Migration Delays and a New Music Server
Our recent trip to Montreal paused our album a day (AAD) project and delayed the migration of all the previous AAD posts on Facebook. In a nutshell, I got distracted by all my digital music content and migrating it to my NAS. It was, however, and much welcome distraction. Allow me to elaborate.
Over the decades I've amassed a collection of albums in the 1000's. It started in the 70's with vinyl and 8 tracks, continued in the 80s with cassettes, CDs, and vinyl, and digital music in the 90s when Napster became a thing. While physical media takes up a lot of space in the house, digital media takes up a lot of space in my head every time I open a file browser and see a "music" folder. I purchased a Synology NAS several years ago to deal with the digital sprawl, but work and life always got in the way. I finally got pissed off and decided to deal with this problem, with the assistance of AI.
It may seem counter to the theme of humanizing tech, but AI does make a great assistant for validating my own thoughts on how to take back control of my content. AI doesn't care that I've grown to distrust technology, it just works with me to find solutions to problems. My initial thoughts on a solution were to find a streaming device with storage to host my files, link it to my preferred home speakers, and ensure the device provides an app to control the music
As I dug into the options, I found every AI recommendation pointed to a solution that was both expensive to purchase and required a subscription. A subscription to play my own content is like paying Kenwood a monthly fee to spin vinyl on my turntable. No thanks. I suddenly realized, "why do my requirements include storage when I have this fancy NAS sitting in my mechanical room?" When I asked AI if I could leverage my NAS to store and stream my music the gates of heaven opened up.
Plex Media Server: Why and How
The why is simple. If you want to support artists more than you support tech companies, you have to find ways to support them directly, and it's NOT streaming. Purchase music and build your own streaming collection. Bandcamp's fair trade music policy shares 85-90% of the revenue with Artists. On the first Friday of every month, 100% of revenues are shared with the artists.
Contrast Bandcamp with Apple who shares a maximum of 70% of the revenues from album sales to independent artists or less than 10% with signed artists. If the artist has already sold their IP, of course they get nothing. Streaming revenues, covered in great detail by Rick Beato, are sad and complicated and how many artists get 1 BILLION streams? More on all of this in another post.
As to how to setup a Plex Media Server on Synology, I won't go through all the steps as it's already been covered multiple times. You canwatch the steps in the shared video below for more detail.
🚀 Key Learnings: Synology + Plex
- Migrating Content: Music content was stored in multiple locations. Setting up a Team Folder and connecting it to my laptop allowed me to easily drag music from different sources directly into the partition Synology uses for music media.
- Plex is King for Metadata: Once music is transferred to the team folder, execute a scan from Plex Music to index everything. Plex takes care of everything from album art to artist overviews. It's your own personal Spotify.
- Plex Pass Optional: If you don't want to eat up your data plan while listening to music outside your home, the Plex Pass may be worth it. I opted to stay free and connect to wifi where I can.
- More to Discover: Plex Media Server is feature rich. I can share my collection with other Plex users and dive into advanced analytics. For now, I'm keeping streaming simple but more will be posted.
Hopefully, this gives you a sense of what is involved in taking back more control of your music collection and helping artists more in the process.
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