The Worst Music Mess?

“Is this the worst mess you’ve ever seen?” It’s one of our most frequently asked questions, usually posed when we’re called onsite to deal with a home entertainment issue. In most cases the problems aren’t massive and it’s pretty easy to find a polite way to sidestep the question.

Except on Monday. By a county mile I cam across the worst mess I’ve ever come across.

I’ll give you a flavour of the issues by describing the hardware. A PC, an iMac, a Sonos system with ten zone players. Next to the iMac were three iPad devices - two Classics with stick on labels, then an iPod Touch in a labelled box. Nestling amongst the Sonos boxes were three iPod docks, and yes, each dock had its own iPod Classic.

Then I was told there was a Mac Mini, and sure enough next to the Sonos boxes and the router, in a basement cupboard, there was a little silvery box with a tray containing a flip up screen, keyboard and a mouse. Then I saw the WD My Book Live NAS drive.

How did this mess come about? Here’s the history. Initially the client had a PC and naturally they put their music on it. A while later they decided to move from the PC to the iMac, their music was copied across by the Apple install man. Using the Mac resulted in a larger music library on the Mac, and a stack of classical music CDs ready to be ripped.

Not wanting to rip the CDs themselves, and the Sonos installer not being prepared to do it for them, they hired a student to rip the CDs. The Mac Mini was bought to give the student something to work on, hence that unit.

While the student was ripping the CDs they decided to install the NAS drive because the client didn’t want to have to leave the iMac on when (in due course) the Sonos system was linked up. However once the Mac Mini project was completed nobody seemed to know how to get all the music onto the NAS drive, so various genres of music was downloaded to its own dedicated iPod Classic. Each iPod was planted in its own Sonos dock, so that the in-house music system had something to broadcast.

Where can I begin to describe the problems the household had with all this. First the music ripped onto the Mac Mini had vast gaping holes - none of it had genre information attached. As the Mini didn’t connect to the rest of the home network none of the music on that could be shared, it couldn’t be accessed on the iMac, it couldn't be put onto any of the other iPods. As the iPod Classics driving the Sonos system sit in docks all day, and the docks are in an airless cupboard they frequently seize up. When that happens nobody can access that genre of music in the house until some kind family member does a hard reset. A problem that’s happening more and more often, iPods simply aren’t meant to run all day every day.

The client doesn’t know how to add music, there’s effectively a berlin wall between the Apple iMac in-house and the Sonos system. They have a bag of new music they’d like to add but if they add it to the Mac Mini somebody has to stand in the cramped cupboard ripping CDs. Oh, and as the Mac Mini daren’t be connected to the internet, all track data has to be entered by hand.

Maybe I’m being picky but despite the effort that had been invested in CD ripping (including some poor soul who had stood ripping 400+ CDs onto the Mac Mini) the music had been ripped to Apple AAC at just 256 kbps. Now that’s more than fine for an iPod on the tube but a massive Sonos investment real ought to be driven by higher quality music, Apple Lossless.

The way ahead?

After some head scratching I think the place to head towards is one where all the family’s music is stored in a single place. That should be the NAS drive. How do we do this? Well the Mac Mini has been dragged from its subterranean lair and the music has been removed to another drive.

As the iMac is connected to the internet and the home network the music recovered from the Mini will be plugged into that, where we’ll spend a few hours tidying up the resulting music library. Once that’s done we’ll copy that all onto the NAS drive, setting the iMac to rip into Apple Lossless for any music they might rip themselves in the future.

Once that’s done we’ll make sure the Sonos system is connected to the same router as the rest of the system, and that the Sonos Controller program points to the shared drive on the NAS. When that’s been done all the music will be available on each computer or Sonos unit in the home, any iPod could be loaded with any selection of music regardless of genre. When this is achieved the client will have a few iPods and iPods Sonos docks surplus to requirements.

Pogoplug - Love at First NAS

In terms of technology I love Apple the most, followed by Kodak. But from this week there’s been a new love in my life - a pink bit of technology called the Pogoplug. And if you had one I think you’d love yours too.

