[Suggestions wanted] Synchronizing my music collection

Hi everyone,

I've got a rather large(and growing) digital music collection. Right there's only one copy of it that isn't out-of-date, which is on my primary Windows box here at home. The problem is though, that I use several laptops, and often find their version of my collection to be out of sync.

My thought was to use an old laptop of mine with some linux distro(Ubuntu I guess, don't really know much about Linux) as a music server. I do realize there are harddrive racks out there with internet connectivity, but I'm trying to solve the problem using whatever resources I have available(being a student, it's not really like I have a choice ;)).

Anyway the question for me now is, how would I keep the library synchronized? Do I only keep the one copy on the server, and just stream it to the clients? If so, this poses yet another problem as I don't have a static IP address.

Another solution would be to autosync the library every time a computer is on a local network with my server.

I guess I'm just looking for some input on how to approach the problem :). Any input is greatly appreciated.

I would have a central computer that the other computers can stream from, it'll work extremely well (and all the clients will be synced all the time)

As for accessing it outside of your house network, I forget the two website's that'll let you do this, but for a low $$/month they'll give you a .com or something that maps to your house network and whenever your IP changes, that .com redirect gets changed automatically too (usually within a minute or something) so you'll be able to login to your server remotely and stream the music (and other files as well) you might even be able to set up a VPN through that as well, I dunno though.

No-IP is free...

Interesting... Well that solves the IP problem. I also agree that not having the library duplicated on several boxes seems like the better approach.

Another argument against attempting to stream the music would be network latency. Do you guys know of any software that'll allow me to stream the music from the server at a set bitrate?(eg. it encodes it to 256kbit from 320kbit mp3 or flac on the go).

If for any reason you wouldn't want to stream and would prefer to simply sync you main library folder with the one on your laptop you could use SyncToy from Microsoft. You would only need to share your main library folder on your network and then from your laptop run SyncToy. The disadvantage is that you need to launch the sync job manually or using a scheduled task and you need to be on your network for the job to run. But if your confident you always have access to Internet or your network, streaming is a great idea.

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Originally Posted by vbNeo

Interesting... Well that solves the IP problem. I also agree that not having the library duplicated on several boxes seems like the better approach.

Another argument against attempting to stream the music would be network latency. Do you guys know of any software that'll allow me to stream the music from the server at a set bitrate?(eg. it encodes it to 256kbit from 320kbit mp3 or flac on the go).

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Get Shoutcast server. You basically have shoutcast running, have it listening on a soundcard. You can then start playing the music on the server in whatever order. The Shoutcast server picks up the sounds and streams it on the assigned port. Anyone can then connect to it using their favorite music player. It's also how shoutcast radio works.

Like this one for example: VB6 - Shoutcast Server using Blade Encoder

Thanks for your suggestions :). I think Shoutcast might be a bit to limited.

Thankfully, I've found a solution that seems to be working for me. I've installed an Ubuntu client edition, and thrown on Ampache to serve the music. My upload seems to be good enough.

The only problem now is to find a client that's good at interfacing with Ampache, since its interface is horrendous, but I suppose you can't have it all :).