It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes.

Sure, they don’t explicitly say “pirated content”, but basically all pirated content either comes from someone else’s CD or someone else’s purchase.

Music labels’ biggest gripes with Amazon’s and Google’s cloud service are that 1) they don’t know what music users are storing on the cloud and 2) they can’t make money off of music people stored in the cloud. They can’t support a service that only makes pirating easier. But what about Apple’s iTunes Match? 1) Music labels know what music each user has in their library and 2) music labels can make money off each song.

Whereas you’re paying for both bandwidth and storage from Amazon and Google, you’re paying for primarily services from Apple. Thus, 100% of revenue from Amazon’s and Google’s cloud offering goes directly to them. On the other hand, Apple only receives 30% of revenue, the industry standard, which is about $7.5 for each annual iTunes Match subscription.

How much does bandwidth and storage cost? Right now, bandwidth costs about 5 cents a gigabyte. Assuming a user has 20GB of music, that’s $1 per device synced for Apple except for the first device. For Amazon, it’s about $1 for uploading from the first device, and $1 for every device afterwards. You already see a price savings from Apple.

Perhaps the biggest cost savings is storage. Amazon and Google has to store everyone’s library, whereas Apple only has to store their own. 18 million songs at about 5MB each is about 88 TB. After 5000 users with 20GB libraries, Amazon has already exceeded 88 TB of storage. And this doesn’t include the infrastructure costs of storing arbitrary amounts of files. These aren’t e-mail accounts either; people are actually going to use the space their allotted otherwise they would pay for less storage.

Assuming you have 10 devices synced with 20GB of music. That’s $10 in bandwidth costs. How is Apple going to make money from iTunes Match? It doesn’t matter, because you already purchased 10 Apple devices. What if you have 20GB of music but only have a 16GB iPhone? Too bad, buy a new iPhone with 32GB of storage. Where as 1GB for Amazon is only a $1 per year, going from 16GB to 32GB in an iPhone or iPad will cost an extra $100. Remember, Apple is a hardware company. iTunes Match is just icing on the cake.

Music

Streaming

There’s no streaming! What if I have too much music to store on my iPhone? Are you going to make me upgrade to a higher capacity drive? What if I’m on someone else’s computer? Apple decided to not even bother with streaming, which were Amazon and Google’s goals.

Music Quality

Assuming you are the regular person who downloads their music through horrible services such as LimeWire, your music is 128kbps and horribly tagged. In that case, iTunes Match would be very useful to you. However, for people like me who download their music at higher than 256kbps quality and download them in full albums, iTunes Match makes no sense, especially when iTunes doesn’t support FLAC.

Introducing: Subsonic

Subsonic allows you to setup a computer as a music streaming server (as well as video, if you donate). Your music can then be streamed to other computers with login credentials via browser, or to other devices such as Android, iOS, Windows 7 Mobile, and PC. The only downside is that the mobile apps cost money, about $5 each.

If you have high quality, well organized music and a decent internet connection at home, you should be using Subsonic instead of iTunes Match. Read more about Subsonic on my posts.

Inroducing: MusicBrainz Picard

Want to correctly tag your music, or ID your tracks? You don’t need iTunes Matching, just use MusicBrainz Picard for free! iTunes most likely matches music the same way Shazam and Picard does: via acoustic fingerprints.

Contacts, Calendar, and Mail

Introducing: Google Mail

This isn’t anything new. All this can be done through Gmail for free when you use Microsoft Exchange as your protocol. Apple seems to competing against Google in this regard, but I much prefer Google’s spam filter and other nifty features. The only reason Apple launched this feature is to make things easier for Apple users who aren’t technically advanced enough to use Microsoft Exchange.

Documents

Now, all your documents created via iWork is synced in the cloud. But how is this useful? What if you’re on a computer or device that isn’t supported by iWork, such as any PC or any other phone? Plus, iWork costs money.

Introducing: Google Docs

Google Docs is free. It uses HTML5, so you can edit documents on any device, though I don’t know why you’d want to edit a document on an iPhone. It’s more cloud than Apple’s Cloud since the document is actually saved on the cloud, not on your computer. It’s also better in terms of collaboration.

