The last few posts were just sitting in my drafts folder, so I cleaned them up and posted them as is. Probably a few years old at least.

I’ve slowly been setting up a music server to preserve my music files. The iMac I’ve currently to serving up my music was bought back in 2016, and while I’ve only had two problems with it, I’m wary of depending on it. One problem is that for some reason, the iTunes app running on Mac OS 10.4 stopped working and got replaced with the Music app. The Music app, while much improved by Apple from when it first came out, is not anywhere as full-featured as iTunes was. One thing I really miss was the remote control app, amusingly called Remote. As far as I can tell, there’s no replacement.

On the Raspberry Pi 4, I’ve installed an app called mpd. It’s a music server that, as far as I can tell, is the most full-featured one available. Hopefully it can serve the Apple format files that make up most of the 24,000 tracks that I’ve acquired. I hope that if everything works as planned, I’ll also add to my phone client software that interacts with mpd so that I can control mpd remotely.

I’ve also bought a HiFiBerry DAC+ ADC to connect to my stereo system and enable input, too.

As an extra added bonus, I’ve also bought a Zigbee control hat to replace the Philips light controller I bought several years ago. The Philips TOS is really obnoxious and I refuse to agree to the new terms.

I sort of got lazy in my quest to replace iTunes with something open source. I tried the mpd software on a Raspberry Pi 4, but mpd doesn’t seem to want to talk to my msic stored on an SD card. So I settled on VLC, which at least talks to the SD card. VLC doesn’t really act as a music player, so I’m left with selecting a bunch of albums and dragging them to the VLC window. It suits my purpose for now, but I’d really like to be able to set up playlists, something that’s not possible in VLC.

Another thing is the transfer of the music files from my iMac to the SD card. For some reason, not all files got cleanly transferred to the SD card, and most of the old files were missing, so I need to find a ripping program I can use on the Pi to re-rip those music disks. But it isn’t a high priority.

Time to start digging into and solving the mpd problem.

It’s about time to check out text editors for my programming needs. Vi has been my go-to editor since the late 80s, and Emacs for certain tasks like Lisp coding, but other editors have sprung up since then. I’ve played with IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse and the JetBrain products, but never got real comfortable with them, as I tend to make small apps for which these tools are overkill.

One language that I’ve looked at recommended VSCode or Sublime Text as the tools best suited for development of app in that language. I tend to shy away from Microsoft products because M$ is such a shitty company, so I guess I’ll be downloading Sublime Text.

Any tips or tricks for new users?

Happy New Years. That’s all.

So, does this post end up in the fediverse?

Trying to figure out whether this blog has posts that end up in the fediverse. Just saw a post from someone that seems to have linked their blog (WordPress?) to the fediverse. And need to check whether comments to those posts end up back here.

Still can’t figure out why the SD card that has all my music on it isn’t recognized by the Raspberry Pi 4. It worked until the first software upgrade on the Pi. I guess that’s the first thing to dig into. Next thing to check is the music server itself, although I don’t think that’s the main problem. Maybe it’s time to dig out an external hard drive to see if the problem is storing the music files on the SD card instead of the drive. Baffled.

Well, everything worked for a while.

I transferred all the music files from my iMac to a SanDisk SSD card and was able to mount it on the Raspberry Pi 4. Then shortly afterwards, the Card wouldn’t mount on the Pi. Tried to figure that out and didn’t get anywhere. So I moved onto other tasks.

About to try digging into it more. Wish me luck.

Now I’m getting spurious error messages from WordPress about not being able to upload posts. This is from with the Jetpack app on my iPhone. Jetpack is more of a clusterfuck than the almost as horrible WordPress.com website. You can hardly ever compose a post on either without major hassles. 

I sprung for a Pi 5 kit from Canakit. Yeah, I know I could get the parts cheaper elsewhere, but I’ve never had issues with the hardware when I purchase this way.

I also bought a hat that outputs audio because I want to make an attempt at building a place to put my extensive audio collection and am getting antsy about the iMac that I purchased back in 2015. Apple just toasted iTunes, replacing it with the Music (which just sucks). Gonna use one of the Raspberry Pi 4s I have laying around.

I’ll have a progress report later.