Several questions

[sculen]

And you were spot on regarding that.

[schmidj]

You don't need a NAS, at least in the immediate future. Save your money and NAS headaches. Store your rips on a brick drive plugged into your Mac. Install the MAC version of Asset (or another DLNA server) on your laptop. Your Mac will be your server instead of the NAS (for now). Install the MAC version of (free) Foobar2000. Mostly for checking out the DLNA output of Asset independent of your players. Your Node Nano apparently won't work with DLNA but the other two do. However the Node Nano does work with Apple Airplay (unsure of the quality though.) Also if you share the brick drive on the Mac, the Node Nano should be able to see it. Play with this setup, pound on it, see what works, what doesn't. What you like, what you don't, particularly when it comes to the user interfaces and selecting what you want to hear. Make sure that the tagging when you rip works well with both Asset and your playback devices. Figure out how most or all of the options work with the hardware you own. The only down side of doing this is that the MAC has to remain booted up whenever you want to listen to music.

In the long run, you may find alternatives that work well for you. A NAS is nice but an expensive computer which probably has a lifetime of 10 years or so and often requires firmware/software updates to remain secure in a world full of hackers. (I spent an hour loading a firmware update to my QNAP last night, the second one this month...)

If you only are planning to use the NAS for storing music, you might want to consider going the Raspberry Pi route similar to what Gary is doing. Save your money and some of your headaches. If you decide you want to go the DLNA route, Asset has a version specifically designed for the Pi.

But don't go out spending a fortune on hardware until you find out what you like and don't like about what you've got. And, since all of these devices have a learning curve, don't over-complicate things to start so you never get it running, get frustrated and give up.

John

[garym]

I always say that if I was waiting for computers to get cheap enough and simple enough before I bought my first one, I'd still not have a computer. By the way, my first computer was an Apple ][ +, purchased in 1980 I think. No hard drive, no floppy drives, tiny RAM, monochrome monitor, and I think cost over $2,000 (in 1980 dollars).

[sculen]

Going to try Asset. Thanks! Extremely helpful. Enjoyment, not headaches

[GBrown]

Going to try Asset. Thanks! Extremely helpful. Enjoyment, not headaches

It is my audio server, has been for a very long time. It is very dependable, fast, and lightweight. And there are options to use sorting tags to ensure John Lennon shows up under the "L's" like every music server should!

No NAS required in my case. Just an old PC I have dedicated to running as a media machine with a 6TB hard drive* that hold music and movies. It doesn't even have a monitor, I access it by Remote Desktop if I need to make any system changes. Asset for local music and Plex for movies.
*I have several separate backup drives to ensure there are no nasty surprises someday.

For more info and support head over to the Asset forum.

[schmidj]

Hi Gary, sorry for taking this off the thread again...

The first computer I actually bought was a "big board" kit, a Z80 processor which ran CPM (a precursor to DOS for those too young to know.) I paid extra for 64K (yes, K) of memory. I paid something like $2000 1981 dollars for a pair of 8 inch floppy drives. No hard drive. I also bought an Epson dot matrix printer, the screen was a 9 inch B&W video monitor I scrounged (appropriated) from work (ABC TV then.) I had some crazy text writing software, a copy of the D-Base database and some other odds and ends and did some useful work on it.

My actual first computer access was as an undergraduate at WPI, on an IBM 1620 in 1964. At Grumman where I was hired for my "knowledge" of Fortran, they had 7094 and later 360s, batch mainframes. Since the operator saw what was running, no G jobs there, but the engineering department had its own 1620 with a nice line printer, And the keypunch ladies were cool at punching cards for what were obviously G jobs. Then Adelphi University, where I was studying for my masters and remained associated with until the late 1990s got initially a CDC 3300 and a succession of machines, eventually dial up modem access and basically for student, faculty and staff to do whatever they wanted. So for many years that was where I did most of my computing. About 1990 we got Internet access at Adelphi, and email, in fact when I left the University in 1995, my email account on a networked/dialup PDP machine remained active for some years until they shut the machine off and took it out the door. But after I left Adelphi, in 1995, I bought my own laptop with dial up (and shortly later a cable modem).

