FWIW,
I use older Squeezebox and newer Plex systems to stream wirelessly from my laptop music server.
dbpoweramp to rip and tag. Picard to autotag files after when needed
This is very cost effective and works and sounds great. Once you get used to it and learn how to use the tools. Not for the computer illiterate though.
I also use Seagate Dashboard (included with most Seagate disk drives) for backups. I use one live and two backup external USB drives.
Can’t express enough the importance of proper backups with this stuff though. Worst thing is to spend time ripping and tagging and losing files when the drive eventually goes.
I had my live drive go about a year back and another just this past weekend. I recovered first time but had lost a lot of album art not stored directly in (.wav) music files at the time. That was a setback that took a while to fully recover from.
This last time restore from backup went 100% smoothly as it should. Seagate was able to restore almost 1TB of tagged flac files including album art. I was back up and running as before in just a few hours.
I use older Squeezebox and newer Plex systems to stream wirelessly from my laptop music server.
dbpoweramp to rip and tag. Picard to autotag files after when needed
This is very cost effective and works and sounds great. Once you get used to it and learn how to use the tools. Not for the computer illiterate though.
I also use Seagate Dashboard (included with most Seagate disk drives) for backups. I use one live and two backup external USB drives.
Can’t express enough the importance of proper backups with this stuff though. Worst thing is to spend time ripping and tagging and losing files when the drive eventually goes.
I had my live drive go about a year back and another just this past weekend. I recovered first time but had lost a lot of album art not stored directly in (.wav) music files at the time. That was a setback that took a while to fully recover from.
This last time restore from backup went 100% smoothly as it should. Seagate was able to restore almost 1TB of tagged flac files including album art. I was back up and running as before in just a few hours.