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[astropuppy]

First off, I've been running JRiver in my main (livingroom) stereo system for awhile now. I bought it, it's great, gets me wiffy points because I can listen while she looks at family  pictures on a 19" monitor. It's running on an old PC with music and pictures stored on a small sata drive. The OS runs from an old ide drive that isn't in the best of shape.

In our family room I have another (noisey) old PC hooked up to the TV. Wiffy likes playing Pandora with windows background set  to play a slide show of family pictures. She turns it on and presto, music and pictures appear.

In my Den I have a one year old PC with a 1TB drive. This PC is backed up regularly to a usb drive using windows RoboCopy. The usb drive is kept in a home fire safe; periodically, the at home usb drive is swapped with one kept in our bank safe deposit box.

Currently we are paying our kids to scan many many many photo albums.  In short I know I'm going to run out of disk space soon.

My question is how to configure JRiver for my house.

I want to be able to listen to my music w/o turning on more then one PC. A complete set of Photos is not required on all three PC's. However, I like the redundancy of having everything stored on more then one PC.

Family room music is played on a soundbar; local 320kps mp3's would be ok.

Someday, I would like to build a music (only) server for the living room.

I do all my ripping, tagging, copying etc with the PC in my den. I'm on a mission to buy all the CD's I can before they stop making them.

My thought is buy another drive for the PC in my den and let it act as a JRiver server for music in the living room and somehow keep a mp3 copy of my music on the PC in the family room.

I want nothing to do with NAS or usb drives as a long term solution. I really do not want the expense or the headache, its just something else to take care of. I figure within 5 years everything will live in solid state drives anyway.

Ideas?

[JimH]

Welcome.  Have you tried using Media Server?  Start at the wiki topic called "Media Network".

[Zhillsguy]

First off, I've been running JRiver in my main (livingroom) stereo system for awhile now. I bought it, it's great, gets me wiffy points because I can listen while she looks at family  pictures on a 19" monitor. It's running on an old PC with music and pictures stored on a small sata drive. The OS runs from an old ide drive that isn't in the best of shape.

In our family room I have another (noisey) old PC hooked up to the TV. Wiffy likes playing Pandora with windows background set  to play a slide show of family pictures. She turns it on and presto, music and pictures appear.

In my Den I have a one year old PC with a 1TB drive. This PC is backed up regularly to a usb drive using windows RoboCopy. The usb drive is kept in a home fire safe; periodically, the at home usb drive is swapped with one kept in our bank safe deposit box.

Currently we are paying our kids to scan many many many photo albums.  In short I know I'm going to run out of disk space soon.

My question is how to configure JRiver for my house.

I want to be able to listen to my music w/o turning on more then one PC. A complete set of Photos is not required on all three PC's. However, I like the redundancy of having everything stored on more then one PC.

Family room music is played on a soundbar; local 320kps mp3's would be ok.

Someday, I would like to build a music (only) server for the living room.

I do all my ripping, tagging, copying etc with the PC in my den. I'm on a mission to buy all the CD's I can before they stop making them.

My thought is buy another drive for the PC in my den and let it act as a JRiver server for music in the living room and somehow keep a mp3 copy of my music on the PC in the family room.

I want nothing to do with NAS or usb drives as a long term solution. I really do not want the expense or the headache, its just something else to take care of. I figure within 5 years everything will live in solid state drives anyway.

Ideas?

Everyone has an opinion on how things should be set up.....there are many options. Things to consider:

• If you are running Windows XP on those old machines, it will no longer be supported after April 8, 2014. It will continue to function, but there will be no more security or other updates. That may not be an issue for you. If premium (audiophile) sound quality is desired a newer operating system is required.
• Kudos for making a conscious effort to back up valuable data. Many folks don't worry about it until it is too late. Robocopy is very good, you might try the free version of SyncBack, it is highly configurable and you can do automated backups locally or across a network.
• Assuming all of your pc's are networked together, make one of them (the Den) a server/holder of all files. Enable file sharing with read-only permissions and play them with MC remotely on the lesser machines. If you have a large media library only having one machine on at a time may not be practical. However, if you go with MP3's on the lesser units a LOT of music can fit on a small drive, and you could configure your backup software to update the music files on them from the server automatically or with a couple of mouse clicks. If pc's are used everywhere I don't see the advantage in "streaming" music, but others may disagree. When you get into using multiple devices (tablets, smart phones, smart TV's, etc.) that's where streaming is advantageous.
• Keep in mind this should all be fun, don't sweat the small stuff. I have only scratched the surface of JRiver, it is a very powerful program but very fun to use. If you haven't already try using the remote software (Gizmo, JRemote, WebGizmo). It really does enhance the experience when you don't have to use the clunky pc peripherals to change the track, playlist, volume, etc.
  

Hope this helps.

[astropuppy]

Thanks for the ideas, I have a lot of reading to do.

two of the three machines are running windows 8 with the living room running windows 7.

Gizmo is a wonderful app. Took some getting use to, but I can't see life without it now.

[astropuppy]

As an update: I bought a couple used 1TB drives and installed one in the living room and the other in the den pc's. Moved the OS of the Family room PC to the 225g drive from the living room pc; freeing up its 500g drive for data. Confused? So am I.

After sharing a "Media Center" directory on all three PC drives I downloaded SyncBack. Wow what a great piece of software. It does one thing and does it very well. I intend on buying the SE version next Credit Card cycle.

As for JRiver, the more I use it, the more I love it. Especially using Gizmo to control it. I can now turn on any one PC and enjoy all of our family media.

For any other newbies who may read this. I highly suggest building your initial JRiver libraries with a small subset of your media. There is, atleast for me, a definite learning curve, especially when it comes to moving (JRiver) library directories around. I configured mine at least a half a dozen different ways before finalizing. The main issue was allowing all users, of any one  to use the same library; then subsequently where to store the common library for all user of any given machine. Having a TV tuner on only one of the three machines added an interesting twist. I donot sync libraries between machines. JRiver does a real good job picking up changes, best of all it does it quickly.

Currently I have about 320G of music/family pictures and growing scan by scan. Not real big; but big enough to completely swamp my LAN using windows 8 copy. SyncBack is so much better!