Photo and Video

Now, the cloud syncs and backs up your videos and photos. Personally, I don’t find this a big deal because I upload all the interesting photos and videos to YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. If they’re interesting, I would have uploaded to another cloud service already. The idea that you should store any non-leud photos solely on your devices is dead.

Features I Love

iCloud is a natural progression for Apple and the technology industry in general. I may not be fond of these aforementioned services, but what I am very fond of are the other cloud features. Syncing and updating over the air. Pushing updates to all your devices. No longer needing a computer to sync or backup to. Allow redownloading and automatic downloads of songs. All these features are free, making iOS still the best mobile platform to be on.

MusicBrainz Picard

The best tool for tagging your music is MusicBrainz Picard. What this tool does is scan each mp3 (like how Shazam works), compares it to a centralized server, and gives you the correct tag for the song. What this program also does is try to group mp3s by album, but it doesn’t do a very good job at that because there are just so many albums a song can belong to, and so many different versions of the same album.

First thing you want to do is change some settings.

In General, you want to Automatically scan all new files. This will save you the hassle of reclicking “Scan” frequently.

In Moving files, select the “Subsonic” directory. This will automatically organize your songs by Artist then Album.

Now that you’ve changed these settings, click Add Folder and add your “Organize” folder. MusicBrainz Picard will start scanning them automatically. You’ll notice on the right side that as songs become scanned, they’ll be grouped by album on the right side.

The discs will either be gold or silver. Gold means that the album is complete and silver means that the album is incomplete. If the album is gold and you’re sure that’s the correct album (an album may have different versions with different tracks and different amount of tracks), click CTRL + S to save the files into your Subsonic directory. Otherwise, move songs around until the album is gold.

You’ll see, next to the fraction of how complete the album is, a number with a * next to it. This is how many songs require changes. If this number is more than the number of songs in the album, then you’re going to be saving duplicates. Expand the album and remove any duplicates before you save. Keep in mind that songs in the “Unmatched” folder will not be saved when you click CTRL + S. These unmatched songs are marked by a ? instead of a *.

MusicBrainz Picard is limited to one request per minute. To bypass this, you can setup your own MusicBrainz server on your computer or another computer. To do so, follow this guide. Once you setup your VM server, be sure to change the Server address and Port in MusicBrainz Picard’s Options panel.

The problem with Picard is that it doesn’t have tags for all the possible releases in the world. This is especially true if you download a lot of EPs and singles from Beatport and other smaller online distribution platforms. In these cases, you’ll have to organize the music yourself. However, Picard should have made this process much easier by tagging most of your songs.

Organizing Music with Guayadeque

The first thing you want to start doing is sort all your remaining songs in your Organize folder by Album. You then want to edit all Album Artist tags and the Artist tags. Make sure the Album Artist doesn’t have any tags that have “featuring” and you may want to remove “ands”. Make sure the Album Artist matches what Picard’s formatting for that album letter by letter, including caps, since you’ll be organizing your music by Album Artist.

If the album is a compilation or soundtrack, Picard labels the Album Artist as Various Artists. You can change this to the type of compilation or the composer of the track, for example Soundtrack or Hans Zimmer. I keep mine as Various Artists just because it’s easier that way. You may also want to edit the Album titles, especially if the name starts with something weird like a year or a symbol like ().  I wouldn’t worry about other tags.

Next, you want to check your file naming scheme and make sure it matches Picard. The last thing you want is for all your music to be saved differently. After that, just highlight the songs that are tagged correctly, right click the songs and press “Copy To”, and copy it to your Subsonic directory. After the files are finished copying, right click, press remove, and delete from disk.

Setting up Subsonic Music Streaming

Setting up Subsonic very easy. Just type in the command:

sudo apt-get install subsonic

But also install any necessary libraries. You will need to forward your port; by default, Subsonic uses port 4040. You can launch Subsonic by going to your browser and typing localhost:4040.

After registering, you want to add your music folder by going to Settings then Music Folders. I recommend also making a separate account to listen to your music; no need to listen to your music as admin. Everything else is pretty straight forward, but what you should remember is that Subsonic doesn’t read tags until you’re in the deepest folder. All the artists are organized by folders.

Hardware

For servers, you want two separate partitions: OS partition and storage partition. If you’re making a new server, buy a cheap SSD for your OS partition, and software raid 5 or 6 four or more hard drives and use that as your storage partition.

