Mark.KirstenAndMark.com

This was originally posted in response to a post on MetaFilter titled “Oh dear, its the audio media server question again!“

I love music. Over the years, I’ve collected around 1600 CDs. The following is a brief look into how I’m currently managing all that music.

I built my own NAS with an old Motherboard/CPU/RAM/Boot Drive that I had laying around (I bought a new case and 5 250GB hard drives which I’m running in RAID-5 for about a Terabyte of usable space) – it’s on all the time, but it’s headless and sits in the back of a closet – I do all management of the box remotely.

Openfiler is my NAS software of choice. It makes management of the server pretty painless (aside from having to build software on a separate VM on my main machine as the install is very stripped down and doesn’t include a compiler).

SqueezeCenter runs on the same box and feeds audio to my Squeezebox (though if I were buying now, I’d go with the Squeezebox Duet – it’s cheaper to add additional units and the remote/controller is much nicer). Not only does this allow me to listen to music in my living room (via 802.11G), away from the PC (which is in a closet in another room), but also remotely using Softsqueeze (a Java emulation of the Squeezebox hardware, which is included with SqueezeCenter).

As for how I got there, I ripped my (now 1600) CD collection into FLAC format on my PC using EAC. Altogether, my lossless (FLAC) rips take up about 560GB. It took me about a year (there were a few periods of a month or two at a time that went by with out me ripping a CD and other times I was ripping several dozen a day). It was painful, but now that it’s done, I’m glad I saved the $1500 or so that it would have cost me to have someone else do it (your time/$ threshold may be different from mine, in which case you may want to investigate a CD ripping service).

Regardless of your decision to DIY or have a company do it for you, I would STRONGLY suggest that you rip to a lossless format, and would suggest that you go with one that’s open source (so that you can easily transcode to a different format – one of the key reasons for using a lossless format). While you may not be able to hear the difference between a high bit-rate and the original, you won’t want to re-rip if you need the files in a different format and you won’t want to transcode from one lossy format to another – you probably will be able to hear artifacts if you do that.

Once you have your music ripped in a lossless format, make sure that you back it up. Keep in mind that RAID isn’t backup – if something goes horribly wrong with your controller or your PSU spikes and takes out a few drives, you’re back to square one and will have to re-rip (which again, is a long or costly undertaking). I have a couple of external drives that I have the data on my NAS backed up onto.

As happy as I am with my solution, I’m still not finished. My primary pain point at the moment is that I don’t have an easy way to get MP3s from my FLACs. My current solution is to use foobar2000 and transcode as needed. This is somewhat clunky as it involves me booting up my PC and involves some manual work selecting what I want, moving files around, etc. I’ve looked into MP3FS, but because of the way that I ripped my CDs (1 FLAC per CD, with a CUE sheet to denote the track positions and hold the meta-data), I can’t get an MP3 per track (which is normally what I want) without manual intervention. I’ll probably end up extending MP3FS myself or just re-encoding my FLAC files to be one file per track.

I would consider just going through and transcoding everything and keeping the files around on my drive, but I’m already running out of space. As it is, I need to move to bigger drives. As it is, I have less than 40GB free – not nearly enough room to store 1600 CDs worth of content in decent bitrate MP3s. There’s also the problem of ongoing maintenance when I rip new CDs. I’d rather just rip to one format and have the system transcode on the fly. I’ve got some more ideas on that, but I’ll save them for another post.

I love The Daily Show. It’s one of a very few shows that I missed when I went from having cable TV to not having it (when Kirsten and I got married we decided that we didn’t need it). So I was thrilled when iTunes started offering it on a subscription basis. The $10 a month was well worth it, and significantly cheaper than paying $40 a month for a bunch of channels I don’t care about. At first things were great – I could sometimes even download episodes before they aired here on the west coast.

However, things quickly fell apart. Sometimes new episodes wouldn’t show up until around noon the next day, sometimes it was several days later. Complaints to Apple didn’t really change anything. I’m not sure if it was their problem or if they just weren’t being delivered the content in a timely fashion. Either way, it was annoying, but still the best option for our cable tv free household.

