My house is old enough that it doesn’t have neutrals, so I’m kinda limited in what I can install. I’ve been using smart plugs by thirdreality and battery powered buttons. No problems with the smart plugs yet.

THIRDREALITY ZigBee Smart Plug 4 Pack with Real-time Energy Monitoring,15A Outlet, Zigbee Repeater,ETL Certified,ZigBee Hub Required,Work with Home Assistant,Compatible Echo Devices and SmartThings https://a.co/d/05vm2VMC

Me too! Not much to look at but it’s a great player on iOS. On Linux, I like SonixD.

I use Jellyfin. I think in your use case, each user would be setup have their own library. You can enable or disable library on a per user basis as will as a per client basis.

Downside is that the default web interface isn’t great as a music player. It does the job but it’s not great.
Other hand, multiple music-first clients exist for a lot of different platforms. Odds are good you can find a client that suits how you listen to music.

Edit: said collection when I meant library.

It’s doable. Stick to the 7b models and it should work for the most part, but don’t expect anything remotely approaching what might be called reasonable performance. It’s going to be slow. But it can work.

To get a somewhat usable experience you kinda need an Nvidia graphics card or an AI accelerator.

It always amazes me to realize that we now have microcontrollers as powerful as early computers. It one thing to know that a graphing calculator has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft, another to see it demonstrated like this.

@tal has already given a really good answer. To add to it, this thread might help you some: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/11963996 I was asked what I thought was “better” than a raspberry pi. Came back with an eBay search and a trio of suggestions in the price range of a Pi 4. TLDR is whatever you have currently will probably work fine but if you need to buy hardware, there are plenty of low cost options. And of course, Pi’s also work fine for anything they are capable of, which is most things.

When I started self hosting, Raspberry Pi’s were the cheapest option available. I learned fairly quickly that the SD card was the weakest part of them but not long after the Pi3 came out we were able to boot off of USB drives which solved that issue. I think I had 8 SSDs hanging off of one pi before I finally decided to plop down the money for a tower. I then added a pair of 6 port SATA cards and added even more storage to that system. Eventually I was hosting so many things that I was running out of RAM, So I bought a second used tower, this one with a much newer processor and a lot more RAM. Now I run both with the old system running as a NAS and the new system hosting my other services. I wouldn’t stress about hardware too much. Hardware can grow with you, to a point.

Mini PCs are too small to house internal drives

Most mini PCs I’ve heard of (and quite a few thin clients) use m.2 drives for internal storage. Not difficult to upgrade. I’ve also heard of a few that had ports and internal space for 2.5 inch SSDs.

I’ve still got a few vintage Napster MP3s from the 56k days.

Damn, I envy you. I lost all my digital music from those days to disk rot and a hard drive failure. Wish someone told me back then that CD-R was not a good backup medium. Or that I had checked on the disks before I needed them. Live and learn.

I use Jellyfin to stream both video as well as audio. Media is stored on my NAS via a samba share.

Much like yourself, I’m more frequently streaming music. The default apps aren’t great for music (and horrid for audio books) but there are music specific apps for most iOS, Android, and most PC OSs. Can’t remember what app I use on Linux (don’t use it much) but I use FinAmp on iOS a lot.

Navidrome is probably a better self hosted music service , but I didn’t see the point when Jellyfin plus FinAmp and met my streaming audio needs.

As for where I got my music collection, I’m an old fart whose music collection predates digital music. Early stuff was ripped from whatever format it was on to digital a while ago. Nowadays I tend to buy CDs and rip them to flac or buy digital from Band Camp or Amazon.

I haven’t seen the need since iTunes and Amazon Music came around, but if you wanted to go sailing you can find popular releases and discographies of popular artists on public torrent sites easily enough. There are also several programs available that can take a Spotify playlist and automatically download the music from YouTube.

While you didn’t ask about audio books, it might help someone else. While I can access my audiobook collection from Jellyfin, it is so bad at audiobooks that that I don’t bother. For audiobooks I use a service called AudioBookshelf. Great for podcasts as well. The audiobooks themselves I generally buy from Audible and then use Libation to strip the DRM.

