Looking for some recommendations. My MacBook has hardly any storage and I need a better way of accessing my music. At the moment, I need to move stuff onto an old external HD when I need/want to clear storage space. A right pain in the arse.
Is cloud storage the best way to go?
Would need a decent amount of storage as I only use lossless files.
Get yourself a NAS drive. My dad has a better home setup than I do and he uses a QNAP - Master your digital files for work and daily life | QNAP which I’m planning to get as well next time I treat myself. You’ll have to check which one as I’m not sure but then you basically create your own personal streaming network except that you actually have the files and they’re stored locally.
I just bought one of these:
It’s lightning fast, nice and big (1TB) and very very portable.
Bought it to store ableton files and other stuff, as my macbook’s 500GB HD was getting full. I don’t regret it one bit.
I like cloud storage, but you have to pay a monthly fee which is annoying, although it’s nice to have the peace of mind that if any of your hardware gets damaged/stolen you are fine. Still, I like having my files instantly accessible to me, which is why I went the SSD route.
Cheers folks. Going to look at these.
Instant access is a definite. And I also use Ableton which is currently taking up a lot of room.
I have all mine on NAS drive too, works really well. Just don’t get a Sonos like I did.
I have a Synology DS220 with a Seagate 4Tb Iron Wolf disk, linked to a Denon DNP800-NE Network Music Player. I’m only using one of the two available disk bays. The fan runs quiet too, which is a bonus!
The NAS setup was £250 and works a treat. Easy setup, the interface is logical and easy to navigate, remote access via iOS/Android app similarly simple.
I got a NAS drive too, Western Digital - think it’s a pretty good solution. I don’t have a record player atm so all my vinyl isn’t getting played.
The one thing I can’t really get to grips with is having a browse through stuff in a virtual sense - I probably haven’t organised my collection properly but the metadata and all that really does my head in, as a lot of my files have been digitised from CD. I find that I have to almost remember what I’ve got in my head! Compilation albums seem to be another nightmare (for me at least) in the digital realm.
I thought Google Music was a good (free) solution too as you could upload all your own stuff and stream it/download it to your own devices - you could also update the album art, change titles etc. However since it changed to YouTube Music it’s crap, they make it less easy to find your uploads and you can’t download playlists (that you’ve made from your own music) to a device without subscribing - I barely use it now.