No doubt you have learnt your lesson and got a robust backup in place after that!
For me, backing up to a second NAS, with a server running on it to access the backup music library, means that you can carry on listening to music if your primary music store dies rather than having to replace drives, restore backups etc.
With the current Naim streamers of course you can do this from a USB drive, using the built in server to access it, which makes it very simple.
I do tend to use Qobuz more and more these days, but internet access is still not sufficiently reliable to ditch my local library. For sound quality, though, Iād say it was just as good these days.
I went for an automated Dropbox backup afterwards, which also worked quite well. It felt safer to backup things outside of the house, in case of a fire or water damage etcā¦
I mainly used BubbleUPNP as a streaming app which allows you to add cloud drives as a source, so it could be streamed directly as well.
Dropbox does cost a bit montly ofcourse, so that is one downsideā¦
For me the music streamed from my local server is a tad better than that which is streamed from a remote source ā¦most of the time. I also find that the quality of Qobuz can vary depending on internet utilisation, network traffic. Whereas my local source is consistent.
Donāt want to divert the chat, but after any years in IT, I always got fed up with the PM just adding on a Backup job without any consideration to restore ability. They never seemed to understand the need for testing your backup. So Tip in life - test your backup, and take two backups - and sods law says you will never then need it.
Can I just say that as a PM I have always questioned why if there is a back up task added where is the restore task. Basics as far as I am concerned. That said ability to recover from an outage and whether it is tested/verified/validated is all about risk and what level of risk is acceptable. But we digressā¦
So back on topic. It seems a Qobuz Hi res stream is the same quality as the same Hi res download from Qobuz. I naively thought the download would sound better, not sure why to be honest, less interference perhaps from network.
Those of you with servers/nas drives and the like - Do you find you listen to locally stored music over Qobuz streams because the sound is better to you ?
To be honest I am not noticing any difference between stream and store, even with hi-res, on my system in my room. I can hear differences between cd quality and hi-res but that is not your question. I suppose my NAS is more for when internet is not available and if I want to move music between say home and mobile devices where internet is not readily available.
If the two media sources, for streaming or download are derived from the same master by the music distributor then they are going to sound the same subject to the capabilities of your local streamer. Technically they will in this scenario identical content.
The only real consideration is that with cloud streaming rights can come and go over time by the distributor/publisher and so content titles may disappear. If you locally stream you have the media perpetually.
The cloud streaming service providers donāt do thisā¦ any changes will by the publisher/distributor on the distro master prior to publishing the distribution master to the streaming service providerā¦ just as with CD fabrication , Vinyl etc.
Cloud streaming is technically about bulk authenticated media HTTP/HTTPS streaming from a CDN, or CDNs not remastering media contentā¦
The lossy cloud streamers like Apple Music and Spotify will almost certainly have their lossless distro masters from the publishers, and these will then be converted into their lossy transit encoding using their codecsā¦ AAC, Ogg Vorbis respectivelyā¦ and given the size of these service providers I suspect some distributors might even natively encode here into the respective transit codecs prior to distribution.
But PCM has no such processing, other than data compression using FLAC which is transparent.(lossless).
An observation that compression levels can vary hugely between masters and albums when streaming losslessly from the cloud, making playlists a little awkward sometimesā¦ however Roon includes tools you can enable to make tracks from the cloud more consistent for playlists in terms of loudness and volume.
I thought about this ā¦ while true, there are not many albums that I played 34 times. With the 2000 physical (CD and vinyl) albums in my library, this would be 1,888 days of 24 hr playing. (assuming 40 min per album)
So with a 8 euro CD you could the reduce the number of streams to about 17, which is a lot less.
Also, not the full price of the CD goes to the artist, since there are other costs involved. Some numbers from an earlier thread indicated that for an 8,- CD, only about 1,- goes to the artist:
Using those numbers, regular streaming through Qobuz will definitely pay the artist a lot more than physically buying the album.
Maybe, but they still make more from it, which I believe was the consideration. Albums I played a lot may have been purchased but only played once by other people. I donāt think there is a debate on whether the advent of streaming, overall, reduced overall income from music licensing (sale + streaming) for all but the big artists.
Also, I think that even if I play it only once they deserve more for it than the $0.04390 they get from a single stream.
Finally, there is not much correlation between these things, for me - some things are important to me and I wish that they exist and artists get payed for them but I still only played them once or twice
It goes both ways i guessā¦ If you really love an album or band you gradually pay them a lot more when streaming. At least once you play them more than roughly 17 times, then every new play will give them more than buying the album would have.
And thatās assuming the full price of the CD / album would have gone directly to the artist.
So unless you intend to donate to them directly through Paypal or other means, those extra plays and appreciation will not lead to them earning more money.
