Computer-stored music has gone way beyond dodgy downloads from suspect websites. Andrew Everard explains how to store your music

Recorded music's future is something of a theme in recent issues of Gramophone, thanks in no small part to Linn’s announcement a while back that it’s stopped making CD players, and the spin put on that news in certain quarters.

However, as I  explained in my Infidelities comment at the time, the company neither said that everyone was about to stop buying CDs, nor that the one true way is downloaded music.

Instead, it reported that a significant part of its customer base seems to be storing its music on home servers and accessing it via remote client units, and that’s something that makes a lot of sense should you want a multiroom set-up without all the complexity of a full custom‑installed system.

The equipment required for such a set-up can be very simple: a computer with a decent-sized hard drive and a CD-ROM transport, plus either an amplifier and a pair of speakers or an active speaker system will do it.

There are also hard-disk music servers designed to sit in the equipment rack and either deliver music direct to the amp and speakers or stream it over a home network to multiple “clients” or receivers, either using wired Ethernet or wireless wi‑fi connectivity.

The most flexible method involves the use of a Network Attached Storage device connected to a home router – usually the same access point used for internet distribution – and accessible by remote devices on the network.

One such NAS designed with music in mind is the RipNAS (pictured), an £875 unit complete with CD drive for ripping and 1TB of internal storage, with up to two 3TB add-ons, at £550 apiece, supported. Once the unit is set up, it’s simply a matter of feeding it discs as it rips then ejects them until you have your entire collection ready for use.

The slightly more laborious way involves using a computer to load the storage device over the network; but whichever way you choose to do it, you can opt for a variety of file formats and resolutions, from space-efficient low bit-rate MP3s – which I wouldn’t recommend – right up to lossless formats handling CD quality and even beyond.

As well as offering them as downloads, some labels even sell discs containing high-resolution music files, specifically designed to copied to such storage and played in this way.

And when it comes to playing them, you have a huge choice, from the likes of the Linn Majik DS‑I and Naim’s NaimUniti through to laptop computers, internet radios and even network-capable AV receivers.

I even tried a little rugby-ball-shaped device not so long ago called the Chumby: as well as delivering the weather forecast, Twitter and the like, it can also act as a simple music player.

So the CD isn’t dead – far from it. It’s just that the latest streaming music devices make it simpler than ever to have all your music to hand wherever and whenever you want to listen. A bit like an iPod for grown-ups, really.

How to store your CDs
At the most basic level, you can store a large CD collection on a home PC: almost every machine comes with both a generous hard drive and a CD drive built-in, and Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes software is both free and capable of storing music at up to 320kbps MP3, using Apple’s own lossless compression, or uncompresssed.

Although other ripping software is available, iTunes will be more than enough for most users, and using either a wired connection or a wireless system such as Apple’s Airport Express, the music can be connected to any hi-fi system with a spare line input.

However, that does put your music collection at the mercy of hard-drive failure, so it’s sensible to make a back-up to avoid having to re-rip everything. Even better, if you have a home network, is a Network Attached Storage device, preferably with mirrored drives for back-up security, connected to your router.

This can then be accessed by a range of devices around the home to play the music, as explained in the main article above, and the choice of music-streaming devices is growing extremely rapidly. You can even get to your music over the internet wherever you are in the world, using remote access software.

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