Replacing CD Collection
Replacing CD Collection
An aquantance of mine has a CD collection and wants to rip it. They don't want to stream it over a server but rather store it, say, on a hard drive connected directly to their speakers/receiver.
While they **don't want to stream ** it wirelessly to/from their phone, they do want to control selection/playback.
Kind of like a remote controlled jukebox or, well, a really big CD player.
I am thinking there's probably some raspberry pi project to play on-device music library that has a remote control library plug-in over LAN. I'd also like there to be a backup option, like a Pi GUI so they could see their library on the TV.
I'm envisioning an interface similar to the retro game players or kodi.
Does this exist?
Don't bother ripping. Just buy a 300 cd changer
Thought you were taking the piss. Turns out they're real things.
They loiter in thrift stores.
I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn't worth it.
Cathode ray dude did a great video on this the 90s were a magical time. There's also a dvd version iirc
As someone else has said, whether they're playing from the device or not it's a server.
With that said, I'm a fan of Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite (the player part).
Install both on a pi or something, add a HDD (I bought a usb plug and power cable for £15 on Amazon) and then rip and transfer it to the HDD.
Then you can play it through any old speakers you connect. If you use a pi you can get a hat for it that will make audio quality good.
There's even an app for it called Squeezer on F-droid which allows control from your phone.
It's old but it works, use the Material Theme to make it look nice.
Bonus is that you can install Squeezelite on a bunch more Pis and dot them around the house and play the same library on those at a later date
To add to this, there's even the capacity to add usb dacs if the underlying distribution supports it. Picoreplayer was my introduction to these tools and I'm pretty sure it's my final destination. Can't recommend it enough if they have the time and curiosity to get it set up.
I would also add that if the person OP is asking on behalf of is not so inclined to get into the technical parts and okay with possibly throwing money at the project, volumio is there. I tried this first and appreciated it for what it was, but I wanted features behind the pay wall which are readily available for free with pCP.
FYI ripping wise, FLAC is the way to go.
And there are guides to using EAC and similar ripping software to get perfect rips.
Well worth the effort to do it once and perfectly.
FYI encoding wise, it's unlikely that you can hear a difference between FLAC and e.g. Opus if you rip the audio from a CD.
In most cases yes, but hdd space is cheap enough that lossless compression is just the best option. Can always use them as originals to spin off mp3s or other compressed files when needed.
300cds would only be around 120 gigs flac compressed
Yeah! Did that once, many years back. took a couple weeks. Used a ripper program that went out on the net and got all the metadata, saved to a HD (now on the third one). Put the CDs in Logic cases (no-wear), recycled the jewelboxes.
Over time, started to drop album folders into VLC, save the playlists, at ur fingertips.
Volumio, moode, pijukebox (possibly dead), runeaudio... There are a ton of options.
.... Various subsonic servers (and client combo) with jukebox mode (like Gonic), good old reliable MPD, mopidy....
So many projects!
On my desktop I do this with quodlibet alongside the KDE connect applet + KDE connect android app, which lets the phone control media players on the desktop. You probably don't want to run a full desktop environment just for this, but it's a good option if you already have a desktop PC with decent speakers.
Mentioning it just in case, because it works for me. If you're looking for a purely headless server there are other good suggestions in this thread.
Volumio
Will run on a dedicated raspberry pi and x86.
(dedicated means, the computer will only do this, nothing else)
Connect the sound out of the device to the amp and it will provide a web interface to directly control playback.
Music is not streamed, it can play files from a local disk, or from a network mount.
The free tier is 99% of what someone needs.Moodeaudio
Same as above without fees, though explicitly only for raspberrypi and a limited number of SBC'sA key fundamental for any music is the metadata tagging and Musicbrains Picard is the best way to do this
Picard can automatically find the proper metadata for almost everything, and, can "scan" ripped from cd tracks and automate the naming and folder structure that a music library should be in.And as others have said, rip to flac
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
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Headless Plexamp.
You could run Kodi, Emby, or Plex and get local access through DLNA access.
I have a QNAP RAID set up that Emby catalogs and handles access for. An Emby app on my LG TV, and a Roku on other TVs. Some RAID systems will just plug into your network and allow you to install apps on them directly.
Another option is to use MediaMonkey to catalog and provide access. They even have an Android app.
Lastly, regular external HDD are meant for occasional access, not continuous work. Most have a duty cycle of about 25%, meaning they should only be run about that amount of time before dying. This is why I went with NAS HDDs. If you have the money, go with an expandable RAID. Once you start using that capacity, you'll find you want more.
Kodi
PiCorePlayer and LMS are the way.
Yes, it's called a server.
Some NAS devices support being media servers. I'm sure Synology does. That would probably be the least effort to manage.
Or you could build your own and run software you choose: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#media-streaming---audio-streaming
I think a server is for streaming the audio to different devices. They don't want to stream from phone to the player (or the other way around). They just want to be able to browse library and control playback from their phone.
It's still a server. A file server in this case.
I've not tried that myself, but AFAIK VLC can be remote controlled in various ways, and since the API for that is open, multiple clients for it exist: https://wiki.videolan.org/Control_VLC_from_an_Android_Phone
There's also Clementine which offers a remote-control Android app.
I still habe this in my project todo list: https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
People will moan and groan because paid software and not opensource but there is nothing even close to Roon for doing this. https://roon.app/en/
I don't mind paying for something but just seeing that its yet another subscription model thing makes me wretch.
(Hope I didn't miss some fixed price info, I didn't look that deep I admit...)
If you take the free trial you’ll see why there’s nothing else like it today. Its next level. Plex works fine too ofc. But its nowhere near as polished.
This seems weird. They say they let you stream with Tidal and Qobuz, is that why it's a monthly fee? I don't really get how the pricing model fits the Roon software features.
Well, no. You need to subscribe separately to streaming services. And yes, I was sceptical before I tried it. There is nothing else like it, if you want to take control over your digital music library Roon is the best way.