Depending on your application, you may also need more than 4GB RAM and at least a quad-core CPU. I have an AMD X6 1055T and 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM in my server just because it’s cheap.

Installing Software

After you’ve installed the latest version of Ubuntu, you’re going to have to download a bunch of libraries and software. These commands will download all the software you will need for the server for this guide and it will also update all your software.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk ffmpeg lame deluge-gtk gmountiso p7zip ubuntu-restricted-extras subsonic nfs-kernel-server nfs-common vim ssh openssh

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Setting Up Folders

Let’s assume that your home folder is /home/user and your storage drive is /media/storage. Let’s also assume that you don’t care how pretty things look and only care about function. After all, it’s just a server.

First, create folders in /media/storage of the different files you have. In my case, these are Downloads/, Movies/, TV/, Music/. Within Downloads/, I also have the folders Movies/, TV/ and Music/. This is because I move items from Downloads/ into their respective folders after they are completed and organized.

Now, let’s assume that all the IPs on your network are of the form 10.0.1.xx (I use Apple AirPort Extremes at home). Type:

sudo vim /etc/exports

And add the following for each folder in /media/storage.

/media/storage/Downloads 10.0.1.1/24(rw,no_root_squash,async)

If you only want to share it to a single machine, replace 10.0.1.1/24 with just the IP address you want to share it to. “rw” stands for read and write, and ro stands for read only. Then type the follwing to setup the server:

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

Mounting Folders on Linux Machines

Let’s say I have a machine with a home directory of /home/jon on a desktop computer that remains in the same LAN as the server. I create the same folders Downloads, Movies, TV, and Music. I then want to mount my server folders onto my desktop. To do so, first I need to install NFS.

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Assuming the server’s IP address is 10.0.1.55, I then add the following for each server.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

10.0.1.55:/media/storage/Downloads /home/jongleberry/Downloads nfs rw 0 0

These folders will then be mounted. You’ll have to do a new line for each folder on the server. Basically, folders will be mounted onto your computer from the server. You can do this with all your computers, thus requiring only one large storage space that has backup (RAID 5).

For the server, you want to mount your drives onto your home folder. You will need this for FTP. Do the following commands on your server:

sudo vim /etc/fstab

/media/storage/Downloads /home/user/Downloads nfs rw 0 0

File Transfers and SSH

I’m not a big fan of FTP, so I use SSH to transfers files and to organize all my folders and such. To check if your server has SSH by typing:

ssh localhost

You then need to forward your ports so that you can SSH into your server remotely. SSH uses port 22 by default, but you can use other ports.

To transfer files, use the SCP command. Here are some examples of how to use SCP from a remote computer. Let’s assume that your server’s IP address is 255.255.255.0.

scp *.torrent user@255.255.255.0:/home/user/Downloads/ (copies all your torrent files in the current local directory to the Downloads directory on the server. This is nice when you setup automatic downloading)

scp -r Downloads/ user@255.255.255.0:/home/user/Downloads/ (recursively copies all the files in your local Downloads folder to the server’s Downloads folder)

Music Storage and Organization

Whenever I download music, I’m very meticulous with the tagging. I want my music perfectly tagged, and this is very difficult with all the possible ways you can download music. Thus, I use MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my files. Check out my guide on how to use MusicBrainz Picard and organize your music and stream your files via Subsonic.

Automated Bittorrent Downloading

You want your torrents to start downloading immediately and in the proper folders. Read this post on how to setup automatic bittorrent downloading on Linux using Deluge.

• Storage
• Music streaming via Subsonic
• Movie streaming over LAN (movie streaming over the net is just ridiculous)
• Automated bittorrent downloading

This server could also be for actually viewing and playing the files, but I recommend a separate computer or device (like a Roku) for that. The last thing you want is someone messing up your server and everything it has. Also, this computer will make a lot more noise than a dedicated device, and this noise will affect your viewing and listening experience. Thus, I would put this server in a room different than your living room and your bedroom.

Overall, you can look at my guide for how to build a quiet gaming PC. You can basically use the same products, but a server has a little different purpose. Let’s assume the following:

• Your server will not handle 100% loads for extended periods of time. Basically, you aren’t folding@home.
• Your server will be on 24/7.
• You want your server to be as quiet as possible.