I do both. I buy the media, usually a physical release, and then put it on my Jellyfin server to stream to my devices. Benefits of streaming, but with the piece of mind that my favorite music, movies or tv shows won’t go away.

I don’t know of ANY reason to go with spinning-platters, nowadays.

Price per terabyte is lower on HDDs. For bulk storage they are currently the best path. SSDs are catching up though, and there are cases where a SSD based NAS does make sense. But most folks at home don’t have the network capability to fully utilize their speed. Network becomes the bottleneck.

Given how old the system is, I’m not sure how long it would survive that type of duty. Power up and downs are a lot rougher on components than if they just stay running.

• https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/27512/intel-pentium-d-processor-820-2m-cache-2-80-ghz-800-mhz-fsb/specifications.html
• https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-pentium-d-820-915-920
• https://www.cpu-world.com/benchmarks/Intel/Pentium_D_820.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D
• https://pcper.com/2005/06/intel-pentium-d-820-2-8-ghz-dual-core-review/16/

If you switch the HDD for a pair of SDD (one storage, one swap), it would be somewhat useable. Better to increase the amount of RAM if possible. If I remember correctly, 2-4 GB of RAM was not uncommon at this time period. Although NixOS or a really light Debian install might be able to stay within that amount of RAM. So yea, I think it’s feasible.

Good Idea? Perhaps not so much. That proc has a TDP of 95W. Haven’t found anything on it’s idle power draw, but I’d guess that that system would have a fairly heavy power draw. The slow speed of the processor and low amount of RAM would probably limit the amount of traffic you could put through it. Additionally, the age of the components would probably cause reliability issues.

Generally I like to tell folks to use what they have. Repurposing old hardware is better for the environment and usually the wallet, but this system would probably would not be my first, second or even third choice for any workload. I haven’t found a benchmark comparing the two, but I think a Pi3 would probably run dead even with this system at a far lower power draw. Although the Pi3’s ethernet does run on it’s USB bus (I think), along with it’s storage, so that would slow it down for this workload. If you wanted to run traffic faster, I would probably look into the used micro PC market at the $75-$150 USD price point. This system is old enough to vote. Something merely 10 years old would be considerably faster.

A couple of years ago I was using a transcription service, though that may be of less help nowadays due to AI transcription. Pay was crap, but it was better than nothing for me at the time. The service I was working with seems to have shut down, but you might try https://www.transcribeme.com/freelancers/

Last time I needed to do this was 2006ish. Like I said it’s been a while. Worth checking into though. Might need the cd burner installed (or emulated) for the option to be available.

I also seem to recall that thee were a couple of projects attempting to strip the DRM off of Apple’s proprietary music format. Not sure how those turned out.

And no, as far as I know, it is not possible to go straight from Apple Music to mp3, or whatever format you prefer. It has to be downloaded to iTunes first.

Not sure if it is still possible, but the work flow for this used to be to use iTunes to burn the tracks or album to a CD and then rip the newly created CD to a format of your choice.

If you don’t have a CD burner, I seem to remember it was possible to emulate a cd burner on Windows and create an iso instead. I don’t remember how I did that though. I was running XP back then and that was a long time ago.

Edit: adding link to iTunes software

Good.

Wait, I thought that was Reddit.

I’m not sure I would trust Google enough to use them, even if they were resurrected. Between their ethically dubious behavior and their tendency to kill off services I had come to rely on, I have very little trust for Google anymore.

Never have I wanted something to wind up in the Google Graveyard more.

It’s not difficult to self host. Pretty light on resources. Documentation on how to do so could use some work though. I believe I used a docker image to get up and running.

The main reason I personally don’t allow public signups on my instance is that US law is rather chaotic. If section 230 gets cancelled or repealed I don’t want to be held responsible for what some random person chose to write. It may not be a big risk at the moment but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it.