (as a client) so your server (the computer hosting/holding the media files whether it be video or audio) doesn't need to do the heavy lifting. If you elect to use the Shield as a server, this is where you might run into issue if you need it to transcode.
If we take a step back, when streaming, the server has two functions, either it serves the files as direct play or it requires transcoding. Direct play is for example streaming a 1080p movie to a 4k TV. Since the 4k can just play the file, there is no need to transcode (other than subtitles). If on the other hand, you want to play a 2160p (4k) movie to a 1080p TV, transcoding is needed because the TV is incapable of playing such file natively.
The transcoding process requires computational power, either through the CPU or GPU to decode and then re-encode (i.e. transcode) the file to a suitable format, this is where a suitable server, whether it be a NAS, Shield (using arm cpu which is meh) comes into play. Because the NVIDIA shield doesn't have direct I/O access to the drives, but has to use USB, this is where you can run into all kinds of weird, inconsistent, and slow/laggy/buffering issues because it's not able to keep up as quickly as the movie is being played.
That's why when it comes to transcoding, any Intel CPU chip with QuickSync Video (QSV) capabilities is king, adding that to Plex which is very optimized for QSV will result smooth playback. All of this doesn't account for your network environment. Wifi, LAN port speed (1Gbe, 2.5Gbe or 10Gbe), remote vs. local.
So long story short, you need to decide whether you want your Shield to be a server or a client, the quality of your external enclosure, your network limitations and what kind about media your wish to stream. If you have 1080p files playing on 4k TVs, everything should use direct play and result in minimal buffering time.
Ahhhh... so those things I was using as Frisbee discs are actually music records? oups... TIL
Baiscally, I'm looking at the new setup now. My intention is to pick up an LG C3 as a tv, and a Nvidia Shield Pro as a streaming interface and as an interpreter for the HDD. The HDD is a WD MyBook 14TB with USB 3.0. The majority of the movies are older formats like AVI and MP4, and not 4K. The main reason for that is that many of the movies are older titles that are difficult or impossible to find in a downloadable/streaming format. I have been adding less new titles because they are available from the Cinema APK that I use. Likewise because they are older titles and because I'm investing less time in adding new ones now I'm disinclined to invest a great deal more in storage. I have everything backup up separately in 7X2TB HDDs but I consolidated to save space and to have a single storage entity that I won't have to switch out. I also still have physical DVDs, so while cumbersome I am backed up already without having to resort to creating parallel saves through a NAS, with its consequent investment. So, long story short, I'm investing much less time in keeping my own versions of new movies, but want access to the old ones when I modernise along with whatever new titles I add. I need something with the ability to read AVIs, hence the proposed setup. I know about the metadata limits, but not whether I can sidestep those. Not super important as long as I can see titles, which I should be able to regardless. Would rather use a streamer than native tv apps. Plex sounds like a good solution for library organization but a lot of people seem to like Kodi as well. My issue is that I can find lots of stuff about people like this or that but not many people talk about why they like this or that, or what the hardware limitations are, if any. Naturally, I'm turning to the sex starved heathens rather than the techies because presumably they have better communications skills. lol.
Kodi is great to manage your library, but it doesn't transcode (transcoding is needed when you cannot play the file as is, such as having subtitles, changing the audio, changing the resolution or bitrate). Many folks will have Kodi serve as a frontend while having Plex/Jellyfin/Emby serve as the backend. But based on your use case, it seems like you might not need any of this other than an old laptop with a HDMI port or a relatively budget mini pc. You can go with the Shield as your client, it's not really the optimal hardware solution for your needs.Baiscally, I'm looking at the new setup now. My intention is to pick up an LG C3 as a tv, and a Nvidia Shield Pro as a streaming interface and as an interpreter for the HDD. The HDD is a WD MyBook 14TB with USB 3.0. The majority of the movies are older formats like AVI and MP4, and not 4K. The main reason for that is that many of the movies are older titles that are difficult or impossible to find in a downloadable/streaming format. I have been adding less new titles because they are available from the Cinema APK that I use. Likewise because they are older titles and because I'm investing less time in adding new ones now I'm disinclined to invest a great deal more in storage. I have everything backup up separately in 7X2TB HDDs but I consolidated to save space and to have a single storage entity that I won't have to switch out. I also still have physical DVDs, so while cumbersome I am backed up already without having to resort to creating parallel saves through a NAS, with its consequent investment. So, long story short, I'm investing much less time in keeping my own versions of new movies, but want access to the old ones when I modernise along with whatever new titles I add. I need something with the ability to read AVIs, hence the proposed setup. I know about the metadata limits, but not whether I can sidestep those. Not super important as long as I can see titles, which I should be able to regardless. Would rather use a streamer than native tv apps. Plex sounds like a good solution for library organization but a lot of people seem to like Kodi as well. My issue is that I can find lots of stuff about people like this or that but not many people talk about why they like this or that, or what the hardware limitations are, if any. Naturally, I'm turning to the sex starved heathens rather than the techies because presumably they have better communications skills. lol.
Is the LG TV the only display device you will be watching your movies from? No other wireless network devices like another TV elsewhere in the house, phone or tablet? If so, you can:
- Plug your HDD directly to the TV to see if the files will play (depends on the codec, how the drive is formatted, the region of the file and other things that will bore you to death)
- If you have a laptop, let the laptop handle the playback when needed by plugging it to the TV and the WD HDD to the laptop
- Host a Plex/Jellyfin server app on your desktop and cast it to your TV either through LG (not sure if they support this), Chromecast /Roku (compatible with iOS)/Apple TV/NVIDIA Shield device whichever floats your ecosystem. You can fire up the app only when needed and will allow you to play your movie on other smart devices or through a casting medium.
Personally, I'd invest in a budget mini-pc or find a relatively cheap laptop to server as the playback device which can also serve a dual purpose such as browsing the web to go on OF or pornhub loll.
Not looking to use anything other than the tv as a playback device. The HDD is FAT32 and the movies are all NTSC. Not looking to use a laptop (only keep a chromebook now and not looking to use it for this purpose) and I do use a PC and chromecast but I find the PC less than ideal to use for playback controls. Have used mini keyboards etc and again not super impressed with the UI. Don't know anything at all about jellyfin though. Will have a look at it.
The initial capital outlay for getting a nas up and running is insane. That's why I'm running Unraid on my F4-424 pro because you can have different HDD sizes as long as the parity drive is the largest of the bunch (similar to Synology's SHR). Once I get all 4x16TB, I'm moving to truenas scale but the migration is gonna be a pain to do. Btw, while you can run 4x20TB, you won't have any redundancy and if you set up Synology in RAID0 and the data is striped (where the data is scattered across all disk as opposed to filling one up entirely before moving on to the next), you might end up with a catastropic scenario where you can lose all your data just because one drive decided that it has reached the end of its road. So in actuality, the DS423+ can hold 60TB with 1 drive parity (1 drives goes down without data loss) and 40TB with 2 drive parity (2 drives goes down without data loss). If your data is valuable (like my 22TB of porn hoarding over 17 years), you should always set up at least one disk for parity.
yes the 80TB is the total size but if you haved redundancy it will be less than that.
and having redundancy is the number one reason to have a NAS.
that being said i have 10TB available, i use 70% of it and i have close to 100.000 songs so i'm very far from the limit
and having redundancy is the number one reason to have a NAS.
that being said i have 10TB available, i use 70% of it and i have close to 100.000 songs so i'm very far from the limit
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