Music Server

What *IS* it with people who have so much money they feel they need to spend it on something that costs 30 times as what they need to spend? Antipodes is based upon Fedora 20, the experimenter’s version of Redhat Linux. It is not something that will stay stable and supported for more than 3 years. I realize that a lot of people don’t mind dropping $600 on a cell phone that will be obsolete in 2 years, but Antipodes retails at something like $7500.

And while we’re at it, a Linux server is not some special people of exotic circuitry with magical geometry wiring and platinum plated gold bus bars. It’s a PC. You know. The kind of thing Dell sells for $300.

I run an HP laptop which is at least 7 years old that I paid $150 for a couple of years ago. I swapped in a new 1 TB disk drive ($100), loaded up Ubuntu Linux (free) and installed the free, open source Banshee software. As a music server, Banshee does everything you want in terms of GUI presentation, search, plays all the file formats and even gets you Internet Radio.

Free. So for $250, I got something which does everything your Antipodes box does AND it has a screen too! Not long ago I started working with DSP, so I paid $50 for a JRiver license and have been working with their DSP plug-in. Even Antipodes doesn’t have DSP, does it?

Did you notice that you can buy it for $5000 without a disk drive, or pay $6500 for it to have 1 TB of storage. $7500 gets you 2.3TB! I got my 1TB of storage for $100.

Ultimately all these things do is to deliver a digital file for your DAC to read and process. There are no magic cables or connectors that make any difference whatsoever. None. That’s the beauty of digital data. Either it transfers or it doesn’t. That’s because all data is transferred with error correction protocols.

Y’all are streaming digital data from Tidal and such over thousands of miles, over at least a dozen routers, fibre to copper converters, over cable or DSL, and somehow you expect that digital information to be absolutely 100% correct, but when you’re at the last 10 feet suddenly you need to manage it with a $7500 PC running an experimental version of Linux?!

Clearly I’m in the wrong line of work if y’all are buying this stuff.

The original post was about the $7500 Antipodes server, which is nothing more than the Fedora 20 version of Linux with it’s own music management software. My little $250 Ubuntu Linux server does all the things you want from a music server and does it just fine.

But rbstehno writes:

" Unless you know how to read a muc file and build a gui front end, then you got nothing."

Banshee *does* have a GUI front end and reads all of the music formats. Furthermore Ubuntu Linux has any number of free applications for manipulating sound files. The ffmpeg utility converts media files from almost any format to any other format for free. wav to flac to ogg to mp3, for whatever your requirement is. Banshee is also available, FREE, for Windows and Mac, as well as Linux.

And as I mentioned before JRiver runs on Linux as well. Costs you all of $50. It’s probably the most widely used music manager I’ve seen outside of iTunes or Windows Media Center.

The one thing my little $250 machine doesn’t do is iTunes and so your little rant about iTunes and its poor performance is just another example that rbstehno doesn’t know much of what he’s talking about. Not that it will stop him.

I chose to put everything on a single disk drive. My own music collection is about 600 GB of flac files in size. Ubuntu itself takes up almost no room. So there’s no need for a separate file server, etc. All the data is right there. I have an Ubuntu desktop for my primary machine and nightly everything gets rsync copied off to a backup drive I have there. I have a 3rd small machine on my network with a 3 TB drive on it that everything from my desktop gets rsync copied to, so in my house, I have three full copies of my music library. I also subscribe to an off-site backup service called CrashPlan, so that’s copy #4 of my music library.

Of course there are other choices. Choices are a Good Thing, but ultimately all you’re doing is transferring digital data from one place to another, and that’s something most all computers do equally well. Yes there’s loss of information when you convert from the original raw format to some others like mp3 or such, but there is no loss at all from full rez formats like wav and flac. ANY software app which can work with them will copy them from one device to another equally well.

Clearly where the real differences happen are the place where digital data is converted to analog. That’s why there’s so much weight given in audio circles to the quality of DAC devices. There’s a recent review in Stereophile of a digitally powered loudspeaker from Dynaudio that takes a digital feed directly from your music server, thus eliminating the need for a DAC or preamp. You’re digital right to the very end of the chain, though somehow even here, the reviewer has not reached Audio Nirvana.

My cheesy old laptop, running Ubuntu Linux, delivers the exact same full rez digital data to a DAC that your higher priced boutique servers do.  As for your Toyota vs. Porche comparison, the Porche may well perform better, but it doesn't do any better job of taking you to/from the grocery store, and all these things do is gather and present digital data.  Not much different.

And it’s not that you have to be a Linux guru to do something like this. JRiver on a Windows PC gives you much of the same capabilities. Personally I hate anything from Apple, so you get to keep your iTunes rant to yourself.

Last comment.  Though I'm a total Linux-head, if you're willing to live with a Windows machine, both JRiver ($50) and Banshee (free) run on that platform as well.  And truth be told, Windows Media Player isn't bad either.  If you know enough of how to use a web browser, read this forum and post here, you should be competent enough to set up a laptop with any of these applications.  

Just sayin'...