Greetings all,
I have recently converted all my music and have it loaded on an external hard drive (15k-20k songs).
Is there a way to play music on the TV/home stereo (WiFi on TV and Bose stereo with Bose Soundtouch), cell phones (even when cell phones are away from home), and each computer in the house?
I am trying to understand iTunes/Amazon/Google etc. but not sure if any of this allows for music on multiple devices. Also, if there is a platform, is it only .mp3 or can it be lossless formats?
Basically I am wanting a way for the hard drive to be an old cd changer that holds hundreds of discs, able to select songs and albums....maybe even shuffle songs and play them on any device/main stereo in the house as well as have that music on the go with the cell phones.
Thank you for your time and guidance.
You are raising a lot of different issues. Some as to file format and container, others as to storage protocol, networking and best practices. And yet others as to how to serve the data to your clients. But don't fret, you are not the first one confronting this. I have been running my own digital library off of HDD for over 15 years now. In 2001, I started ripping my entire library of CDs to HDD, and have never looked back. I now have over 70,000 audio tracks on HDD. All of it is accessible from every computer, every mobile device, every TV and every stereo. And a number of portable wireless players as well. I think that is what you are talking about.
First off, the data. If you have not already, you are going to be putting a lot of time into creating, tagging, organizing and managing your media data. Perhaps thousands of hours. One head crash on a single HDD, and it could all disappear. No matter which form you have ripped or converted your files into, they should be kept in some fault-tolerant fashion, with adequate back up in case a mistake happens. A single HDD is asking for disaster. Ideally, your working data should be on a RAID array of some form. While RAID10 is best, many people can get by with RAID5 even today. Whether you elect to set up a software or hardware array is up to you. I keep our working digital media (what is accessed and managed) in a HW RAID enclosure connected to our server machine by Thunderbolt link. You may not need to go to that length, but you absolutely need to keep your data in a fault-tolerant storage medium.
As far as backup, you can keep a local backup, an off-site (cloud) backup, or both. I do both, with a networked NAS for backup of the working data, and a cloud service off the server machine. In the event of a local loss, I can recover locally in a few hours. And if the house burns down, I can get replacement drives delivered to me overnight if I need them. Think about a backup in the event you accidentally erase or corrupt a media file on your working drive. It happens all the time.
Next is how the data is going to be physically accessed by your clients. With multiple client types, the best way is through a home network. Because your data needs to be served to these clients, you will need to tether the data to a networked machine that is capable of running one of the primary server platforms or services in use today, or be network-accessible to a machine that can run such server applications and services. That is either a NAS or a machine that you would designate as your server machine. Many NASes are capable of running many of the major music server applications. Most all freestanding home computer systems are as well. The data does not need to be on the machine directly, but it needs to at least be accessible to that machine. I tend to prefer a freestanding machine over a NAS if only because the former tends to have much more computing power and will not bog down with a larger library as often.
Next is selection of a server application platform or platforms or corollary application services, to access and manage the data and serve it to your clients. The primary ones are iTunes, DLNA, and some third-party music server apps, such as Roon and Logitech Media Server (LMS) (which is built for Squeezeboxes, but works with Chromecast clients). There are others. You can run multiple server applications accessing the same data! So if you are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, you can target your library into iTunes, and also set up a DLNA service for other non-Apple clients. Just be sure to not let iTunes or any other application make so many changes to the files and directories that it becomes difficult for the other server applications. By example, portions of my audio library are simultaneously accessed by both iTunes and LMS. I do NOT allow iTunes to "manage my library".
While some of your clients can be connected via Wi-Fi, always keep your server machine and the data on a wired ethernet connection to your network. The latter may be asked to serve multiple streams to multiple clients simultaneously, and a gigabit ethernet link will provide the necessary bandwidth to do that. A Wi-Fi connection, even if AC, may not.
Next comes the container and format of your data so that it is compatible with your server applications, clients, and at the quality level you want. That can become a bit of a juggling act. For instance, while many clients are fine playing FLAC files, iTunes and Apple clients are generally not. And while iTunes and Apple clients love Apple Lossless, many other non-Apple clients do not. You need to keep your files in a container format that each client can read and decode. Sometimes, you may need to create duplicate files in separate directories to accommodate the inconsistencies. For instance, many Apple mobile clients cannot handle 24-bit audio, but your other home clients may, and you may want to listen on both. As a default, nearly everything can play MP3 today, but that is a lossy low-fidelity format, IMO. WAV is another fairly universal format, and is what I have always ripped my CDs into beginning in 2001 - uncompressed 44.1/16 WAV. At that time, there were tagging and storage limitations, and a 250GB HDD was considered enormous. I did it anyway, because I remembered when a 20MB HDD was enormous. In 2019, there is no storage or streaming issue with uncompressed WAV, but it still does have limited tagging options. SO you may still want to make duplicates in an Apple or other format. But bear in mind that the best music server applications today do not require tags as much anymore, and can readily locate track, artist and other information online solely from the song titles. We did not enjoy that luxury in 2002. And for HD audio, always pick a format that will not exceed the wireless bandwidth of your clients. A lossless compressed one. For instance, do not stream 192/24 bit audio in a fully uncompressed format, as it will nearly saturate any client on a legacy G band. I usually keep my HD audio masters in FLAC, and will convert a copy to 44/16 Apple Lossless for Apple clients.
How you tag your files is up to you. If you elect to use a container format that is good for tagging, you can add all sorts of information and graphics to each file. With WAV, if you toss a jpeg of the album cover in the same folder named as "folder", some server programs will apply it to the entire album. Other more powerful programs such as Roon will find everything for you as it indexes your library.
For each server application or service, you then need to direct the applicable clients to them. It is relatively easy for Apple clients with iTunes and for the clients that are native to some third-party apps. DLNA is an open standard, and many clients not bound by their own proprietary server architecture will use that. I like LMS because I have Squeezeboxes everywhere, and it also serves my Chromecast clients well. But many new clients are 'Room-Ready' and are easy to interface into that ecosystem.
The general rule of thumb is one server per client. Otherwise with some clients, each server application may may settings changes, and network mayhem will result.
If you have dissimilar clients and multiple server applications and services, it is probably a good idea to have a powerful audio transcoding application, for conversions between formats on an ongoing basis. I recommend DB Poweramp, which has excellent flexibility and fast conversion with plenty of options into most common containers at varying bit and sample rates. It also includes an excellent ripping program. Other excellent CD ripping programs are Exact Audio Copy (PC) and XLD (Mac). XLD also has some conversion capability.
That's a long initial guide on how to do this, in addition to the others that I'm sure are available here. Hope it helps.