Music library management

I've discussed home servers before. Home servers are useful because they centralise, making data and services easier to manage. There are a number of different home server platforms available, but I choose Linux chiefly because of the power and flexibility it affords... not to mention it tends to work out cheaper.

Home servers centralise data (such as music files and documents) and services (such as home music servers and jukeboxes). This makes the data and services easier to manage, because they are all in one place. You don't need to remember where a particular album, or where your photos from Aunt Ethel's last visit, are stored. Backups run from just one place. If you ever want to access all of your music externally, just open your firewall to your music server.

There are a number of different ways that you can build home servers. You can go the generic route, or the specific one. Generic home servers are basically computers on which you install your own applications and invent your own file sharing structures. Examples of generic home servers are:

• Linux (subdivided into the various Linux distributions)
• Microsoft Windows Home Server
• Mac Mini

Specific home servers are targeted at a particular problem. For instance, VortexBox is a music jukebox for distributing music through your home. You can pick these up in 'appliance' form, where the operating system, applications and all are already installed on a new piece of hardware, which you simply plug into your network. They often have Web interfaces to help with their administration.

I chose Linux. Here's why:

Cheap

It's true that Linux is generally free at the point of installation. There are no licences to purchase (unless you happen to use a beefy enterprise level distribution, but that's unlikely for a home server). It runs on less powerful computers, meaning that you can recycle your existing, older computers.

In general, because Linux can be operated without a graphical user interface, you save on the extra resources required to support said interfaces. You can strip a Linux box down to the bare essentials.

My current Linux server consumes about 50 watts. This supports 1.75TB of storage capacity, a video capture card, and a music server (VortexBox) in a virtual machine and a MythTV server. It could be more efficient because I could purchase more modern energy efficient hardware, but that would mean scrapping the existing hardware. My current calculations are that it would be cheaper to go with the existing hardware.

Powerful

'Power' is an overloaded word, but in this context I mean the ability to easily adminster the home server using a small set of common tools.

Everything in Linux can be administered from the command line and configured in the file system. This consistency of approach means that you can use the functionality of the command line for different applications and data types. Linux comes with a set of de facto standard GNU software packages. These are generic tools and can be applied to different uses. For instance, I can use the 'find' command to list all recently added music onto my home server.

Flexible

Linux was built for server deployments. The fact that it can be run and administered purely through a command line interface means that it is easy to administer a Linux home server wherever you are. I've lost count of the times I've realised I forgot to bring some photos to share with family on a weekend away; with a Linux server it's very simple to log in and transfer these files.

A number of the software tools that are available for Linux also speak of this pedigree. Using tools like cron and rsync for backups, generic tools as they are, make for a very flexible approach. If you fancy compressing those backups, just bolt gzip on the end. Because all the software talks to each other in a standard way, it allows different ways of solving problems.

Thanks to DeclanTM for his highly realistic home server portrayal!

In the beginning (well, 2002 anyway), there was the computer. The computer was very useful. You could read and write documents, listen to music, play videos and reminisce with embarrassing old photographs.

Over time, all this data began to grow in size. It became difficult to fit it onto a hard disk on a standard computer. We began to want to backup the data, because losing precious music and photos would be A Bad Thing. Then, as we added more computers to our home in the shape of netbooks, smartphones and tablet computers, we wanted access to all this data from all these devices.

To solve this, we decided to centralise the data.

We moved all our data to computers responsible simply for data storage. These computers are called NASes (Network Attached Storage). They offered far higher capacities, could provide your documents, music, photos and video to whatever computer in your house requested it, and were easier to backup. They tended to run continuously at a low power draw, so as soon as you wanted your data, there it was. Now, companies like Buffalo, Linksys and LaCie make affordable, easy to use home NASes that provide all of these benefits.

This worked well until we found it wasn't just the data that we wanted to centralise in our homes, but the actual applications too. For instance, music streaming servers like Squeezebox and Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) like MythTV would work, in the background, while you got on with your life. This new wave appears just ready to break through. Microsoft's Windows Home Server product is a version of Windows that you can install on servers. Linux is another popular option amongst hobbyists, as is the Mac Mini.

Where does music management fit into this?

There's no reason why music management should be something a collector has to laboriously step through on a constant basis. If we define rules by which our music should be managed, music management can be done on a continual, fully automatic basis. When new music is added to the collection, rules kick-in to ensure that the music library is maintained in a consistent, complete and correct state. If the application of the rules is not certain, then we can ask a human via normal methods such as email or a Web interface, as humans are great at creativity and problem solving.

So, the result is much less time tagging and more reliable and consistent results.

bliss is written to run on a home server.

This is why it has a web interface, so that it can be reached from anywhere in your home network. It is also why, most importantly, it applies the rules you define when new music is added to your collection. This way, you dictate the rules, and bliss does all the hard work.

Where will home data storage go next? Some say 'the cloud', a vague, loaded term that tends to refer to online storage of data over the Internet (and lots more besides). While this is an excellent solution for a number of reasons, as yet such an infrastructure is not capable of storing data in all its guises, for instance the lossless music beloved of audiophiles is simply too large both in terms of the capacity required to hold it and the bandwidth required to upload/download.

It'll be interesting to see in what directions home servers go, but so far it appears it will make music library management quicker and more accurate.