About 30 years ago I created a Monster

heiney9

Well I didn't exactly create the monster. I just hepled foster his current addiction for music. My little brother (9 years younger) was always following myself and friends around when I was younger. He was exposed to my long interest in audio and music and it rubbed off....err...rather it was more like a tumor that grew and grew and grew.....So now after the purchase of close to 4500 cd's he has decided to work on a little DIY project.

Keep in mind he grew up right in the middle of the computer explosion and is extremely knowledgeble about computers and their workings. He's a system admin. for a payroll company. He's my very own "geek squad" whenever I have trouble. His current main computer is the latest over clocked Pentium with external cooling. He has actual liquid flowing around the chip much like a radiator in a car.

Anyways his big project is to build a music server which can house all of his 4500 cd's which will be ripped via a lossless audio program called FLAC. This is transferred wirelessly to his main stereo system and his computer rig via the Squeezbox 2. Here's a run down of the components involved and a few pics of the final product. I have yet to see or hear it....probably this weekend.


His post to another board:

I've decided to call upon my inner geek to make this this post. My inner geek can always be relied upon to deliver long lists of facts, figures and specifications most of which run no risk of interesting anyone but afore mentioned inner geek.

With that in mind, I shall spend a few moments talking about my new music server project. As I mentioned a few months back, I've been wanting to build a machine that would allow me to house all of my CDs in digital format (.FLAC) thus allowing me to stream them to my main stereo system via a Squeezebox2 or play them on my computer stereo rig via MediaMonkey. After much calculation, I realized that I'd need about 1.4 terabytes of space in order to store all of my discs in FLAC format. Add to that some room to grow & the need to have some sort of hard drive redundancy in case of drive failure, and I was looking at a fairly substantial investment.

My initial idea was to add an external drive enclosure to my current computer with 8 320GB drives in a RAID5 array. By the time I got done pricing out everything I'd need to accomplish the project, I had about $2,200 dollars invested. While that number didn't scare me a whole lot, it seemed like an awful lot of money to spend integrating an external sotrage solution to my current computer rig. That's when I started investigating the possibility of building my own music server with an internal RAID array. If I could do it for about the same money, it made a lot more sense to have a free standing server.

So, that's what I did. I ordered all the parts from newegg.com and they should be here Thursday. Here's a list of parts (I told you there'd be specs in this post):

[1] Intel D945GNTL ATX Motherboard
[1] Intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB LGA 775 EM64T Processor
[1] Norco Technologies Inc. DS-600S Grey / Beige / Black Steel 4U Hot Swappable Rackmount Case
[1] CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit
[1] Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card
[6] Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 RAID-specific Hard Drive
[1] Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3200826AS 200GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive
[1] NEC Black IDE/ATAPI DVD Burner Model ND-3550A
[1] 3G Technology GM170B Black 17" 30ms LCD Monitor
[1] Rosewill RP550S-2MB ATX 2.01 550W Modular Power Supply
[1] Logitech 967502-0403 Black PS/2 Wired Standard Value Keyboard
[1] Logitech Trackman Wheel 904353-0403 Grey 3 Buttons 1x Wheel USB + PS/2 TrackBall Mouse
[2] Evercool EC6020 60mm Ball Case Cooling Fan
[3] Generic 5 1/4" 4-Pin to SATA Power Cable Splitter Model 11W3-S6800-6IN
[1] CyberPower CP1200AVR 1200VA 720W UPS
[1] Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard with SP1 5 Cals

So there you have it. 6 X 400GB drives (minus one for RAID5 redundancy) gives me 2.0TB of music storage. That will hold my current collection (4,500 discs) and allow me to rip an additional 1,900 or so CDs before I run out of space. I also have access to a friend's 400/800GB Ultrium 3 tape drive, so I can make periodic backups of the music files for off-site storage.

I've managed to rip about 950 CDs so far and while it's a slow process, it's also fun to hear tracks I haven't listened to in years.

So that was my geek post.

Keep in mind this is just the music server, not his regular computer.

Here are some pics.

I think he's crazy sometimes....but I am a bit envious, in a good way.

