![]() The rest of the stuff I looked at from a distance via reviews and such, and that’s because I could tell just from reading that so many of the other apps wouldn’t suit my needs. Swinsian was the only software I actually downloaded and tried out. Depending on what you’re doing, you can get away with a much cheaper model than what I got. Lots of other nice stuff about this model, too, like hot-swappable drives. I wanted 4 TB of storage because that gives me a little room to grow from my 1.5G TB music and less than 1 TB of video, and I chose to buy the drives pre-installed because buying just the empty NAS case and then getting the drives separately ended up costing about the same. Which is also why I chose to get a model with an HDMI output, which is not a common feature. ![]() I wanted a decent amount of RAM and not an Intel Atom processor because I plan on streaming movies off of the QNAP in the near future as well. This means when one drive has a little glitch or if a file gets corrupted or anything like that, the QNAP will replace the broken info on one drive with the good stuff on the other drive. I knew I wanted 2 hard drive bays so I could run a RAID system which allows the two drives to mirror each other without any extra work on my part. I opted for QNAP because of this review and lots of recommendations. The big debate seems to be between QNAP or Synology for your NAS brands. There are tons of reasons why you might prefer a NAS over a straight external hard drive, but the big draws for me were being able to access the content anywhere (anywhere at home, anywhere away from home) and not having to worry about my external hard drive dying and having to buy a new drive and restore my cloud backups, which is a a huge stress and a major pain in the ass. Storage: QNAP TS-251 NAS (Intel Celeron 2.41GHz, 8 TB (2 x 4 TB), 4GB RAM) – $669 I did tons of research on which NAS brand/model to buy and the software that would replace iTunes, and ended up with this: Software was a bit more problematic, because as most of you probably know, there’s not a whole lot of decent iTunes alternatives out there, especially for Macs. ![]() So many people had recommended getting a NAS (network attached storage) setup, so that seemed like the next obvious move for storage. Eventually I got fed up and started looking for other software & storage solutions. The hard drive had both my digital music as well as the iTunes library and database files. My (2011?) Macbook spent most of its time sitting plugged in at my desk where it could be connected via FireWire to my Western Digital MyBook Studio 3 TB external hard drive. My previous setup was pretty straightforward. So that’s what I hope to do with this post, let you know where I was, where I’m at now, and why I’m much happier. ![]() I know others have jumped ship well before me and there are tons of other articles about the why and how, but I haven’t seen too many address the biggest issue I’ve had: a huge, cumbersome music library. But decent software should be able to handle this iTunes can’t because it’s bloated, trying to be a comprehensive media manager & store. My music library lives on an external FireWire hard drive and is roughly 1.5 TB, which is admittedly pretty fuckin big. It won’t let me do anything quickly, which is both iTunes’ and my fault, though. What used to be the most intuitive and seamless experience has turned into a glitchy piece of shit that freezes whenever I try to do something as simple as search for a record or play a song.
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