Best setup for ~3TB of wav files on hard drive

[KEW]

I have a 4Tb external drive which is roughly 3/4 full and am wondering about what the best approach is to have the ready ability to playback and manage these files with reasonable efficiency.
Should I use an older PC I have for this function? Or are there better options?
Thanks!

 

[panteragstk]

Well, lots of options, but my recommendation would need to know if you are planning multi room or just one location.

What type of files? Do you care about cover art? Lyrics? Remote access?

 

[Trell]

A 4 Gb external drive of the spinning rust type? Must be quite old to be that small, but you probably meant to write 4 Tb.

Some home routers have the feature that you can connect an external USB drive so that the router can serve the files. Might be an option for you if the router can handle that large a drive, assuming 4 Tb.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I was thinking the same thing that @Trell mentioned... 4TB RIGHT?

That said, what you really want to do is determine how and where you want file playback. The top couple of threads here are about Kodi & Plex which offer audio playback functionality. In my case, I use Plex. You just load Plex onto an old PC, then connect the hard drive and point Plex at the hard drive. Give it an hour or two to dig through all the file names and you will have access to all of your music from that PC or from any Plex client. A Plex client is a program that you can load onto any number of devices you already may own including a Smart TV, Roku, AppleTV, your phone, or your tablet (etc.). So, you can play those files anywhere you choose.

But, what you want to think about and discuss is what it is you want to do with that music and how you would like to use it and where you would like to listen to it.

 

[rojo]

Compress them to FLAC, add metadata with MusicBrainz Picard, then serve them over DLNA with MinimServer (more info). You can also serve your music with Plex Server simultaneously if you wish. The two should play well together without interfering with each other.

Re: media player, I wish I knew of one that would allow loose browsing of a local library similar to how MinimServer organizes the breadcrumb trail for a UPnP / DLNA client. For lack of anything better, most of the time if I take a notion I want to listen to something I just launch what I want in MPC-HC from a cmd console window. It's quicker for me to type with tab completion than to point and double-click. Kodi will let you browse by album, by artist, by song title, by filename, and various other ways, and that's the media player I choose when I'm controlling my PC with my Harmony remote. I wouldn't be opposed to something more clever though.

 

[KEW]

Yes, you are right, 4TB (I edited title and OP). My mind still hasn't got wrapped around the whole TB thing (my first hard drive was 2 or maybe 20? MB for my Amiga computer!).
I'm actually hesitating to respond because I am not sure exactly how I will use it. I need some pondering time on that.
One thing I definitely need is a convenient way to cull a song I listen to and don't want in the mix.
I'm thinking it would be good to be able to shuffle-play classical one day, Rock another, and mix all genres together on another day depending on my mood.
But, honestly, other than some time with iTunes I am clueless!
Is there a good approach for a simplistic orientation before locking in on a final approach?

 

[BMXTRIX]

So, I'm not huge on playing music in my home through Plex yet, but I've played with it some.

From your phone, you can control any playback device in your home, like the PC that's running Plex and connected to your stereo system. So, you tell your phone to control the PC (this way it doesn't play back on your phone, but through your good speakers), then you sort by genre (80's) then you select 'shuffle all', and there you go.

I think that Kodi may offer something similar, but I'm not well versed on what Kodi offers for playback. It may be possible for you to load Kodi and Plex and see what you get out of them with your current file library.

None of this is command line prompts on a PC. You just load Plex, tell it where your music is, then you can run it from a window with point and click, or you can use your phone as the remote to run it, or you can access it using a client like Roku, FireStick, or similar.

But, really, you want to determine how you want to listen to your music. The when and where matters, then the how can be more easily identified.

I will say that I have NO idea what MusicBrainz Picard is, so there is stuff that I can't speak to at all. Certainly putting things in FLAC format isn't a bad way to do things as I think it adds metadata which matters.

 

[panteragstk]

I will say that I have NO idea what MusicBrainz Picard is, so there is stuff that I can't speak to at all. Certainly putting things in FLAC format isn't a bad way to do things as I think it adds metadata which matters.

It's a tagging app that grabs correct metadata for music. I've used different versions of it throughout the years and it works well, but I'm not sure it's what @KEW is looking for. It may be part of the equation though.

 

[BMXTRIX]

It's a tagging app that grabs correct metadata for music. I've used different versions of it throughout the years and it works well, but I'm not sure it's what @KEW is looking for. It may be part of the equation though.

