The other day Ben pointed out to me that I’m nearing a significant milestone.
See, I use this great open-source application called Subsonic to stream all my media. For you non-techies, this means that I run a small program on a computer at my house which can “beam” my music and movies to wherever I happen to be. If I’m on the road, I can use my cellphone; if I’m somewhere else, I can use any web browser. The awesomeness of this software is not to be understated – it is, quite honestly, the media solution I’ve been dreaming of for a very long time. In fact, it’s what finally moved me off the hard-disk based iPod model and into “the cloud.” For you techies, I run Subsonic on a four-drive NAS, running Windows Home Server in a JBOD redundant configuration. I keep this tiny machine in our master bedroom closet, where it has a dedicated line to the internet. The machine provides me with a whopping 4.66 terabytes of storage for my pictures, music, movies and saved television shows (a separate repository than our DVR). Using folder mirroring I am fault-tolerant against any single-drive failure. It’s a nice setup.
I use Subsonic daily; I drive to work while streaming music, I listen to music at work, etc. One of the neater features of the application is that I can enable any number of friends or family to also have access to the server and likewise stream all my content at will to their mobile devices or PCs. In this way, I’ve enabled a dozen or so music-minded folks who make regular use of the streaming server. Oftentimes I’ll be logged in listening to music and see a friend or two also streaming this or that. Subsonic even supports a rudimentary chat interface, so we can talk back and forth as we enjoy my growing library.
In fact, that “growing library” is what I stopped by to write about, for that’s exactly what Ben called my attention to. I hadn’t even noticed, but he sent me an instant message in the Subsonic interface yesterday saying “You’re close to cracking the 1TB mark!” I’m glad he did, because it seems like an important milestone to me. Check out the screenshot below from the Subsonic interface, where the application summarizes the available listening library:
For a few minutes I was so happy that I almost reached a terabyte of music. Then I realized that full-on 50% of this is movies (Subsonic doesn’t differentiate in its count). The real music-only size hovers just over 500GB of disk space. Nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, yet still not quite as exciting as the ten minutes where I thought I was on the verge of library-size domination.
Guess I’ll just have to continue legally purchasing music from iTunes and Amazon in a reach for that next goal.
Goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- out here - 2024
- coming on - 2019
- an orange afterglow - 2010
- sharaun can win anything - 2009
- hola amigos - 2008
- finance my backyard with CDs - 2004