Adventures in Modern Audio

The new server is working great–it’s got plenty of power and has been rock-solid stable. I ended up with Debian on it, and I’m a lot happier now that I’m running testing instead of stable (for instance, I have FLAC 1.2.1). I’ve been running the 6.5.5 nightly builds of SlimServer, upgrading every week or two as I think of it.

Power consumption is a little higher than before but still pretty low. I haven’t fully taken advantage of the throttling the CPU can do yet–I haven’t had the time to investigate what the stock kernel does versus the various mods that VIA makes for the kernel and what they do.

After my trials and tribulations with the Thecus, I realized I needed a real solution. People on the Slim Devices forums had talked about mini-ITX boards with Via processors as low-power, high-performance solutions. Basically I want a real math coprocessor to handle encoding and transcoding duties, and having an x86 processor will make things simpler. I still wanted low power consumption, and although the system may use more energy at its peaks, the ability for it to throttle down the CPU variably as well as to go into deep sleep mode and spin down the drives when not in use should offset that overall.

I decided I needed more power to run SlimServer comfortably, as well as rip and encode CDs when I get them. I also might want a second Squeezebox someday, and I couldn’t easily run two at once on the Kuro Box or Thecus, especially if transcoding was involved. I also want some headroom for home automation or other projects.

So I got a motherboard, case, and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813995002. The case was bigger than I expected but I figured I should be able to cool passively (lots of vents) and keep noise and power consumption down. If I can’t there some case fans which are actually very quiet. And this thing will live down in the basement anyway. The power supply is very efficient and usually fanless.

I’m reusing the hard drives I got for the Thecus, as well as my old CD-ROM drive, scavenged from the external USB case to mount inside the box as an IDE device–taking one more power supply out of the equation and its phantom power and efficiency losses.

I put everything together and it didn’t work. It powered on but it didn’t POST. I later determined that the RAM wasn’t seated correctly, and it takes some pushing to get it in right. I’ve booted it but without a loadable OS on it (funny, it can’t boot the ARM Linux kernel off the hard drives) it is less than useful.

I’m thinking I’ll install OpenSUSE on it. I’ve enjoyed Debian and Gentoo but since I have an x86 CPU I might as well avail myself of all the options. While the thing has a video adapter I do plan on running it headless most of the time. It has a sound card as well, and I may try to run squeezeslave on it and use it to play music downstairs.

Fun stuff.

I got a temporary SlimServer config running on my Kuro Box with an 80GB drive, and the 500GB backup drive hooked up via USB. It worked fine.

I decided to buy an open box Thecus N2100 from Newegg, with upgraded RAM, a quieter fan, and dual 500GB hard drives in a RAID 1. Nice. The whole solution still cost me less than the original Kuro Box. The Thecus has a 600MHz processor, so I expected it to be quite a bit faster. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the hard drive was dead. I did manage to get some of the things I wanted off of it (even though I think I have backups everywhere) but I will have to do my configuration over again.

Which is fine by me. My gentoo image was a little old, and I was having trouble updating packages without conflicts and dependencies that would be tricky to untangle, so I’m using a new overlay and starting from that.

I’m also taking the time to install u-boot, which allows me to boot straight into a 2.6 kernel, instead of booting a 2.4 kernel in the firmware and then chaining a 2.6. Should be fun.

I’m using an old 80GB hard drive I have for now–my 400 GB is off to Seagate for a factory refurbished replacement. I didn’t take the amazing offer where for $100 they’d upgrade me to a refurbished 500GB hard drive.

It’s boring yet fun work, watching it all get put together again.

It was bound to happen–I was copying my music files over from my main Kurobox disk to the backup USB drive and noticed a few i/o errors. I dismounted the /datafiles/ file system and tried to do an fsck which did not go well, basically I lost the root filesystem out from under the running kernel. A reboot first brought the Kuro into EM mode, from which I tried to start another fsck, which also didn’t really work.

I tried rebooting again (since I haven’t done the serial port mod on my Kuro, I can’t tell what’s happening on boot) and it was probably hanging on boot. But it’s also likely that it was doing an fsck itself on bootup and would eventually boot up, provided things weren’t too swiss-cheesed.

But I decided to take a closer look. I opened the Kuro Box (BTW, opening it allowed me to also spray some WD-40 in the case fan which makes it run much quieter now), removed the drive, and put it into the USB carrier my backup drive is in. Of course I didn’t get the IDE cable in firmly at first and couldn’t read the disk, which of course sent me into a panic.

But I fixed that, and my computer recognized it, and automounted both the root and /datafiles file systems. Mostly intact. So the good news is that once I run the fscks I should be able to boot again. And at least I haven’t lost everything if I have to rebuild the Kuro.

Of course, I was thinking of upgrading anyway. So maybe this is my big opportunity. . .

I finally downloaded the SlimScrobbler plugin and started using my last.fm account. I have been using the NowPlaying plugin, but that’s not nearly Web 2.0 enough on its own.

So if you use last.fm go ahead and friend me and watch my music stream by.

It is time. Time for me to go ahead and back up my digital music. It’s something I’ve always intended to do but didn’t want to spend the money.

