Digital-Music

My Home Stereo Upgrade: The Roku SoundBridge

September 27, 2006 by Kirk Biglione

About five years ago I started phasing CDs out of my life entirely. I digitized my entire music collection and moved the jewel boxes into the garage. I stopped buying new CDs and committed to only acquiring new music in a digital format (eMusic helped tremendously). Then I began looking for the perfect stereo component that would play my digital music collection through a traditional home entertainment system. Ultimately, I bought a Turtle Beach AudioTron.

The Audiotron fits into a stereo rack and connects to a receiver like a normal audio component, but it also has the ability to connect to a home network and play audio stored on a PC or media server. The AudioTron was an amazing innovation in its day, effectively liberating digital music from the PC and bringing it back into the living room where it belongs.

My AudioTron served me well over the years, becoming an integral part of our household, until last week when it suddenly died. In our home the death of the AudioTron qualified as a stage-one emergency. All other activities ceased while I considered my options.

Bare Bones “Backups” For Your Digital Music

June 27, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Yesterday, Kirk wrote a great post delineating four ways of protecting your digital music collection. His overarching rules of maintaining a mindset of total paranoia and redundancy redundancy redundacy are absolute gospel truth.

If you don’t know where or how to start, or don’t have the time, money or tech-savvyness to do things like store your music offsite in a safe-deposit box, or build a RAID, here are a couple of strategies for incorporating back-ups into your natural music-geek lifestyle. None of these are are foolproof, nor should they replace the methods that Kirk proposed. But they might be natural offshoots of things that you are already doing with your music.

Four Ways To Protect Your Digital Music Collection

June 26, 2006 by Kirk Biglione

Since the beginning of time music collections have been subject to all manner of catastrophes. In earlier centuries the risk was to the music itself. The singer might die, or worse, someone might sit on the lute. In more recent times we’ve been faced with the prospect of warped records, snapped cassette tape, and scratched CDs. While the risks have changed as media has evolved, one thing remains constant — true music geeks live in fear of a nightmarish event that could wipe out their entire music collection in one broad stroke.

You might think that digital music would eliminate most of the physical risk to a music collection, but that’s not the case. In fact, music collections are arguably at more risk now than ever before. While the traditional risks of theft, fire, flood, and sunlight still exist, they’ve been augmented by new risks including power surges, faulty backup media, and unstable operating systems. Not only are these new risks more likely to actually occur, when they do they’re likely to wipe out more music.

We’ve heard a lot about how media companies are trying to protect their digital assets, but we rarely hear anything about what consumers should do to protect theirs. That’s not surprising considering that major computer failures and broken iPods could ultimately lead to increased music sales.