Here are some different hardware to consider:

Chassis

The problem with a regular tower is that it takes too much room. Thus, I recommend rackmount, especially if you have multiple computers and want to save room. Rackmounts make everything easier. However, they are a little more expensive.

• Quiet 3U Rackmount
• Quiet 4U Rackmount
• I-Star D Storm D-400 – Rack-mountable – 4U – ATX – USB

Fans

Since your server won’t be handling 100% loads for extended periods of time, it’s probably not going to get very hot. Thus, you shouldn’t worry about intake fans and should only make sure that there are exhaust fans. Most cases already come with exhaust fans, but if they don’t, be sure you buy quiet ones.

• Scythe Gentle Typhoon D1225C12B2AP-12 – Case fan – 120 mm
• Noctua NF-P12 120 mm Nine Blade SSO Bearing Fan with VCN – Retail

You also want to make sure that all your rackmount computers have air flowing in the same direction. In my case, all the air flows from the front and left sides and exits through the back and right side.

Motherboard and CPU

You want a motherboard and CPU combination that has an integrated graphics card (even if you’re using this computer to watch movies), low power usage, and enough SATA ports for your needs.

• Intel Core i5-2400S Processor with 6 MB Cache, 2.50 GHz for Socket LGA1155 – Boxed
• GIGABYTE Socket 1155/Intel H67/DDR3/CrossFireX/SATA3/A&GbE/Micro ATX Motherboard GA-H67M-D2-B3

Hard Drive

For your boot drive, you want an SSD. The best one right now would be the OCZ Vertex 3. For your storage hard drives, choose the largest and lease drives possible. More drives = more noise and energy consumption.

• OCZ Technology 60 GB Vertex 2 Series SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD22VTXE60G

Power Supply

You want a quiet and efficient power supply. The more efficient, the less heat output and the less fans you need. Seasonic makes some of the best power supplies.

• SeaSonic 750W Power Supply X750 Gold

Other things like RAM don’t really matter as long as you get quality components.

The default player looks like this in subsonic:

The first thing I’d like you to do is help me select cover art. Click “change” right below the empty picture and you’ll be directed to list of covert art options. Choose one and press back! Just please, let’s not troll each other.

You’ll also be able to rate albums, so please rate albums as you wish, especially when they’re actually good. Try not to change ratings, put comments instead.

You will be able to chat with other people who are connected to my server on the right. If you have your own account, you can even track your plays on Last.FM like me and compare your music taste with others! Here’s my Last.FM play history (damn it, why is it saved as jpg):

Also, you can change tags, but please leave that to me. I use MusicBrainz to tag all my music, so they should be generally flawless. Instead, if there is an artist or album that you want or some artists or albums that are not properly tagged or are missing files, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

The main goals for sharing with my friends are:

• Stop playing songs off YouTube at parties. The sound quality seriously damages my ears.
• Stop fighting over whose iPod to use. Use a computer connected to my server.
• One server that has all the music. There’s no need for everyone to find and download songs yourself.
• High quality music. Most of my music is either in FLAC (CD quality) or 320kbps (better than iTunes).
• Music discovery. Hopefully my friends will be able to share their favorite music through this server and through Last.FM, or you can just make a playlist of random songs and eventually you’ll find something you like!
• Music downloads. If you’re lucky to get an account that allows music downloads, then you’ll be able to download my music. Unfortunately you can’t choose what format you want to download the music, so you might be stuck with FLAC.
• Use this on your phone!

If you want your own account, ask me directly, not in the comments.

The first thing you need to do is click “Show Settings” and add my subsonic address and your username and password. Then you’re connected! Then go to settings and start messing with the settings.

You want to set the maximum audio bitrate when listening through WiFi as none. However, depending on the type of account you have access to, your bitrate might automatically be limited. For use over 3G, I suggest either 128 or 192 kbps. Anything below 128kbps doesn’t sound good and you don’t want to kill your bandwidth.

You do want to enable song caching and auto-cache the next song. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of using iSub. I made sure that my phone has at least 1GB minimum of free space and allowed my maximum cache size to be 8GB on my 16GB phone, which is a lot of songs considering I’m not storing albums. Be sure to auto-delete old songs based on oldest played.

