[MrDennis]

I have a external hard drive with a folder of all my digital music, the main folder is titled "Music" and inside that folder is many sub-folders with album and/or artist name and the individual music files inside those folders. The "Music" folder is 288GB in size with 42,000 files (M3P & AAC). I also know there are a lot of dupe titles in there as well.


What do I need to integrate and manage this media into my HT system? I'm thinking hardware something and software something but am a little clueless in this area.


Thanks
Dennis

 

[Jawaburger]

I have a external hard drive with a folder of all my digital music, the main folder is titled "Music" and inside that folder is many sub-folders with album and/or artist name and the individual music files inside those folders. The "Music" folder is 288GB in size with 42,000 files (M3P & AAC). I also know there are a lot of dupe titles in there as well.


What do I need to integrate and manage this media into my HT system? I'm thinking hardware something and software something but am a little clueless in this area.


Thanks
Dennis

I'll assume you use a Windows based computer. You can use Windows Groove Music, or Windows Media Player, or if you prefer something not made by Microsoft you try downloading foobar2000. If you want to pay for a media player, try J River Media Player. Any of these will have no problem playing your music. Kodi is another good free one.

Any of these players have a setting where you tell them where your music folder is, and they will figure the rest out, including album art, etc. You will need to keep your drive plugged into the computer for these to work properly.

 

[MrDennis]

I'll assume you use a Windows based computer. You can use Windows Groove Music, or Windows Media Player, or if you prefer something not made by Microsoft you try downloading foobar2000. If you want to pay for a media player, try J River Media Player. Any of these will have no problem playing your music. Kodi is another good free one.

Any of these players have a setting where you tell them where your music folder is, and they will figure the rest out, including album art, etc. You will need to keep your drive plugged into the computer for these to work properly.

Something like Kodi is what I was thinking for software and I do like the "they will figure the rest out, including album art, etc". My external hard drive and computer is in the downstairs off where I want it to stay. The HT is upstairs so I need something "Hardware" to put all this music on THAN plug (hardwire or WiFi??) into my HT system.

 

[Jawaburger]

You can use Nvidia Shield in your theater. It has streaming apps on it, and you can download Kodi to it as well, and it will network with your computer upstairs.

 

[MrDennis]

This hardware is pretty spendy but a "KALEIDESCAPE TERRA MOVIE SERVER" type hardware is something I had in mind.


My home network consist of a AT&T WiFi router downstairs, downstairs office with WiFi laptop and WiFi printer. Home Theater is upstairs and has a Denon AVR-X6500H receiver, DVD, cable box ETC. that are also connected via WiFi. No Cat5 cable in the house. So if I chose to rip DVD and/or grab music off my "downstairs external hard drive I need to put these files on a piece of "hardware" that is integrated into my HT system.


A local forum member invited me to his house to listen to the Klipsch RF-7III and he was pulling up music and movies and I asked what he was using and he stated he had a home network server tied into his system. Not sure if that's my answer but if I'm going down this road I might as well be thinking music and movies which means big storage hard drives.

 

[Jawaburger]

Best Buy regularly has their 8 TB and 10 TB HDD on sale for under $200. I have purchased 6 of them over the last year. For full disclosure, I am referring to the Western Digital EasyStore HDD. I just remove the cheap, plastic enclosure (shucking) and put the HDDs in my computer for media storage. I use Kodi to access my media.

 

[MrDennis]

Looking on the net and YouTube a HT server seems to be what I'm needing, a home built or off the shelf solution.

 

[gmmW8P8Adz]

That receiver has HEOS functions, it can stream the music without additional hardware

 

[Nobr8ks]

I have a external hard drive with a folder of all my digital music, the main folder is titled "Music" and inside that folder is many sub-folders with album and/or artist name and the individual music files inside those folders. The "Music" folder is 288GB in size with 42,000 files (M3P & AAC). I also know there are a lot of dupe titles in there as well.


What do I need to integrate and manage this media into my HT system? I'm thinking hardware something and software something but am a little clueless in this area.


Thanks
Dennis

I manage my music (SMB shares, but mostly stream these days) from far too many (Kodi/LibreELEC) RaspberryPi's. Located behind all TV's, mounted behind in-wall touchscreens, or headless Pi directly connected to AVR/Amp (Controlled from my iPhone). Touchscreens feed centrally located receivers via Toslink cable (Monoprice toslink splitter) each can be independent to that room or used as whole-house music controller.