Last weekend, I found a 500GB hard drive at Newegg for $139.99. That and a Thermaltake USB2.0/ESATA case stayed under $200.00 including tax. Compare this with $290 for the 400GB ATA internal drive I bought when I started my Kuro Box and it’s a good deal.

I got the drive and formatted it NTFS figuring I could plug it in to my laptop as well and have some flexibility. It worked on the Kuro just fine but I couldn’t write because the NTFS kernel driver doesn’t support that. So I found the ntfs-3g driver, compiled and installed that, which worked great, but it was sloooow.  User-mode filesystem driver and all that.
So I blew away the NTFS partition and reformatted with ext3. Copies are quite a bit faster now. Not blindingly fast–it’s taking a few seconds to copy each song, so it will take many hours to do the first pass. I started it with “rsync” but realized cp would be quicker and it didn’t matter if the destination is empty. Once I do the first pass I’ll use rsync to keep them in sync.

I also plan on using backupPC to keep my laptops backed up to the rest of the space I have on the drive.

I last posted about what to do with my CDs now that I’m running out of room in the family room for them. I had thought about binders, but realized I wanted all the cover art including the back covers.

I looked around on the Slim Devices forums and saw many people were happy with sleeves from Jazz Loft. They’re plastic sleeves that accomodate both the front and back liners of a jewel case, and fold in such a way you can still read the spine label by pushing gently when the CD is in the rack. You also get about a 4:1 compression ratio, so I will only need a few shelves to store everything. Very nice. The process of transferring all of them will take a few weeks (I’ve only done about 100 at this point) but I am ready for it.

Also along the same theory is the JewelSleeve but it’s a little more expensive and you have to write the CD title on the tag to see it on a rack.

I’m still left with the issue of what to do with the digipaks, jewel case covers, boxes, and other custom boxes. I’ll probably store them someplace special. For now I’m storing jewel cases in our old entertainment center (a chest of drawers painted black with shelves where the drawers were–worked really well) that is now in our basement helping to wall off the sump pump. It’s wasted space now so no big deal.

I haven’t put a CD in my CD/DVD player now for about a year.  My CDs are still in racks in the family room.  It’s been mutually agreed that I will be removing them, but I”m not sure how.  I have lots of questions.

• I know a lot of people use the large binders.  These look nice, but I’ll still need about 4 of them and I’ll have to find a place for them.  I then realized say a 400 CD binder would mean only 200 if I stored the CDs and the booklets.  Then I realized I actually only want the booklets in the family room–I don’t need the CDs at all.
• Then I thought if I’m just storing booklets there’s no point in putting them in a binder–I could just store them on a shelf, probably with tabs for each letter of the alphabet.
• What do I do with the jewel cases?  Some people just throw them out.  I could do that (I’d probably try and recycle them) but I kind of want to keep them.  I could store them and the CDs in the basement.  That also solves the issue of the special CD cases (colors, shapes, etc) and digipaks.

I’m thinking about my next gadget purchase, and outlining the things I’d like to be able to do:

• I would like a new portable music player.  Right now my 60GB Nomad Zen doesn’t have enough room for everything I own at 160Kbps MP3 which is about as low bitrate as I want to go.  So something with at least a 100GB drive or more is necessary.  Also note that you can’t really buy just a music player anymore, it has to be a “media player”
• I’d like to have a handheld device I can reliably use as a SlimServer remote.  Any PDA would probably do but the device of choice seems to be a Nokia 770.  The 770 can also be used as a Wi-Fi streaming player which would be cool for interfacing with SlimServer as well.  What’d be even better would be a dual Wi-Fi/EVDO or HSDPA device with an unlimited data plan so I could stream from nearly anywhere.
• A universal remote.  Something like the Harmony 1000, perhaps.  The Harmony also does IR and RF (z-wire it’s called) so I could use it anywhere in the house with an IR repeater to the stereo systems.

I’m intrigued by the PepperPad, which seems to do the IR remote and WiFi okay, but it’s got a tiny 30GB hard drive and is actually a bit big.  An OQO is interesting for the same reasons and in the same way but it’s also got a tiny hard drive and is pricey.  other UMPCs like the Sony one are also neat but expensive. The ARCHOS 504 has a 160 GB hard drive but doesn’t do WiFi or IR since it’s just a media player.

So what I want is a device with several hundred GB of file storage, Wi-Fi  and wireless broadband connectivity, that can be used as a universal remote and a media player with local and streaming capability, preferably running Linux, and can be hooked up both to a TV (make it HDTV) or a computer monitor and keyboard, but with a built-in hi res display and a decent input device for mobile use. It should be easily switchable from function to function and have enough horsepower to be repsonsive whatever it’s doing.  It should fit in my pocket–perhaps not my shirt pocket but baggy pants or  a jacket.  I guess while you’re at it let it be my Blackberry and hi-res digital camera too.

The funny thing is there are pieces of this device in all the things I’ve mentioned–I could make it with those devices and a bunch of double-sided tape–but it would cost upwards of $2k and not actually be logically interconnected.  I do, however, believe that in 5 years we will be able to do exactly this.