Well I finally switched over to a new music server tonight. This Server is using a Server OS so I had to enable some items that are non-standard on a Server as well configure my music to stream properly and update my web server. My previous music server has been streaming music consistently 24/7 365 since 2004 with minor breaks due to updates.
This server isn’t totally new but for me is a step up with dual Xeon hyper-threaded (Virtual dual core a step before Duo-Cores) 3.06 CPU’s with 7GB of RAM.
I still have gigabit LAN’s onboard which is significant since my onboard Gigabit NIC’s a couple of years ago on my previous server started getting flaky and I had to install a couple of after market Gigabit NIC’s on that server to keep it going!
On this new server I had to install LAME & Fraunhofer codecs just to be able to play mp3’s on this system! May have been overkill but I saw somewhere that Winamp used LAME and not Fraunhofer so just to be safe I added LAME codecs after Fraunhofer was installed already.
I had to forward the appropriate ports so folks could listen to the stream as well as enable Audio which is normally turned off with this server OS and install a soundcard and then install a USB soundcard for previewing music. I ended up uninstalling the first PCI soundcard I had installed since it wasn’t working and installing a more upgraded one I had lying around.
Tonight I also found that if my music stream application pointed to an incompatible device it just sat there and looked at me. This took me a while to figure out what the issue was since it seems after reboot my music streaming application switched to the PCI soundcard instead of my USB soundcard I had installed to get going and for testing. Pointing to the incompatible PCI soundcard caused the song to appear in the appropriate music deck but wouldn’t play!
I found out about the issue of not being able to stream with my incompatible soundcard while shutting down apps on my old server and switching to the new one since all my tests were with the USB soundcard had worked. I then found out I hadn’t saved the router configuration from last night with the ports going to the new server and I had to do that all over again and reboot the router. Each time I could tell I was knocking folks off the stream, which I apologize for.
I also had to go on the Web Server to change the sever ip.address in a configuration file so the new system Music Server could be the one syncing with the Web Server’s database and display the appropriate songs as they are played.
I even had to do a mass save of mp3 ID3 tags on my old server and then recopy over my mp3’s again and do a mass ID# mp3 loading of tags into the new server. Each time I did this I also backed up the database from the old server to move over to the new server. Next I will have to run the utility to remove duplicates
Even after testing many late nights I ran into some new learning opportunities. Overall I had forgotten how much configuration and customization I had done on getting the music stream to where it is now and that’s nothing to do with how the website looks and feels except the update portion.
The new server has loud fans so at some point I will try and upgrade to more quiet and power efficient fans as well as do some sound proofing and then some air flow control on my 7 foot computer rack but that’s for later and its time for and early night getting to bed for me (1:55 AM), at least lately!
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