What would I need to do to put together a music server?
I currently have a ASUS Xonar card in my desktop along with a logitech z501 sound system, but would like to have one place to drop all of my music into and constantly have music in the background. My first idea was to get a raspberry pi and connect it to my network where it can access the music, but I was unsure if this could sufficiently drive the sound quality I would like. I have some parts where I could build a secondary desktop but wanted some other input first. Any ideas would be great!
Yes, a network drive would be sufficient for audio quality, the files are hardly big so they wont loose quality in order to stream over the network, so some sort of NAS would be fine.
What other speakers are you playing from?
I just have a Logitech Z501 system for now, but I'm always on the lookout for a receiver and full system so to speak. For now though I'm just trying to get the music all in one place and will upgrade the speakers in due time.
How much music do you have? I'd only put it on a network drive if you want to access it from everywhere in that case buy a small NAS and put he music on it because the only audio quality you'll be loosing will be from the logitech speakers, even if you do get a big setup the sound quality will be fine unless you go up into the $20,000 and onwards range. But if you are only going to be listening to music through your one computer then you're current PC will be just fine, you won't even need the audio card tbh.
As of now I have somewhere in the range of 250GB, but that is constantly growing. Does it also make a big difference of whether it is mp3 or FLAC?
Oh wow nice! DEFINITELY only go with mp3 and at 320kbps max, anything else beyond that is hardly distinguishable, if at all, and if it were to be distinguishable, it would be on $20K plus systems. FLAC is usually around 1000kbps, so don't go there haha.
There isn't really any hardware for music to make it sound better, nor is there anything purchasble today really that would worsen the quality of the music (storage wise). Just get another 1TB drive for your music (or general media) and just put it in in your PC, or get a 1TB NAS if you want to access the music from one source (the NAS) from multiple local locations.
Alright, in terms of a NAS, would you suggest just using a raspberrypi and putting together some sort of media player or no?
Nah i'd just straight plug the hard drive into the the Ethernet cable and then use the audio program (itunes, zune, vlc etc) to play the music.
Sounds like a plan to me. You may or may not know, but is there a USB to ethernet adapter where I can plug it into my switch directly, therefore connecting to the network?
Nah there isn't, you will want to get either a pre built one, witch will be just one hard drive in a case that plugs into the Ethernet like this http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=280 , or if you want room for expandability you could get something like this: http://youtu.be/44m66sXWU84?t=6m8s where you own your own hard drives.