Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Yeah for sure, give it a try.

In the Vinyl Parlor I have my turntable, floorspeakers, and sub.  They're driven by an old integrated receiver/amp/DVD player that used to be my master bedroom home theater setup.  So I use the DVD player as a CD player and they sound fantastic, so much better than streaming.  The integrated amp has fairly limited output options for DSP on its 5.1 setting, but it's absolutely perfect for running 2.1 stereo sound, which is all I need in there.

You know, you can still go digital with high-quality source files. MP3 is lossy but at very high bitrates can be "close". But instead you can go FLAC, which is lossless, and still compress your CD files to store and play back at full fidelity. 

Apparently it's a much larger file size than MP3, of course... But you can solve that by buying more/larger hard drives 

You know, you can still go digital with high-quality source files. MP3 is lossy but at very high bitrates can be "close". But instead you can go FLAC, which is lossless, and still compress your CD files to store and play back at full fidelity.

Apparently it's a much larger file size than MP3, of course... But you can solve that by buying more/larger hard drives

Yeah, that's one thing I was working on for my home server before it went kaput, and I haven't replaced the hardware enough to resume the project.  I was trying to do all that during a time when financial resources were much more tight than they currently are.  I got this NAS thingy and used two old drives that my wife happened to have and set them up in RAID.....????....I don't remember which number....whichever one means they're duplicated.  They weren't that big on storage capacity, but they were big enough to hold our music, so although I could've gotten double the space, I chose to go with the array that would safely guard my files if one of the drives went ka-blooie.....which it promptly did after about two months of use.  

Everything is still safe on the remaining drive, and it actually functions, but the NAS beeps constantly to let me know that the RAID is faulty, and there's no way to disable that.  Plus, I'm not inclined to use that drive, because it might be my only remaining source for my files, and I can't afford to lose that.  I interfaced with that NAS through my Linux laptop, which was an old, old Windows PC originally....and.....that also sort of went kaput about the same time.  Not exactly, but the mother board is faulty to where you only get a few minutes after boot-up to do what you need to do, and after that the screen scrambles and you can't tell what you're doing anymore.  The drive functions, you're just blind.  So all my music was transferred from that to the NAS, but I can't really access it.  

If I were a real nerd, I'd know how to pull that drive out and connect it to another PC somehow.....but my nerd credentials don't extend into that arena.  My current laptop (at that time) had a pretty small hard drive, so I never kept my music on there.  Meaning, my music files are present in two locations that I can't easily get to.  My new laptop has plenty of space to house my music, so I'll probably just run the NAS from there when I get it going again.  

But in the meantime, I won't be able to reuse that drive in the server anyway.  As you undoubtedly know better than I, once you set the RAID, that's it, can't expand the space except by redoing the array and wiping whatever's there.  I'm going to kick it up to a TB or 2......my wife has a bunch of DVDs that I figured I might as well stick on the server as well.  That old drive is not nearly that big.  So I've got to get my music from the mostly defunct laptop somehow, and start over.  

I think I have a few more free total downloads from my Google Play account, but 1) Google Play got so stupid in the last 10 years that I can't stand to use it and can barely navigate it to find my actual music, and 2) I'm not sure anymore if the Google Play is current with the most current version of my music library.  I may have bought some stuff since I was using that.....can't remember.

Anyway, the point is I was going to try FLAC, though I wasn't sure how it actually worked so that my .mp3 and .m4a files expanded to a meaningful larger file size.  It makes sense that a file can be expanded to a larger file type, yes, but I don't get how a compressed, lossy file can gain sound quality back.  But whatever.  

Spotify streams at 320, and I really don't think I can hear the difference between that and a .wav file.  I'm not sure I can hear the difference between even 128 and a .wav.  But, as I say, I'll have to test that out on my current speakers.  It only just occurred to me that when I used CDs, I always had subpar speakers, home or car, and since I've had good speakers, I've only used streaming/.mp3 files.  

I feel like at least a 1/3 of my library, if not half, is 128 bit rate files that I purchased from iTunes.  I can't load up my entire library again from CDs, because it no longer originated from CDs.  A nerd friend of mine said I could convert everything to FLAC, but that's where my earlier skepticism comes in.  

Of course it's not just the quality of the stream, it's also the devices I've allowed myself to listen to music on, as the years have passed.

I went from always running albums or CDs through a quality HiFi system, to streaming over bluetooth speakers or Alexa devices or whatever.  That's entirely on me, but it just reinforces the massive difference in quality in the sound, when I go back to running my HiFi sources through HiFi equipment.

Gotcha. Mirror is RAID1, BTW.

I'd highly recommend getting an external drive just so you can pull the files off and store them somewhere. Depending on the NAS, you may (should be, quite frankly) also be able to replace the failed internal drive and it'll re-mirror the files. If this is truly an older NAS with low capacity, an external or a replacement shouldn't be that pricy. I.e. if you're talking about kicking it up to "a TB or 2", you're not talking about much capacity at all.

If you do that, and you want to replace the RAID1 with two higher capacity drives, you can offload to a small external and then drop both bigger drives in, build the RAID again, and then copy them back on.

BTW I think Spotify, if you're paying for premium, streams lossless now.

I guess I could do that, didn't really think about it.  

You are correct, the Synology NAS will rebuild the entire setup on a replaced drive from the remaining good drive.  Thus, why I chose RAID1 in the first place.  But, that drive is something like 500 MB, and from what I understand, even if I bought a new 4 TB drive and stick it in there to mirror, it's still going to have a 500 MB max, because that's how the array was set up.  So to really increase my capacity, I've got to replace both drives and initialize a new array.  Ergo, my current mirror is useless.  

But your solution sounds workable.  I have an external hard drive I use to back up my PCs.  But I should be able to just install the Synology software on the new PC, get my music off of the remaining NAS drive onto my laptop, drop some new drives in the NAS, and rebuild from my PC.  For whatever reason I've only been thinking about this in terms of needing to get into my old laptop to get at my files in order to rebuild the server.  I hadn't even considered getting them off of the server.  

Good thing you Purdue nerds are around or I'd never get anywhere.  

The next challenge after that will be converting all my iTunes .m4a files to FLAC, or something that PLEX can read.  I was irritated to learn--though not surprised--when I briefly had it all working before one of the drives crashed, that PLEX can't/won't read iTunes format.  

Seriously, I've been through this a couple of times with iTunes.  When I first uploaded my library to Google Play, I learned that iTunes purchases included something called DRM and it blocked me from playing those files anywhere except iTunes.  I had to learn about that nonsense, download a program from some independent programmer, strip the DRM off the files, and then upload them.  Apparently, even though I'd bought those songs, Apple didn't really want to let me own them.  A-holes.  I don't care if stripping the DRM off was illegal.  I bought that stuff, it's mine, I should be able to do what I want with it.  

Then I learned that for whatever reason, PLEX can't "see" the .m4a files.  It shouldn't be a DRM issue....I think all my files should be DRM-free now.  It just doesn't know how to read files that I bought from iTunes.  Ugh.  That will be a long, hit and miss process to fix.  I don't have a list of stuff I bought from iTunes.  I'll just have to fix the files little by little, as I try to listen to them and realize they appear to be missing.  

F Apple and iTunes.  Cue the grumpy old man thread.