Death to shuffle!

I have been relying on Plex for my media playing needs for a couple of weeks now (as I mentioned previously) and it has lead to an interesting revelation. I hate the shuffle button. Let me explain.

I most often use Plex via the web app and its interface is a bit simplistic for music streaming. There are no playlists, queues, repeat or shuffle options. You select an album that you want to listen to (or an individual track if you want) and press play. It plays through the album, in order, and that's it. If you want to skip around, you have to do it manually. Ditto if you want to put another album on. At first, I was looking for more options and functionality thinking that it had to be there. Surely I was just missing something. But I wasn't. It just doesn't have the familiar functionality of other music players. But I soon came to realize that this is exactly what I want from a music player.

Previously, my music listening experience usually included listening to a random selection of songs from my entire collection. Sometimes I would play through the tracks from all albums of a single artist, again usually at random. If I ever listened to an album through front to back, which didn't happen often, I would have several albums queued up and there would be no clear distinction between them. I even have key bindings to "next track", "previous track", and "play/pause," so with a twitch of my wrist I could skip tracks. As such, I let my music collection get into horrible disarray. I had singles lying around, parts of albums, mislabeled tracks that would show up under several different artist listings. Finding and playing a single album was often difficult anyway.

So after switching to Plex and being "forced" into respecting the Album again thanks to its limited interface, I have since re-connected with my music in a way that I have been missing for so long, but didn't know what to do about it. I'm going to go into a "back in my day" spiel here, forgive me:

When I was younger I spent much of my spare cash on CDs. I had hundreds of them, and cherished my monster Case Logic folders full of discs. I loved spending time in record shops, fingering through racks of plastic cases, searching for something new to listen to. I had made a ritual of opening a newly purchased CD, always just after leaving the store, peeling the plastic shrink wrap away just so, popping the cover off at the hinge to make removing the sticker across the top easier. The art, the liner notes, the disc itself were all part of the experience and made the whole thing tangible.

Playing music in a single disc CD player added to the interactivity. You had to make a deliberate choice, flipping past other options. While it's not a monumental effort to change discs, doing so is enough of a hindrance that I didn't do it often. Once an album was on, I left it on and let it play through.

MP3s, as much as I love them, have taken this experience from me. After some reflection, I'm now realizing that this is not OK. Music used to be hugely important to me, and since making the switch to 100% digital music, I've lost most of my passion. This isn't entirely the fault of the MP3. I'm older and busier and don't have as much time to search for new bands or learn more about my favorite artists. I don't have a car any longer, and I always found the car to be a great place to enjoy music. On top of that, I've lived in a rather transient state for the last 10 years, and always in apartments, so I haven't collected any stereo equipment to speak of. I listen to music on my laptop almost all of the time. This isn't an environment that is conducive to sitting back and taking an album in.

Anyway, my stripped down media player is letting me get back some of the "old school" experience that I'm now realizing that I've been missing, especially when playing something on the iPad. The album art displays across the full screen, which I hold in my hands. This feels kind of like sitting next to my stereo listening to something while holding the disc, admiring the artwork. I only wish that I could get a full liner notes experience, and flip through a set of artwork, lyrics, and whatever other treasures the artists chose to leave me. Now that so many people consume their music using devices with big, beautiful touch screens on them, it's time that some kind of MP3 linear note system becomes standard. I want to dig deeper into my music, and interact with it again.

I can live without CDs, without a physical product in hand. I can get used to shopping for music on Amazon or iTunes rather than in a (preferably musty) record shop. But I argue that the Album, as a concept, still has tremendous value and should be given respect again. This guy knows what I'm talking about. Plex, with its lack of a shuffle button, has helped me do just that. And the Album should still be, as it always was, more than just an auditory experience. Just like a movie is more than just something to look at, an Album is more than just something to listen to.

Master of my domain

I'm in the middle of a total overhaul of my home network and multimedia collection. Here are some details and thoughts on the matter.

I got a free computer from work a couple of months ago (P4 3 GHz, 2 GB ram) and have since bought and installed a 1 TB hard drive, installed Lubuntu, and set it up on my home network as a file and media server. It's plugged into the TV, but mostly operates sans head. When I need to tinker around with it, I do so via SSH or NX (my favorite remote desktop solution) from one of the laptops. I also setup some samba shares so that it would be easily accessible from our Mac. So now our network consists of the server, an iPad, a MacBook, and my work laptop.

One annoying thing about the iPad is that it's not very convenient to import videos or music onto it. One has to use iTunes (blech!) which doesn't accept many video formats, so conversion is usually required using e.g. Handbrake. In an effort to make my media easily accessible from any device, I installed Plex on the server, and it's fantastic. I just point it to my TV and movie directories, then it automatically grabs information about the shows from the web and displays them nicely in the app. I can access my entire library over the network via a web interface and stream content to any computer in the house. I can also watch everything on the iPad with the excellent iPad app (not free, but well worth the $5). There is no need to re-encode the videos, either, because the software does that on the fly, if necessary. I haven't noticed any performance issues using an older computer as the Plex server, but that might be because I don't have much HD video content.

Plex is great for music, too. I've moved my few hundred GB music library onto the server, and can listen to the entire collection from any device. My collection was a MESS though, so first I used Picard to organize everything. Picard is a nifty tool that scans MP3s and matches them with albums in its database. It can use file names and ID3 tags to search, as well as the audio "fingerprint" from the MP3 itself. I just review what it finds, accept its suggestions, and it will fix the ID3 tags and move/rename the files for me. Their database is extremely extensive, from my experience. I have a lot of obscure stuff and I have only found a few things to be missing so far.

I also have a LOT of photos distributed between a couple of portable HDDs, my laptop, and my wife's Mac. They're totally unorganized so I never look at them and this bothers me. To remedy this I've moved all of my pics to the server, but I want to be able to manage them intelligently from afar (i.e. the other side of the apartment). For this I'm using Lightroom on the Mac to organize and edit our photos. Lightroom is really powerful as both a photo manager and a non-destructive editor. It doesn't alter pictures directly, rather it maintains a "catalog" parallel to the photo files. All edits and Lightroom specific metadata (tags, ratings, etc) are stored in the catalog, as well as a pointer to the photo. Since the catalog doesn't actually contain the image data it doesn't take up nearly as much disk space as the photo library. So I store all of the pics on the server but maintain the Lightroom catalog locally on the Mac (making sure to backup regularly).

So now I just have to worry about backing everything up. The plan is to setup some cron jobs to execute rsync commands from the laptops every day. I only need to backup a few things like the Lightroom catalog and some documents (those that aren't already on the cloud... so not many actually). As for backing up the server, I have an external HDD attached to the server at all times to make a second copy of our photos (again, backed up via a cron'd rsync command every day). I will also keep a copy of my music and videos on a separate portable HDD. Those don't need to be backed up more than once a month or so since my media library doesn't change that quickly. 

So in the end, our digital content is much more secure and accessible, and that gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.