Trying to get my music right **getting bamboozled)

stonedcamel

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hello,

History; in the last year + i had an external portable hard drive go bust on me so i set up a Synology NAS at home and it works great. to save space on the mac i copied my itunes folder over to the NAS. all works great and plays through the logitech squeezebox server great (duet in lounge and boom in kitchen)

Fast forward some, i slowly got the feeling Apple were closing their doors again and my mac needed upgrading so i made the switch to windows and later changed my iphone to android.

Present; i transferred some of the music to Google Play. the rest is on the NAS in the itunes folder still and i have a box of CDs i keep meaning to rip. I have made the decision not to purchase anymore music from itunes, therefore all my new music will be bought and ripped. i am keeping my old iphone as a portable music player only though and i downloaded copytrans to help do this much better than itunes.

Questions:
What do i do with all my music in the itunes folder? change the name of the folder or keep adding to it?
Rip CDs with media player in mp3?
ignore the google play side of things?
the logitech units are dying and have pretty much been replaced with google home, can i play from synology?
and generally, i seem to have got myself in a muddle and just want it simplified and easy to use but couldnt see any light so any help or suggestions are welcome

sorry for the long winded post and this seemed to be the best section to ask!
Thanks
 
Bought music from iTunes will have the .m4a extension. It can be converted to .mp3 using the likes of DBpoweamp's Music converter. It is part of a paid-for package that I have found very useful.
What settings did you use to rip music using iTunes ?
 
Yes the sound file format is key, especially if you're using a lossless compression format. You may find that maintaining lossless for home listening and compressing to MP3 for portable use is a good idea. I effectively do this in iTunes (lossless AAC rips but compress to 256kb/s when syncing to devices).
 
thanks for replying.

Ripping CDs in iTunes, I just put the CD in and away it went haha

I had noticed last night, my music on the NAS is also on my laptop. Not all of it is organised so I did some research and found MusicBrainz Picard and started organising with the help of youtube. my plan was then to delete everything off the NAS and copy over the newly organised stuff from my laptop.

am I just making things worse or not for the better etc
 
I rip CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy), store them as FLAC and convert to mp3 as necessary for portable devices/the car.

Converting the itunes stuff I can't help you with, but others have already suggested solutions.
 
Ripping CDs in iTunes, I just put the CD in and away it went haha

I had noticed last night, my music on the NAS is also on my laptop. Not all of it is organised, so I did some research and found MusicBrainz Picard and started organising with the help of youtube. My plan was then to delete everything off the NAS and copy over the newly organised stuff from my laptop.

am I just making things worse or not for the better etc

I would suggest that you make yourself familiar with the settings in iTunes. They can be found at -

Edit------>Preferences

itunes.jpg


On the General Tab above you can see that there is an option for tweaking the import settings for ripping CDs.
The other tab of immediate interest is Advanced -

itunes2.jpg


As you can see the first section covers where your music is stored. The above entry is, in fact, the default setting. You can change it to where ever you like. In your case, I suspect you have the checkbox ticked for Copy Files.....
It would explain why your music collection appears in 2 places.

As to how you arrange your collection, that's up to you. I prefer -

Artist---Album----Track Number, title

others prefer Genre at the start for example.
 
I would suggest that you make yourself familiar with the settings in iTunes. They can be found at -

Edit------>Preferences

View attachment 973436

On the General Tab above you can see that there is an option for tweaking the import settings for ripping CDs.
The other tab of immediate interest is Advanced -

View attachment 973441

As you can see the first section covers where your music is stored. The above entry is, in fact, the default setting. You can change it to where ever you like. In your case, I suspect you have the checkbox ticked for Copy Files.....
It would explain why your music collection appears in 2 places.

As to how you arrange your collection, that's up to you. I prefer -

Artist---Album----Track Number, title

others prefer Genre at the start for example.

Thanks, I think I have cracked the issue of getting rid of iTunes. my Library on my laptop I will reorganise and copy to my NAS.

From there, I can rip CDs and add them to the folder? (assuming) I will give EAC a look.

Something else slightly confused me today, base for playing the music... whether it be Media player or winamp etc.... im assuming (again) if its on the synology NAS I have to use the DS audio which is their built in
 
I would look for an alternative to Winamp. Even though the brand has been bought from AOL the software has still not had a stable release. The last was in November 2013 and it was version 5.666.

AIMP

There are a couple of other choices for what app to use but not many.
Packages | Synology Inc.
 
I would look for an alternative to Winamp. Even though the brand has been bought from AOL the software has still not had a stable release. The last was in November 2013 and it was version 5.666.

AIMP

There are a couple of other choices for what app to use but not many.
Packages | Synology Inc.


Thanks for the reply... youre going to laugh at this one....

so.... sat at home and i decided to put my music through the brainz picard, mostly seemed to go ok with the help of youtube. then i deleted my itunes library from the NAS, no idea how or why but the library from my laptop disappeared at the same time. A bit (lot) of panic set in and searching for anyway possible to find it and get it back... eventually realising i had the organized folder saved separately.

i thought i was little tech minded but this is doing my head in, never got around to ripping any CDs

I am not bothered about streaming music so players such as plex dont interest me and as mentioned before, i want to get away from Apple and itunes etc...

if im sounding stupid, its because ive got myself in a right pickle with it... its probably very easy and very simple
 
The Groove music player built into Windows10 is pretty decent, all you do is click the cog icon for settings and then select choose were we look for music/choose another folder and point it at the NAS shared folder. It will scan the music into it's library.

If you want to keep things retro but with tons of customization look at Foobar2000.

The Synology DSAudio is their web browser based audio player and smartphone app companion.

The itunes media library does not exist in multiple locations, if you set the itunes library to a folder on the NAS then delete that folder, it's gone unless you have a backup elsewhere, it's just as well you did.
 

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