The ABC IT department in the late 1970s and later didn't want us engineers anywhere near their mainframes, no Fortran or Cobol, etc. They eventually broke down and allowed dialup APL, one of the more obtuse programming languages ever written. (Google it) I never did anything useful on it but one of the other engineers did write some programs. But about 1981, the same time I built my Big Board, the engineering department bought its own Radio Shack TRS 80, referred to by some as a Trash 80. It also ran CPM. We put it to good use.

We eventually got some early PCs at ABC, finally one for each of us, networked by Arcnet, ABC IT had nothing to do with it. Eventually ABC IT developed its own (quite unreliable, it kept crashing) PC network, replacing all those expensive IBM terminals. But that got us Internet access at work, years after I had it at home. +

I certainly spent enough money on computers, not waiting too long for them to get cheaper. And now you can buy a Pi for what, not much over $100 with a power supply and case that has far more computing power than those 360s at Grumman which cost millions.

[schmidj]

Sculen, yes, play with your laptop and exiting hardware. You'll probably still have headaches, it goes with the business. But if you read some of the threads on this board in the Asset section, read the setup notes for Asset and if necessary, ask on the board for help, you'll get it running and you can play with it. As I recall, the default configuration it as it downloads should pretty much just work, once you tell it where your music is stored.

Do realize the goal should be something that you can use and are reasonably happy with. If you demand total perfection, you'll never get to use it, just spend too much money. Once you get used to it, it should become more obvious where you need to add hardware/software and what to get.

John

[garym]

Hi Gary, sorry for taking this off the thread again...

The first computer I actually bought was a "big board" kit, a Z80 processor which ran CPM (a precursor to DOS for those too young to know.) I paid extra for 64K (yes, K) of memory. I paid something like $2000 1981 dollars for a pair of 8 inch floppy drives. No hard drive. I also bought an Epson dot matrix printer, the screen was a 9 inch B&W video monitor I scrounged (appropriated) from work (ABC TV then.) I had some crazy text writing software, a copy of the D-Base database and some other odds and ends and did some useful work on it.

My actual first computer access was as an undergraduate at WPI, on an IBM 1620 in 1964. At Grumman where I was hired for my "knowledge" of Fortran, they had 7094 and later 360s, batch mainframes. Since the operator saw what was running, no G jobs there, but the engineering department had its own 1620 with a nice line printer, And the keypunch ladies were cool at punching cards for what were obviously G jobs. Then Adelphi University, where I was studying for my masters and remained associated with until the late 1990s got initially a CDC 3300 and a succession of machines, eventually dial up modem access and basically for student, faculty and staff to do whatever they wanted. So for many years that was where I did most of my computing. About 1990 we got Internet access at Adelphi, and email, in fact when I left the University in 1995, my email account on a networked/dialup PDP machine remained active for some years until they shut the machine off and took it out the door. But after I left Adelphi, in 1995, I bought my own laptop with dial up (and shortly later a cable modem).

The ABC IT department in the late 1970s and later didn't want us engineers anywhere near their mainframes, no Fortran or Cobol, etc. They eventually broke down and allowed dialup APL, one of the more obtuse programming languages ever written. (Google it) I never did anything useful on it but one of the other engineers did write some programs. But about 1981, the same time I built my Big Board, the engineering department bought its own Radio Shack TRS 80, referred to by some as a Trash 80. It also ran CPM. We put it to good use.

We eventually got some early PCs at ABC, finally one for each of us, networked by Arcnet, ABC IT had nothing to do with it. Eventually ABC IT developed its own (quite unreliable, it kept crashing) PC network, replacing all those expensive IBM terminals. But that got us Internet access at work, years after I had it at home. +

I certainly spent enough money on computers, not waiting too long for them to get cheaper. And now you can buy a Pi for what, not much over $100 with a power supply and case that has far more computing power than those 360s at Grumman which cost millions.