Before I tell you why Pogoplug has joined us let me tell you something about our technology set up. We have six computers installed in an office at the back of the house. They’re a mixture of Mac and Windows PCs. Through these boxes we provide analogue to digital services - cd ripping, photo scanning and video conversion. Over the years the size of the hard drives inside each machine has edged up but we still have two terrabyte drives attached via USB ports onto which we’ve been copying completed work projects. Frankly, it’s all got a bit chaotic. Yes, we can find files when we need to but it takes longer than necessary.

We have also been worrying about data loss while in the middle of photo scanning projects. Large image libraries are forming a bigger percentage of what we do so files are on the computers connected to each scanner for maybe a couple of weeks. If the awful were to happen and one of those drives went down, several days worth of production could be lost. At the moment we back up, manually, each evening but it’s easy to forget.

Our photo scanning service offers an online album for print scanning clients. One of the benefits of the online service is it takes a day or more out of getting digital files back to clients. Photos scanned today can be put online today, and downloaded by clients. It’s proved popular with people doing last minute photo books or who just don’t want to have to wait. We’d like to offer the same service to people who ask us to scan slides and negatives, but we can’t because the maximum file size offered by Zenfolio is too small.

A few weeks ago I started to scratch my head to find a way to first of all consolidate the large backup drives we’ve been using so files could be accessed from any of our computers, to see if there was a way to make large jpg and TIFF files of scanned negatives available to clients and to deliver a backup strategy we presently lack.

My first thought was a NAS device. Network attached storage, as the name suggests, is a hard drive which hangs off your router and is thus open to any network connected computer. We’ve often dealt with these on behalf of clients who want their files accessible through their homes, without the necessity of having to leave a PC switched on all the time. This would have been a solution but all the files from two large drives would have had to be copied across the network to their new home, and the investment made in the present USB drives wasted.

Enter Pogoplug - which turns up to four USB drives into network attached storage, instantly. OK, not exactly instantly, they say it takes one minute to get the system configured, but as close to instantly as makes no difference. When my unit arrived I followed the really simple instructions, got the Pogoplug registered and online, then connected the two USB drives into ports at the back. A few clicks and whirs later and the folders on both drives became available over our network.

I should clarify, you can make connected drives and their contents accessible in one of two ways. First, via an internet web browser interface; second via an extension of the file management system. This means for me I can look on my Mac via browser and see two USB drives. I can create folders, drag and drop, delete contents exactly as I do with the internal hard drive.

Good points? Very simple, elegant extension of file management system, very fast even though the main Mac access to the Pogoplug is via a wi-fi connection rather than hard wired ethernet. I can add much more capacity just by adding low-cost USB drives.

I am knocked out by the free iPad app. Not only can I access conventional data files but it manages streaming music. Sitting here now my iPad gets a signal from the floor above me, which is sent out of the house, into the office, the file is accessed though the Pogoplug and then sent back the same way. Wirelessly, faultlessly for over an hour.

We’ve yet to try the feature that should let clients access their digital files and download them direct to their systems, but if that works as it says on the box, it will be a big step forward.

Bad points? As far as I can see the Pogoplug backup software doesn’t replicate the folder structure we have on each system. Via the backup program I could restore one or more files but I can’t for the moment work out if it’s possible to restore a folder containing one clients work. That’s a very small issue, just dragging the client folder onto the relevant hard drive via the Mac file management system achieves what we need. I would have liked an FTP facility as from time to time people need to send us big files. It would have been great if they could have dropped them directly into our storage system.

Going forward we need to organise our file storage, so one drive will be designated for music and the other for photos. We’ll try to find a file naming system that will enable us to use Pogoplug’s backup software so we can recover a full set of clients image files during the course of a project, and then offer those for the client to download when the files are bigger than Zenfolio can handle. I’m feeling very positive about Pogoplug, can’t think why I didn’t buy one before.