I guess I should put in a plug for the way I decided to do things. In my situation, I'm serving music up for both home (SlimServer) and portable (iPod/iTunes) applications. What I did was to get a NAS (in this case, a ReadyNAS) to hold a very large and growing music library. Because the NAS is highly and easily expandable, independent of any workstation/OS/applications I run, can be backed up separately, and can be used for other functions (e.g., file storage/backups from my workstations, print server, etc.), it made sense to focus the functions of storage on an entity separate from the other computers.
I use the NAS to hold my FLAC files (800GB and growing). I rip CDs from a Windows workstation simultaneously to FLAC and to M4A AAC stored on the workstation (I find the latter the best sounding compressed format, at least to my ears) and backed up to the NAS (which is in turn backed up to other media stored offsite). I run a Ubuntu-based Slimserver (incredibly stable) as a headless box controlled via the NoMachines NX client/server (free version). My Ubuntu box is overengineered for Slim, but it was pretty cheap to put together given how inexpensive the major components are, and it's almost silent (I keep it in a closet nonetheless). I like the idea of componentization, so that Slim, music ripping/iTunes, and storage all run independently, which makes it simple to make changes to one part of the system without impacting the others. I could go to another music management system (so long as it supports FLAC -- although even then I could transcode to WAV, etc.) without screwing up my laboriously ripped source files, or change my Windows workstation without Slimserver noticing anything different. So it works for me. -- Balthazar_B ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Balthazar_B's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7366 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38519 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