Well, that seems like a topic of its own to me. Because, I really need something like that which will go through my stuff and get it properly tagged with metadata. I can't imagine how long it would take to do everything. It's a blessing and a curse that everything started getting sorted with metadata, but it meant my hundreds (thousands?) of songs which had bad metadata ended up all over the place.

 

[KEW]

Cover art would be nice, but certainly not a neccessity!
If I understand metadata, I assume it is like a way to populate the fields of a database to allow more versatility in sorting the files? That would be pretty useful! Especially when i am looking for a specific arrangement of a classic jazz song (but I don't know that it would include arranger).

Compress them to FLAC, add metadata with MusicBrainz Picard, then serve them over DLNA with MinimServer (more info). You can also serve your music with Plex Server simultaneously if you wish. The two should play well together without interfering with each other.

What would it take to compress to FLAC? Is it something that I could automate for 3TB of music? Or would I need to batch it in lots?
Same questions for running Musicbrainz Picard! Is there a fee?

 

[rojo]

I found a free music manager app called MusicBee that seems pretty clever. I was looking for a free alternative to JRiver and MediaMonkey Gold (both $50).

MusicBee will auto fetch album art and artist bio (I guess from Wikipedia?),and indexes all your songs in a database for instant search results. It lets you group your music by "Genre Category" -- handy if your ID3 tags are as buggered as mine where some songs may be tagged "Drum & Bass" and others "Drum n Bass" or similar, and sorting merely by Genre gives you hundreds of orphaned singles with quirky genre tags.

The shuffle control includes an "Auto DJ" feature. I have no clue what this does differently from Shuffle though. Randomly inserts the Cha Cha Slide for no reason? *shrug*

Cover art would be nice, but certainly not a neccessity!
If I understand metadata, I assume it is like a way to populate the fields of a database to allow more versatility in sorting the files? That would be pretty useful! Especially when i am looking for a specific arrangement of a classic jazz song (but I don't know that it would include arranger).

What would it take to compress to FLAC? Is it something that I could automate for 3TB of music? Or would I need to batch it in lots?

Same questions for running Musicbrainz Picard! Is there a fee?

You could do it in batch with ffmpeg. Google for zeranoe ffmpeg and it should be pretty easy to find a pre-built executable. Save / extract ffmpeg.exe to the root of the directory containing all your wav files, then execute it as follows.

From a cmd console:

cd /d drive:\path\to\wavs
for /r %I in (*.wav) do (ffmpeg -y -i "%~I" -map_metadata 0 "%~dpnI.flac" && del "%~I")

From a PowerShell console:

cd drive:\path\to\wavs
gci -recurse *.wav | %{
    ffmpeg -y -i $_ -map_metadata 0 ($_ -replace "\.wav$", ".flac")
    if ($?) { rm $_ }
}

MusicBrainz Picard, you just have to screw with it and see. You can generally drag entire hierarchies of music files into Picard, then right-click and choose "lookup". Some will succeed, and others will fail. The ones that fail, try right-clicking and choosing "scan", which takes a little longer but offers maybe a higher success rate or something? In any case, Picard is completely free.

 

[KEW]

I found a free music manager app called MusicBee that seems pretty clever. I was looking for a free alternative to JRiver and MediaMonkey Gold (both $50).

MusicBee will auto fetch album art and artist bio (I guess from Wikipedia?),and indexes all your songs in a database for instant search results. It lets you group your music by "Genre Category" -- handy if your ID3 tags are as buggered as mine where some songs may be tagged "Drum & Bass" and others "Drum n Bass" or similar, and sorting merely by Genre gives you hundreds of orphaned singles with quirky genre tags.

$50 as a one-time fee is not a problem. I am more wary of a "service" with a monthly fee!
So would your recommend one over the other among Jriver, Media Monkey, or Musicbee.
I figure I'll get enough use out of it over the next years that $50 would easily pay for itself if the app worked better in any way! But if they are equals, then I'll save the $50!

 

[panteragstk]

FWIW jriver is excellent. I've used it in the past and it does pretty much everything, but never got the market penetration Plex has. Kodi is probably second (which is interesting). There's always good ole foobar2000, but I've never used it for anything other than dvda playback.

 

[rojo]

$50 as a one-time fee is not a problem. I am more wary of a "service" with a monthly fee!
So would your recommend one over the other among Jriver, Media Monkey, or Musicbee.
I figure I'll get enough use out of it over the next years that $50 would easily pay for itself if the app worked better in any way! But if they are equals, then I'll save the $50!

