Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Help me build a music server!

RAID Is Not A Backup.

If you were willing to pay for and liked that product you linked to, then I would seriously look to Olive music servers that Michael briefly mentioned. They should have something you would like.

Yeah, I checked that out. I like the idea (and aesthetics) a lot but the model I want (O6HD) is $5000.00!

The 03HD is $999.00, I could settle for that if I had too...

But I'm probably gonna try to put together a budget high end system myself. That just takes more work!

Has anybody used this software for playing music files called Play?

Not really liking these release notes for PLAY:

Known Issues:

•Album art support is missing
•Some metadata is read-only
•Seeking in Ogg FLAC streams is not supported

It would seem to me the easiest way and to stay with Mac would be to use apple TV with the music stored on a NAS/timecapsule or something like that, but I am not really familiar with Apple/Mac stuff.

Yeah, I saw that. Oh wells.

Checked out Songbird. Pretty cool but bloated with a lot of crap though. More importantly, it cut off the ending and beginning of songs! Like a crappy cross fade thing. Could not figure how to fix that.

The iTunes player really is crap. I can't believe Apple is letting me down so much with what should be a simple music player app. Bastards!

(damn I wish that MediaMonkey was available for Mac... )


The two best things that I've gotten from this thread so far are:

1. Start my archiving process now.

2. Use EAC for all my ripping needs.

I definitely agree with those two. It takes time to rip everything. (I never finished, as I'd start listening old CDs that I hadn't heard for a while, and then a squirrel would by or something.) As long as you rip into a lossless format, you can't go wrong. Find out that you don't like FLAC (or what ever) down the road, it's possible to convert one lossless format to another without generational loss. EAC will guarantee you've got an error free rip too.

EAC found a few of my non scratched cd's had errors, sometimes it would say I might have a different pressing, other times I simply had a bad pressing

Hmmm, I've never had it report an error on any rip. Sometimes it is a little less sure my rip is correct, because there were so few (or no) other examples.

Who made the drive you're ripping with? I used to use Plextor, until LiteOn started building them, and then switched to Pioneer.

As Ken said, RAID ≠ backup. Let's say you have all your music on a pair of mirrored (RAID 1) drives. One day, one of those drives fails. No biggie. The other drive is an identical copy, so you've lost nothing. You just buy another drive of equal or greater size and you're good to go. Some time later, though, the RAID controller goes kaput, but not before corrupting some data on your drives. Oops, you may have just lost some music.

To prevent data loss, you need a backup. A good backup routine is to make an identical copy of your precious data and save it to a completely different device, preferably in a different location, at least once a day. There's plenty of software that will do this for you. Naturally, everything doesn't get copied over every day. Most software will only transfer anything that has changed since the last successful backup ran.