diff --git a/communal-music-server.md b/communal-music-server.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9c97ad4 --- /dev/null +++ b/communal-music-server.md @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +For the communal music player, means of access is also something to consider. +I'm personally quite comfortable with the minimal MPD client, [ncmpcpp](https://github.com/ncmpcpp/ncmpcpp), but the aim of a _communal_ music system is to entice others, potentially houseguests to use it too. +To ask them to use a TUI system whose name doesn't even contain vowels would be an exercise in the obtuse. +Therefore, I also want a means to interact with this music player which is ideally as straightforward as Spotify. diff --git a/nfs-mpd-nas-music-server.md b/nfs-mpd-nas-music-server.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b21d9af --- /dev/null +++ b/nfs-mpd-nas-music-server.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +# Setting up a network media drive with an NFS-enabled NAS and a Raspberry Pi + +I have a large digitised collection of music, and have been experimenting with ways to set up a communal music player in my living room without defaulting to Spotify, or any other such streaming platform. +Thus far I have used an old laptop with as much music as it will fit loaded onto it, running [MPD](https://www.musicpd.org/) and plugged into some speakers. +This is an OK solution, but has a few drawbacks: I'm limited to the disk of the laptop, the laptop uses more power than it needs to, and I kind of want that laptop back as a laptop! + +I also have a desktop machine from which I often work from home, and would like my music collection available there too. +Ideally, these should be stored in the same place, to save having to manage duplicate files and manually synchronising locations, since I am likely to add to my collection from a variety of locations. +I have spent enough time `rsync`ing albums between machines, life is too short even on a gigabit local network. + +I've recently had the good fortune to acquire a Synology NAS, so I'm going to use that to host my music collection. +Nothing I'm doing should be specific to Synology's hardware or software, as we'll be using [NFS](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NFS) to mount remote drives - but exposing an NFS shared folder to the network is therefore out of scope for this post. +I also had the luck to grab a Raspberry Pi from a pop-up store a few weeks ago, and felt that would make a perfect, low-power, unintrusive box to attach to the speakers. +Ostensibly, the Pi is overkill for just playing music, but it's better than a whole laptop and I'm sure I'll find other jobs for it to do as time goes on. + +## Set up a shared folder + +The first step is to centralise my music storage. +To do this, I created a shared folder from my NAS' web interface, and exposed it to the network. + +In my case, I had to specifically add permission for other devices to access the folder via NFS - such as the Pi, my desktop and my laptop. +It was therefore prudent to assign each of these machines a static IP on my network, so that the NAS can continue to recognise them. +I also had to set it to map all users to admin, but this is almost certainly a misconfiguration on my part - don't follow me for security advice, I am just tinkering! + +## Setting up the Pi +