by Craig

Still here! Here's what's been going on...

It’s been 119 days since my last post and OH how things have changed!

Firstly I have moved the website to a new web-host (TSOHosting) and I am much happier with both in performance and the features that the new hosting company provide. You may notice a difference in how quickly things load which will save countless seconds in our lives ;) Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I quit my job! Which brought to a close 9 years working for IDOX Group the last 3 of which were as the Head of IT. My reasons for leaving are many but it felt like the right time both professionally and personally. I want to finish off that chapter of my working life with a synopsis of the lessons learned but I might save that for another time.

So since leaving IDOX (4th April) I have had a self imposed period of gardening leave. Most of that time has been spent with personal matters which I don’t wish to discuss here but it’s also prompted a moment of reflection which is never a bad thing. In between the times of watching the rain continuously fall and the country gear itself up for the Olympics I have bought a couple of pieces of tech which I think I should share.

Sonos

Many of us will already have some sort of stereo system either playing physical media (CDs etc) or streamed media from a storage device. I was looking at the rather large collection of CDs in our house and thought I must do something about it. The problem I have had to this point is that there isn’t very good integration between the components of a streaming system to make it easy for anyone to use, in particular people other than me!

The Sonos system (www.sonos.com) is not a cheap option and for many that will put people off from choosing this route and going more bespoke. That’s fine but one of my goals was accessibility for anyone to use which is why I chose it.

The system is made up of individual “Players” which are self contained units which connect wirelessly to a base station (they call it a “bridge”). These players can read a music source such as a network share and play whatever you want or play radio stations from the internet. Control of these units is either done through a dedicated remote or from a free app which you can download to your iphone/ipad etc. They all act independently so you could have different music playing in different rooms or all playing the same thing!

One of the great components of this system is the remote control which can be installed on your phone/tablet from which you can navigate through your music or a radio station and start playing it. There is no messing around with awkward displays or turning other things on (except for storage) you simply play the music you want which is excellent for my other half! :)

dBpoweramp - ripper

The next thing on this list is a piece of software enabling me to “Rip” a music CD such that a digital copy is made on a hard drive of a music CD which I can then play through the Sonos system. The idea here is that you make a share on your PC onto which you “Rip” the CD on your PC. You then point the Sonos system to this share and it reads the share and the CD copy you have just ripped there.  You can then put the CD somewhere else (read the loft for me) and never look at it again!!!

The problem in the past has been the quality of the ripping (read recording) of the CD and not knowing if it has skipped during the recording and only finding out much later when you are listening to it. Fortunately since I last looked at ripping technology it has moved on a bit and thus enter dBpoweramp (www.dbpoweramp.com).

There are only a few features which make this software an absolute must for me; the ability to rip to FLAC files, the online querying of music libraries and the use of hashing for file comparisons/quality. So to go through in a bit more detail:

FLAC files - when you Rip/Copy a CD to your hard drive the PC needs to use an algorithm to build the files onto your machine. As an example of these algorithms Itunes uses AAC and you must have heard of MP3 before! Both of these are compression algorithms that lose some of the information/quality of the song in order to save space. I didn’t want to lose quality so I used File Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) to build my music library on my PC.

Online querying - Extremely useful to ensure that all the songs you are ripping have the right names and that you have the album artwork as a file next to all the songs. If you get all this right then when it plays on the Sonos system the track numbers will appear as well as the album artwork.

Hashing - Possibly the most incomprehensible bit of the system but it is all done automatically for you so it’s no big deal. When you do an online query for an album to bring back the artwork and track numbers dbpoweramp also looks in it’s own online database for the MD5 hash of the file created by the rip. This is essentially a finger print of the file which confirms what size the file should be and, therefore, the quality of it. This is a user produced database where each time someone rips a track it uploads the MD5 hash of the file and you can see how many other people have ripped this track and be confident that, if your MD5 hash matches everyone else’s, your rip is as good as it can be.

Given that I have around 900 albums to rip I found the speed and accuracy of this piece of software absolutely invaluable.

Synology NAS

The next component I needed was a NAS on which to store all these music files. The last thing I wanted was to turn on my PC each time someone wanted to play some music and I also wanted it to be as easy as possible for someone to turn on the music storage and see if the music storage was on.

After some investigation I decided to use a Synology NAS (www.synology.com) based on it’s feature set and some of my own research through friends/colleagues I know who use them.

[]Synology create a number of NAS products but I was particularly interested in the DS212+ which is a SOHO product (Single Office/Home Office) as they can be used for my particular purposes but also allowed me to look at the product for use in other projects.

Of particular interest for all of the Synology products is the DSM management software which the NAS runs. This is a web interface product with a kind of “plug-and-play” approach to software which you typically see with apple products. You download the particular function you want through a “Package Center” and it installs the code on your Synology NAS for you to use immediately.

The features that I was interested in, to name a few of those available, were:

  • virtually silent running (approx 20db)
  • “Cloud station” which allows you to back up one NAS to another (fantastic when you want to have a physically redundant backup)
  • VPN Server - I can connect to it from outside of my home network to access files when i am not at home
  • It being a NAS and serving files!

There is also a very obvious power button on the front which turns it on and off (properly)!

So with that setup my home music system was finished and ready to rock and roll - it sounds pretty good too :)

So with that little exercise I moved onto sorting out the garden as isn’t that what gardening leave is about? Oh and if you were wondering; yes my garden does look really nice now :)