Interesting stuff. Yeah, I purchased a separate floppy drive (5.25") for my Apple ][+ and had an Epson dot matrix printer. And I used "Visicalc" for spreadsheets and I think "Apple Writer" or "Easy Writer" for word processing. (I used a hole punch to create a separate notch on the floppies so I could "turn over" the floppy and use the back side for storage, doubling the amount of storage on the floppy.) I think the entire package was $3,000 back then. My buddy had a "Trash 80" with CPM. And in the mid 1980s I added a 300 baud modem. I used this in grad school to dial in to the university computer system. I could then submit jobs using JCL language to the university mainframe (an IBM 360 I think). Back then I mostly used FORTRAN programing to extract data from "tapes" that were loaded on the mainframe. In the 1970s I initially learned programing using COBOL (and submitting jobs to the mainframe by reading in 80 column punch cards).

We've come a long way!

[sculen]

The Asset and LMS tools both look good. In looking through my CDs, curious - how does it know that John Lennon s/b Lennon, John (under L) but that band names that look like a person'e name e.g., Pink Floyd, s/ stay as Pink Floyd (under P)?

[garym]

The Asset and LMS tools both look good. In looking through my CDs, curious - how does it know that John Lennon s/b Lennon, John (under L) but that band names that look like a person'e name e.g., Pink Floyd, s/ stay as Pink Floyd (under P)?

It knows because YOU told it by entering an ARTISTSORT or ALBUMARTISTSORT tag for John Lennon as Lennon, John when you ripped the CD. This was addressed earlier in the thread. And for Pink Floyd i simply would not enter a sort tag.

All this said, I decided long ago to not use sort tags. So i have to browse to “J” in my library to see the artist John Lennon. I even rearranged my physical library to match this.

[simbun]

The Asset and LMS tools both look good. In looking through my CDs, curious - how does it know that John Lennon s/b Lennon, John (under L) but that band names that look like a person'e name e.g., Pink Floyd, s/ stay as Pink Floyd (under P)?

If you have Album Artist Sort and Artist Sort enabled under CD Ripper > Menu > CD Ripper Options > Tags & Filenames > Meta Data & ID Tag > Options: Write ID Tags then the tags will be populated during the rip process using data from one of the supported metadata providers (CD Ripper > Menu > Active Providers).

The default configuration of AssetUPnP is to use the Sort tags if they exist (AssetUPnP > Edit Advanced Settings > General Settings: Sorting Tag Handling).

[garym]

And if not filled in, you can do it yourself on the tag tab in the lower enter of ripper screen (or check to see what is filled in there). May have to add the tag in that section. Click on add tag and type artistsort. Explained earlier in thread when this previously came up.

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/other-topics/general/332162-several-questions?p=332938#post332938

[sculen]

Thanks garym. Was struggling to find it but went back to your instructions and eventually found all the settings in ID & Tag. Do I really need both ARTISTALBUMSORT and ARTISTSORT or just ARTISTALBUMSORT since that determines hoe the albums are alphabetized?

[garym]

Thanks garym. Was struggling to find it but went back to your instructions and eventually found all the settings in ID & Tag. Do I really need both ARTISTALBUMSORT and ARTISTSORT or just ARTISTALBUMSORT since that determines hoe the albums are alphabetized?

Entirely up to you. In my own case, I sometimes browse my library by ALBUMARTIST and other times by "track artist" (ARTIST). The ARTIST may not be the same as ALBUMARTIST. So *if* I was a SORT tag user (I'm not), I'd likely fill in both ALBUMARTISTSORT and ARTISTSORT.

[sculen]

Thanks again. With all this help here and finally reading the entire instructions (I believe so , at least everything I could find), I'm now doing my restart in FLAC, and starting out with my Various Artists (Compilations in dbpa terms). And just when I was feeling confident, I noticed that the album art does not show up on each individual track, only the one jpeg file at the end. ?