JDPFu.com 2025

Many of us have lots of music on our home network. I spent months converting my audio CD collection into MP3 and organizing the files.

Organization

At the time, I didn’t trust ID3 tags inside MP3 files.
My organization was/is directory based. /{genre}/{artist}/{album}/{track_no-title}.mp3

It was a lot of work to keep that since “genre” is often subjective. Is it lite rock or easy listening? OTOH, almost every player supports “random” and you’ll get only artists that you like since you’ll probably only convert music you like.

Streaming

I installed gnump3 on my Linux server. This is an-all-in one perl-based media streaming server. No external web server used – it has a built in streaming server. It supports simple authentication and blocking/allowing access by IP address. Of course, when you travel, allowing any IP access, but retaining the login is a good idea. Here’s 1 screen, there are many different skins available

This is really old news. Almost everyone who wants a streaming media server probably already has one setup. Why bother with this? Well, if you have a Nokia N800 (or similar), then perhaps you’d like to stream audio anywhere in your home. The browser-based interface is simple and will pull a M3U file that the N800 Media Player app works with. Other computers and media devices in your home can also listen to this music. Imaging, Sunday morning, when you’re reading the newspaper and listening to Bach. Nice.

Backups!

Obviously, if you spend the time to convert a large audio collection into digital formats, you’d like to never do it again. Definitely back up those files. I took an old IDE disk drive and copied all those media files over to it. Then that disk is placed on a shelf. This is the best backup method – better than burning DVDs, CDROMs, or even tape. Hard drives effectively have no end of life when they aren’t used. Realistically, the EOL happens when you no longer have a PC that can connect to the drive. As a simple example, can you read a 5.25" floppy drive today? Anyway, when you spend as much time and convert all your own music personally, you will want a backup, period.