Let’s start at the beginning. What’s a home server? A home server is a computer that is used to store all your personal media such as music, photographs, video, TV recordings and documents. It may also run applications to stream that media around your home, delivering your music to different rooms, photographs to your television and more.
Home servers come in different shapes and sizes. For example, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a simple home server that primarily stores media, while a fully blown server can also be built from scratch using operating systems such as Windows Home Server, Linux or Mac OS X.
What are the advantages of storing media, and particularly music, on a home server?
1) Cheaper. Rather than having a desktop computer powered on 24/7, serving your media a home server typically consumes far fewer watts.
2) Capacious. Home servers make it easy to add new storage so you can store more music of a higher quality.
3) Safer. Most NAS servers allow online backup.
4) More flexible. You can access your media from anywhere in the home: computers, televisions, hi-fis and more.
What about the ‘cloud’?
It’s worth discussing the advantages of storing music and media online, in the ‘cloud’, as it has become known. Services such as Spotify and Grooveshark allow you to stream music, and Amazon and Google are now offering services to upload your media and store it on their servers rather than your own.
The advantages of this approach are that you save time in setting up and maintaining your own home server. The disadvantages are that, being online, if you lose your Internet connection you will lose access to your music. This could be frustrating if you are hosting a party at the time! Furthermore, there are certain constraints to storing music in the cloud: practical ones such as file size, which constrains sound quality (lossless music sounds better than lossy) and also the lack of control you have over your music collection. Maybe you want to recategorise your music within certain genres, for instance.
Ploughing The Home Server Furrow
So let’s say you’ve decided a home server is for you, perhaps for some of the reasons above. Now let’s concentrate on music. Your first priority is to grant access to the music for your music players around your home. Subsequently, building and maintaining a music collection is an ongoing process. At some point you will want to change how your music is organised. For instance, you may want to update album art to higher resolution versions or you may want to re-categorise the genres for your albums.
Article comments
1 - letraitplat
Very interesting article.
I might miss a point but you seem to talk about rule based organisers / taggers but I can't find any beside Bliss... Which is mainly aimed at Album Art.
Would you mind pointing out some windows software that allows this kind of automatic tagging ?
Thanks :)
2 - Dan Gravell
@letraitplat, thanks for your comment. bliss is the only one that really concentrates on rule based organisation as it's "raison d'etre", as it were. It focuses on album art now, but new other features are coming.
However, you can use other taggers in a rule based way, because many allow you to perform bulk rule/pattern based changes to your music collection. Check out, for instance, batch tagging in MP3Tag. The trouble is that this still involves you remembering what the batch tagging operations were, and remembering to run them every so often, or when you add music.
3 - letraitplat
Dan, thanks for your answer, i'll be sure to check out mp3tag too.
The main issue with Bliss until now is how it manages its fixes counter.
I downloaded the trial and pointed a portion of my music (just to be sure as to how it would perform and to avoid destroying my hard work of tagging :) )
And the fixes number started melting even though there were only so few albums to browse : I guess that's because an album might need numerous fixes. To be fair I expected it to need 1 fix per album, may it be a cover only fix, or cover / name / etc fix. So I didn't have a real opportunity to test it.
You might want to consider another way to give a trial preview of your software to interested buyers ;) Just my opinion.
Thanks again
4 - letraitplat
Oh and BTW, Dan, not trying to diss out the work you've done on Bliss : it seems REALLY promising... Just trying to give unbiased customer feedback (all in awkward english, what can you expect from French people ? :) )
Once Bliss is able to fix an unlimited number of times (I have to buy an unlimited fixes package to do so) + music recognition (I read on your blog you were looking for partners to do so) it might become the ultimate server-related music solution :)
5 - Dan Gravell
@letraitplat thanks very much for your feedback! Yeah, it's one fix per album, for each aspect fixed (cover art, file/folder naming etc).