Affordable way to store & play my music?

[Tony Starks]

I have hundreds of CDs in the loft, but never really get to listen to them, I listen to some of the albums on Spotify but hate how they randomly add their own stuff to lists.

Would I be able to put all my music on A HDD and then plug that into my Marantz 7013? Or do I need to have some sort of music server/converter?

[Rowe]

bang them on a usb stick and do this: http://manuals.marantz.com/SR7013/NA/EN/GFNFSYgxpq...

[tomsugden]

Pay £9.99 / month to Apple music and listen to whatever you want, wherever you are, whenever you want.

[Tony Starks]

tomsugden said:

Pay £9.99 / month to Apple music and listen to whatever you want, wherever you are, whenever you want.

Because I begrudge paying monthly for things I use a little bit. Especially when I've already paid for the music.

[take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey]

Tony Starks said:

tomsugden said:

Pay £9.99 / month to Apple music and listen to whatever you want, wherever you are, whenever you want.

Because I begrudge paying monthly for things I use a little bit. Especially when I've already paid for the music.

Amazon music - it's part of the basic amazon package.

I went through the effort of digitizing all my CDs. Took forever, cost me a few hundred quid in HDs. Then you get into faffing with streamers etc.

It's worth the few quid a month for the simplicity... And I'm a tight arse Yorkshire man.

[The_Doc]

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:

Amazon music - it's part of the basic amazon package.

I went through the effort of digitizing all my CDs. Took forever, cost me a few hundred quid in HDs. Then you get into faffing with streamers etc.

It's worth the few quid a month for the simplicity... And I'm a tight arse Yorkshire man.

I've started exploring Amazon Music (basic) and it really is quite terrible. I see why it's 'free' with Prime. The range of songs is very poor. I think it caters for a bit of pop and charts, but it's very patchy. No streaming music service has ever contained all the music I own on CD, they all have gaps. I think it's just a marketing tool for Amazon Music Unlimited. Which is obviously more money (and another endless direct debit) on top of Prime.

For the OP, rip all your CDs to mp3 format, it won't take long, and then buy a cheap Synology NAS.
You get to keep and use all the music you've already bought. You can also use the NAS to send videos to your household, and back-up your home computers and photos to it too.


You could also upload your entire music collection (of mp3s, once that's done) to Google Play Music, which accepts all your files and stores them for free. Even the obscure Irish Folk music album you bought in 1983. There is a thought that Google Play Music will be rolled into Youtube Music in the coming months/years, whereupon your personal library might disappear, but I think they will keep it and just rename the service.

If you get into this streaming business (over physical products) , pretty soon you've got Direct Debits for Netflix, Prime, Spotify, Sky, Office365, and every month you are at least £50 down - for ever! AND..... you are beholden to a good data signal/wifi connection. I live in the countryside with a sometimes crappy home broadband and 3G signal, when there is one. When I go fishing there is no signal, so no streaming anything. I take my Sony CD player(!) and plug it (!) with a cable (!) into a JBL speaker.

Edited by The_Doc on Saturday 18th April 08:47

Edited by The_Doc on Saturday 18th April 08:49

[legzr1]

As mentioned, rip to FLAC and store on cheap SD or HDD.

Do NOT rip to MP3 - what you lose you will never get back.

If you go down the Synology NAS route, rip to FLAC then set it up to convert and stream on the fly as MP3 when away from home to keep bandwidth down.

[anonymous-user]

If you are going to rip to mp3 make sure you bounce it to 320, anything less will sound crap. People will say don't go to mp3, but if you do it properly, and I mean properly using a DAW then its very hard to tell the difference between 320 mp3 and wav

[The_Doc]

In my opinion FLAC is so overrated. 320mp3 produces a file that is so much more versatile. Anything will play it, it's a great takeanywhere solution
If you put your music into FLAC, it will take up x6 the size and you will be stuck for things to play it.

And the cheap/budget NAS drives have underpowered chips which will struggle and glitch on convert-on-the-fly for FLAC


Yes it's better quality...

Edited by The_Doc on Saturday 18th April 13:05

[legzr1]

Ripping a sizeable cd collection is one of the most tedious things I have ever encountered.

I took advice and ripped losslessly. You might be fine with MP3 lossy sound quality but equally you might upgrade your equipment in the future and you will kick yourself for not ripping to a lossless format at an earlier date.

Maybe 15 years ago MP3 made more sense but nowadays? I’m not so sure. Storage is relative pennies and just about any media player, AV amp, streamer/DAC and app on a phone will happily play FLAC files. It’s free, open source and well supported.

I’ve just bought a 5tb USB drive for less than £100. When MP3 was in its prime that would have got maybe three 30Mb cards.

As for a NAS struggling with file conversion on the fly - it takes a negligible amount of processing to go from FLAC to MP3 for streaming away from home. It’s a tiny use of resources compared to video transcoding (which even a base model Synology or QNAP can manage).

However, if that worries you simply use a ripper such as DBpoweramp (around £12 for the licenced version) and set it to rip to FLAC and MP3 at the same time - set it up to move FLAC to a folder named ‘Quality’, MP3 to ‘that will have to do’ - when away from home, stream from the second folder - no transcoding required

[The_Doc]

Bingo!

[Tony Starks]

Cheers guys, streaming is OK but it does soon add up and like others I have stuff I just can't find streaming.

I found an old HDD that had some music and worked well, the only annoying thing is the Marantz only has a front USB port. Other than looking ugly, I also have young kids who sometimes struggle to see anything past their noses.

Would a USB to HDMI connector allow the same control and playback or does it need the USB to work?

[peterperkins]

Open up the marantz and solder a usb cable onto the back of the front port, then stuff you HD inside it somewhere.

[shopper150]

One thing to note, I listen to some very obscure stuff. I've had a couple of instances where the track suddenly becomes unavailable (permanently) on Apple Music.