8 months ago, they started showing episodes on their site, but the experience was pretty bad. The episodes were broken up into clips that had to be watched individually, and the full show wasn’t even available (the toss to Colbert at the end of the show, for example). I was willing to deal with ads, but I was not interested in hunt and peck piecemeal gathering of pieces of a logical unit.

Recently The Daily Show was added to Hulu. It’s ad supported, but the ads are short, the video quality is great, whole episodes are available (in one piece), and most importantly, the previous night’s shows are always available when I wake up in the morning. Game over. iTunes loses. After trying Hulu for a few days (to make sure the timelyness of the content going up wasn’t a fluke), I canceled my iTunes multi-pass.

(and yes, I understanding the irony of writing about timely content after a 2 month absence of what was meant to be a weekly blog)

Just a few posts in and already I’m slacking by not posting every week. Things have been pretty busy the past few weeks at work, but I’ve definitely had time in the evenings to post, especially over the past few days. Kirsten and Britton are up in Utah visiting family and I’ve been getting home early.

However, where I’ve really been slacking is in making music. It’s been years since I really played around with sound (it’s even been a few years since I touched my DJ equipment). That makes me sad. To remedy this, I picked up a USB-MIDI cable today. I brought it straight home, hooked it up to my keyboard and laptop, noodled around in GarageBand and came up with this:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s not much, but at least it’s something. It feels really good to be playing around with music again. Eventually I’ll need to incorporate my Korg N364 and Novation Bass Station into the mix as actual sound sources, but at least I’m making music again.

In case you didn’t see the post already, we’ve got our hands full with our new arrival, so this week will be brief. You may find something interesting in the Adobe Developer Week sessions (March 24 – March 28). I’ve registered for the following 4 sessions:

• Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3

• Building AIR Applications with Flash CS3

• Dreamweaver: Effective Standards-based Workflows for Ajax

• The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

I just finished watching the Mix08 Keynote with Steve Ballmer and was thinking about how IE8 will affect my web development workflow. The short answer is that it won’t significantly, but I hope the effects will be dramatic. I’ll still start building the site with TextMate and get it working in Firefox (along with the amazing Firebug) on my Mac. I’ll probably still look at the page in Safari and maybe Opera, but honestly, if it works in Firefox, it’s probably going to be just fine in both. At this point in the process, I should be about 90% done, but then I have to make things work in IE (which is where the second 90% gets added on). First, I’ll test in the version of IE I have installed on my windows machine (IE7), then test in IE8 in a virtual machine (currently I check in IE6 in a virtual machine).

The only thing different will be that I’m testing in IE8 instead of IE6 and will hopefully have a lot fewer CSS hacks and/or conditional comments in my finished product (because when IE8 ships, I’m cutting off IE6 – immediately for personal projects, and hopefully no more than a few months later at my day job). If the “Emulate IE7″ feature in IE8 works perfectly, I’ll also upgrade my (non VM) IE install to IE8 and will be able to eliminate the VM step. Assuming IE8 is really as standards compliant as it’s supposed to be, that little switch could mean cutting out that second 90% of the time it takes to make a cross-browser site. I can’t see the developer tools they’re introducing taking over what Firebug does anytime soon (though I’d love to see their tools get that good), so I don’t really see IE becoming my first-pass browser. Also, since there won’t be a Mac version, I won’t be able to run it natively in my OS of choice.

I will say that I am excited that MS seems to finally be making intelligent decisions when it comes to the web. The recent announcement that IE8 will behave like IE8 by default and their commintment to web standards are huge leaps for them. I’m hopeful that momentum continues. I’d love to stop spending half of my front-end development effort on a broken browser.

I’ve been building websites professionally since 1997, but until now I haven’t had a blog of my own. I did make a site for Kirsten and myself, but she’s done almost all of the writing there (and done a great job). I probably should write there more often, but a lot of the stuff I find myself wanting to write about wouldn’t really fit with our audience over there. So, here it is. To start, I’ve placed my recently played songs (from my last.fm profile) and my Twitter updates in the sidebar. I’ll probably be adding more such content in the future (in addition to my posts). If I don’t post here around once a week – poke me and remind me to say something.