I’m looking for a consolidated tutorial, or instructions for setting up a network music library accessible by Sonos devices. Something that will at least cover the basic requirements, system compatibility, etc.
I know this is a wide open topic, and dependent on OS and hardware, but I find myself starting from scratch, searching through other’s mistakes and questions, trying to solve problems that should be basic knowledge.
If you are ripping CD’s I suggest that you establish a printed “stylesheet” that lays out how to handle the “Meta Data”. This is sometimes called “Tags”. It is the Artist, Track title, Genre, Album Name, etc. Particularly for classical music, how do you want to handle the Orchestra, Conductor, Solo Artist, Composer. Do you want artist name in First, Last or Last, First order? Spend some time fussing with this on a few CD’s before ripping the bulk of your collection. Rip your collection in a lossless format. If you need a compressed format for some application, transcode this as a separate library. These days disk space is cheap.
When I rip, I’ll lash up as many computers as I can and set each ripper to open the CD tray when done. As the trays open, I’ll insert a fresh disc, check the suggested tagging and … er … let it rip. With a few computers I can easily rip 30 CD’s an hour. Another scheme uses only one computer while I’m otherwise working. I have a stack of CD’s nearby and drop one in as time allows. In terms of elapsed time for completing the project this is not the fastest scheme, but it hardly impacts my other workflows.
Make sure that the CD’s are clean before you rip. I have found that CD drives vary in their capability to read scratched discs. As I inspect each disc, I’ll stack the difficult CD’s by the machine most likely to be able to read the disc. At one point I had an old W95 machine that could (slowly) rip CD’s that would fluster actual CD players.
If you are ripping CD’s I suggest that you establish a printed “stylesheet” that lays out how to handle the “Meta Data”. This is sometimes called “Tags”. It is the Artist, Track title, Genre, Album Name, etc. Particularly for classical music, how do you want to handle the Orchestra, Conductor, Solo Artist, Composer. Do you want artist name in First, Last or Last, First order? Spend some time fussing with this on a few CD’s before ripping the bulk of your collection. Rip your collection in a lossless format. If you need a compressed format for some application, transcode this as a separate library. These days disk space is cheap.
Thanks, for the many suggestions. I’ll take a look at the suggested reading. I should have been more clear, I’ve been ripping for years, but only playing from my phone or on my PC. I’ve tried a few times to access the files from another device from the network, and use NAS, but never successful. Always get some type of an error “files now found”, “no file found”, “files not accessible”, etc.
I’ll view the reading mat’l. Thanks !
once you have a NAS, you have all your music there, and you can see it from your PC/Mac, then it should be relatively easy to point Sonos at it.
I recently re-did my synology disk station. I have not problems using it as a music library. Here’s the screen where you tell sonos where your librarie(s) are:
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