Music Storage?

[garthhudson]

Hi all! Longtime lurker of the forum, but still a n00b.

Question pertains to storing music.

I am running out of music on my laptop (at something like 200 GB now). I kind of want to get something which I can use to store all of that and much more so that I don't have to keep purchasing external HDs; the goal is to have ALL of my music, maybe 2 TB worth of music (!) in ONE place.

I don't know how much I want to start dealing with media servers or NAS for now. Someone recommended I think of getting a media player but I'm not sure if that would work as it seems TV oriented.

Basically I want a magic box that has an ungodly amount of music on it that I can hook up to something with some sort of interface (a'la iTunes), make playlists, do shuffle etc. Oh and also hook it up to speakers or with headphones. DOES SUCH A MAGIC BOX EXIST?

Yes, I am an idiot. Thank you!

 

[Adam]

Welcome! Well, welcome to the world of posting.

If the right people see this, you should get some real good info. There's a number of knowledgeable people here on this topic.

After reading your description (especially the mention of iTunes and 2 TB), an Apple Time Capsule came to mind. I don't know if that's any different than a NAS, but I know that people use them as music servers. They come in 2 and 3 TB versions, and I'm pretty sure that you can connect an external hard drive to them for even more storage.

Another product that popped into my head was a Popcorn Hour. That's a media server, though, so maybe not what you want. A member here, Warpdrv, posted two of them for sale last month. He might be able to give you some good info on them, and I know that others here have used them.

 

[bikemig]

vortexbox

You could try vortexbox, http://vortexbox.org/about/.

 

[sholling]

2TB is a heck of a lot of music, very roughly 4000-5000 albums in a compressed lossloss format like FLAC. There are lots of ways to reach your goal but the important thing is backups. It really sucks when you lose a year's worth of work because a hard drive dies. The cheap and simple solution is a small 2 drive Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with 2 mirrored drives. My first NAS was a DLink DNS-321. They're slow but plenty fast enough for music and will accept up to two 2TB HDs in RAID1 (mirrored). That way if one drive dies the other still has a copy of your music. You can then access your NAS across your home network and play any of your music. I'd still keep one more copy on an external drive though - just in case a power surge fries the NAS. The DNS-321 can even be setup to email you when one of its drives fails.

Higher end solutions exist but will cost you more. Another way to do it is with a media player with its own hard drive (internal or external) and then some sort of backup solution.

 

[rhead1123]

As long as you have a desktop computer at home, could always just hook up a 2 TB hard drive to it and store your music on there, then access it via your network.

Far from ideal situation, but it should work.