H9

ohskigod

thats is effing insane!!!!!

I want to see how much of that he fills

keep us posted

nadams

Oh, God... I think I need to go take a cold shower.

madmax

That will never work, it doesn't even have a needle...
madmax

Pablo

That is quite the set up. It would be nice to have that kind of selection of tunes handy for a party.

heiney9

madmax wrote:

That will never work, it doesn't even have a needle...
madmax

Ironically enough, he has taken all his favorite vinyl (mostly stuff not avail on cd) and burned it to cdr using a Denon DP-47f TT with a Grado Prestige Gold (MM) cartridge running thru a Parasound PPH-100 Phono Pre-amp into a Denon CDR-W1500 stand alone cd burner. Then used Cool Edit Pro to edit the clicks and pops. Sure it's not a very esoteric TT set-up but it does an admirable job . Close as I can come to getting the needle involved for you MadMax .

Also he will be running the wireless digital signal fron the SqueezBox 2 into a Monarchy DIP/DAC combination so as not to use the less than marginal DAC's in the SqueezBox 2.

H9

bobman1235

Wow. And I'm debating the idea of having a RAID array of like, 100 Gigs. I feel shamed.

nadams

what's the point of a 100gig RAID array, except maybe for speed? I've got 200 gigs in a single drive... and you can get 500gig drives, too.

criverajr

Hey man, that is serious stuff, be proud he is your brother, in runs in the blood man.

CRj

steveinaz

6500 cd's, holy ****! I've only got like 650 and I can't think of a CD I want to buy.....

audiobliss

:eek:

That is just...totally awesome. No other words to describe it.

heiney9

steveinaz wrote:

6500 cd's, holy ****! I've only got like 650 and I can't think of a CD I want to buy.....

Well actually he has about 4500 right now . It's borderline addiction. He's been collecting for a long time. Thing is he's still keeping all his cd's after he rips them to the server. He tends to do things in the extreme. Nothing wrong with that as he will ultimately get a benefit out of it, plus the pride of building and implementing it. Sometimes the project itself gives just as much satisfaction as the end result.

H9

nadams

Sell the CDs, pay for the server

bobman1235

nadams wrote:

what's the point of a 100gig RAID array, except maybe for speed? I've got 200 gigs in a single drive... and you can get 500gig drives, too.

I have no need for more than 100 gigs of data at the moment - I have about 30 gigs of music, don't p lay games, don't keep movies on my computer. So really I want two 100GB drives in a RAID array so I don't lose my music. Plus if you go bigger than 120 / 160 GB, you're really running into reliability issues with the drives, or SERIOUS costs. For non-important data (OS, programs that I have installs for) I can just use non-backed up IDE hard drives that I have in abundance.

audiobliss

I wonder what that's costing him...

Roy Munson

As we used to say..that is way cool!

beardog03

very cool..

is he gonna make you one too..?!!

heiney9

beardog03 wrote:

very cool..

is he gonna make you one too..?!!

I wish.... . He has some extra Squeezebox servers but as far as the music server, if had the 2 G's he'd be more than happy to set it up for me. I may try a Squeezbox 2 for awhile to see how well it works. The HD space is up to me financially. He's generous, but not that generous. I take a little pride in knowing he's following in my foot steps when it comes to music appreciation and audio appreciation

He has for his main system

http://www.thefirstcut.net/stereo.htm

Not ultra high-end but certainly a nice system. The pic was taken before he moved into his new house.

H9

beardog03

yep...he`s your brother alright..!!!

:rolleyes: :cool:

audiobliss

heiney9 wrote:

He has for his main system

http://www.thefirstcut.net/stereo.htm

Not ultra high-end but certainly a nice system. The pic was taken before he moved into his new house.

H9

Man, that's one beast of a transport!