I couldn't say, as I haven't tried JRiver or MediaMonkey. I don't know enough to compare and contrast them. You could install all 3 and see what you like best, though. JRiver offers a 30 day trial, and MediaMonkey is freemium -- meaning a basic version with missing functionality is available for free without trial time restrictions. I've seen others besides @panteragstk who really dig JRiver, so they must be doing something right.

 

[KEW]

FWIW jriver is excellent. I've used it in the past and it does pretty much everything, but never got the market penetration Plex has. Kodi is probably second (which is interesting). There's always good ole foobar2000, but I've never used it for anything other than dvda playback.

I'm too lazy and don't want to suffer the learning curve of all three before reaching a level of competence to evaluate them properly.
I am willing to settle for excellent!
Jriver it is!

 

[sholling]

What I'm using for my 2TB+ of FLACs is a QNAP TS-451+ NAS with 4x3TB Western Digital Red drives in RAID5. That's backed up to a PC, to a portable drive, and to an online backup service. With that setup I can listen to my music and watch classic Loony Tunes videos from any room in the house via Plex.

 

[sholling]

What would it take to compress to FLAC? Is it something that I could automate for 3TB of music? Or would I need to batch it in lots?
Same questions for running Musicbrainz Picard! Is there a fee?

That's reasonably easy with the paid version of dBpoweramp CD ripper's bundled Batch Converter. It does take a bit of planning but once you decide where you want the FLACs and how you want them filed (e.g. D:\FLAC\Artist\Album\Song) you're good to go and can kick of a multi TB batch job. You just need room for the new files. I usually make MP3s as well for my portables when I finish ripping CDs to FLACs so I've done this multiple times over the years. Note that with 3TB on an external drive you're probably looking at a very long batch job, probably days.

 

[Spinningbull]

As you start looking at things like jriver, etc... you should at least play with plex and roon.

Plex is great for all around media, excels at video, but audio is catching up.

For the ultimate music experience, I like roon the best. Maximizes audio quality, can manage playback across multiple endpoints (like plex), and has a great ui for discovery, playback, etc...

Both plex and roon will handle all of the metadata collection, correction, etc - will download cover art, liner notes, reviews, etc, and will play custom 'radio' based on your collection, genre, mood etc.

My setup has a synology nas to store media (movies, music, photos) - I'm up to 52tb now, but I also have about 350 movies and a lot of them are 4k - music is 'only' 6tb right now, and a PC to host the roon and plex servers. I can playback media to streamers (shield, ATV, firetv) or dedicated music endpoints built with raspberry pi and hifi dacs.

Fantastic quality, simple to use. I even have the server setup so sticking a disc in the drive auto-rips the content and stores it on the nas.

The great thing about a media server like roon and plex is, as you add drives it will continue to organize your content, and present a simple navigation, no matter how many places you out content.

Sent from my SM-T837V using Tapatalk

 

[little wing]

I'm too lazy and don't want to suffer the learning curve of all three before reaching a level of competence to evaluate them properly.
I am willing to settle for excellent!
Jriver it is!

I use JRiver as well. Have used it for about a year and a half now. How do you like it?

 

[Bucknekked]

As you start looking at things like jriver, etc... you should at least play with plex and roon.

Plex is great for all around media, excels at video, but audio is catching up.

Both plex and roon will handle all of the metadata collection, correction, etc - will download cover art, liner notes, reviews, etc, and will play custom 'radio' based on your collection, genre, mood etc.

My setup has a synology nas to store media (movies, music, photos) -

Sent from my SM-T837V using Tapatalk

Spinningbull
I too have a Synology NAS unit where I put all my music files. I am experimenting with leaving iTunes and looking for a music manager with a future (iTunes being at end of life). So I also loaded Plex since it will run native on the NAS and cover all my in home devices and players. Plex runs everywhere.

Your comments on Plex handing meta data on music couldn't be further from my experience this week. The Plex pass promises "music fingerprinting" where they sample the tunes and provide the metadata based on an internet database. My experience with Plex and movies has been without incident: it all works and the metadata is handled well. My experience with music and tagging has been nothing short of awful with Plex.

I wish I could say "here's the problem.......", but, there's so many problems with Plex and music tags that it would be hard to say. It manages to get nearly everything wrong (with ID3 tags) and does it in a pattern I have yet to discern.

I would be interested in the experiences with Plex and music tagging of others. The forums for Plex are repleat with people saying pretty terrible things about the same topic. Not much in the way of fixes coming out from Plex. Anybody else tried this with Plex? Am I barking up the wrong tree for music on Plex?