BrentMcGhee

HEINY!!! I could not beleive what i saw when i looked at the first picture there. IN the top left hand corner you have the best action figure ever made. The jesus action figure complete with wheels and swinging arms for the utmost of gliding karate chopping action. I have one too! !!!!!!

avelanchefan

Your Brother is brilliant, and I wish he would build one for me. I am currently ripping my CD's to a hard drive, but I am 4400 short of what he is doing. I have 400 CD's but me and my wife wittled it down to a 100 cd's of what we listen to the most.

heiney9

BrentMcGhee wrote:

HEINY!!! I could not beleive what i saw when i looked at the first picture there. IN the top left hand corner you have the best action figure ever made. The jesus action figure complete with wheels and swinging arms for the utmost of gliding karate chopping action. I have one too! !!!!!!

Actually that's my brother's computer/office room at his house. And yes, I believe that's the jesus action figure. He also has a freud action figure, two things he just had to have off of e-bay. Cheesy-cool :cool: .

avelanchefan wrote:

Your Brother is brilliant, and I wish he would build one for me. I am currently ripping my CD's to a hard drive, but I am 4400 short of what he is doing. I have 400 CD's but me and my wife wittled it down to a 100 cd's of what we listen to the most.

Well he's very very good with computers. By his calculations it will take him almost 2 years to rip everything to .FLAC. He's been ripping 10-12 cd's a day as he has time. Crazy thing is he's probably keeping the cd's. He has a tendancy to go a bit over-board at times, but it will be very cool when done. I think the project is more than half the satisfaction for him.

H9

thejck

Hey H9,
I recently inherited an old Compaq dl580 quad xeon 700mhz processor server from a friend of mine that was killed in a bike accident (his mom gave it to me) its a sad story and I miss him a lot as he was my best friend and my source of all sorts of advice from audio to video..
he had a raid controller card in there with 6x320gb hard drives in there. I was able to hack all his admin accounts to get to his music. he had about 80 thousand songs in lossless mp3 ogg and other formats ranging from 192kbps to 320kbps bitstream..
anyway just wanted to share this story with u guys as reading about your brothers setup reminded me of this.

p.s i am a smart computer guy too in fact i first met this guy when he was looking for help with a virus that he could not get rid off that i helped him out on

engtaz

That ripping takes a lot of man hours. What are the latest upgrades to the Music server.

thejck

it might take a long time but its not like you have to sit and watch it. you put it in and set it and forget it.

sucks2beme

avelanchefan wrote: »

Your Brother is brilliant, and I wish he would build one for me. I am currently ripping my CD's to a hard drive, but I am 4400 short of what he is doing. I have 400 CD's but me and my wife wittled it down to a 100 cd's of what we listen to the most.

The point of a music server is to listen to all the music. If it's at your fingertips, you'll be more tempted to vary the music. The hassle of looking for the cd is gone.

Willow

Pardon my ingnorance, I think it's a great idea. My qustion is, can the PC play random and what is the delay between tracks ?

blakeh

Willow wrote: »

Pardon my ingnorance, I think it's a great idea. My qustion is, can the PC play random and what is the delay between tracks ?

I use a SqueezeBox 3 (more info at www.slimdevices.com) to wirelessly stream the FLAC files from the server to my stereo. The software that allows for this is called SlimServer. It will play random tracks, playlists you create, or just about any combination of tracks you can think of. You can set it to pause between tracks or set it to "no gap" which will play multiple tracks with no silence between them.

blakeh

sucks2beme wrote: »

The point of a music server is to listen to all the music. If it's at your fingertips, you'll be more tempted to vary the music. The hassle of looking for the cd is gone.

This is so true! I set the SqueezeBox to 'random' last night and listened for about two hours. Three songs played that I'd never heard before (or at least don't remember hearing) that I really ended up enjoying and quickly added to my 'favorites' list.

I still really like the tactile qualities of a CD -- the cover art, the liner notes, etc. But it's hard to beat having all your music instantly available in one place.

AndyGwis

Damn, I probably only have about 100 CDs. . . maybe even less.

Every time I would start to build my collection up, I'd have someone steal the CD binder from my car or something and have to start all over. Eventually, I just decided to put my brother's 32 Gig collection on removable hard drive and use that as my "music server."

Terabytes, are you kidding me?!? 4500 CDs?!? I think that desk is going to snap like a toothpick.