So what is caching? When I’m streaming a song on my phone from my subsonic server, when caching is enabled, that song is stored on my phone. That means that while you listen to music, you’re also downloading that song to your phone. You can’t do this with any paid service due to licensing issues. Not only that, when you’ve finished downloading the current song, it will automatically download the next song. Keep in mind that the song is stored in your maximum allowed bitrate.

So how is caching helpful? You’ll never have to sync your iPhone again. You’ll add songs to your phone while you stream songs, so when you no longer have an internet connection, you’ll only be able to listen to songs you know you’ve listened to before. Thus, there’s a good chance a cached song is a good song. This is especially good for me since I download full albums, and most songs in an album suck.

So, in short, what are the benefits of using subsonic over actually storing your music on your phone or iPod?

• You never have to choose which songs to sync to your iPod
• You never have to worry about fitting all your music on your iPod
• You never have to worry about downloading music
• You never have to worry about downloading low quality music
• You never have to worry about badly tagged music
• You never have to worry about losing your music

The only problem is that most of the time, 3G on AT&T sucks. Hopefully you’ll be using WiFi a good portion of your time. With Gmail’s Microsoft Exchange, Evernote, and Google Voice, you won’t ever have to worry about syncing or losing your E-mails, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Text Messages, Voicemails, and now, music! Cloud computing FTW (even though this subsonic server is just my computer at home)!

Case

A case is a good investment because they last forever, don’t depreciate much, don’t wear and tear (unless you move a lot and aren’t careful like me), and don’t improve much over the years. However, you want to make sure that the case you have is a case you’ll keep for a long time. I recommend buying the case at a local store like Fry’s so that you can easily return it if you’re unhappy whereas you should buy everything else online (Amazon or Newegg).

Buy a case that is designed to be silent since they already include acoustical material. Here are some good cases:

• Fractal Design R3 $110
• Antec P183 V3 $175
• SilverStone FT02B $230

Power Supply

The power supply is another good investment that lasts forever and doesn’t improve dramatically over the years. What matters more is how much the power supply costs you during its lifetime – energy, both in energy efficient and heat output. Thus, I suggest buying a power supply that is certified 80 Plus Gold or Platinum and has Active PFC. It will cost a little more, but you’ll feel the difference in energy bills (both your computer and air conditioning) and quality. Here’s a Tiered Power Supply List.

• SeaSonic X750 750W 80 Plus Gold $160
• Nexus RX-1.1K 1100W 80 Plus Gold 15dB $250

CPU

Choose your processor wisely. When buying a processor, always buy a CPU with the smallest manufacturing tech possible (currently 32nm). The smaller the manufacturing tech, the more energy efficient the processor is and thus less cooling is required. Then look at the TDP. If you don’t plan to overclock, buy a CPU with the lowest TDP. If you do plan to overclock, make sure you buy a processor that is known to be able to handle overclocking. The lower the TDP, the cooler the CPU will run and the less cooling you can get away with.

• Intel Core i5-2400S 2.50GHz 65W $203 for regular people
• Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz 95W $315 for overclockers

CPU Cooler

The type of CPU cooler you should use depends on how much you plan to stress your CPU. However, you should always replace the stock cooler with an aftermarket cooler as they are much quieter as well as effective. Buy a large heatsink and fan(s) as it would cool your CPU more effectively. Do not buy any CPU cooler or fan that is rated more than 20dB.

1. Noctua NH-U12P SE2 $66
2. Prolimatech Megahalems Rev. B (Silver) $67 (fans not included)
3. Noctua NH-D14 $90

Fans

The type of fan you use is very important as they create a tremendous amount of noise. You want the fan to be as large as possible with the highest airflow as possible spinning at the lowest RPM as possible. You can look at the sound rating, but those aren’t generally precise as they’re used for marketing. However, if you are looking at sound ratings, make sure you get fans below 18dB.

• Scythe Gentle Typhoon D1225C12B3AP-13 16dB 120mm $19

Make sure that you have more air flow going out of your case than in your case. Negative pressure is better than positive pressure since positive pressure can leave pockets of hot air in your case.

Fan Controller

The purpose of a fan controller is to manually set the RPM of your fans so that they aren’t too loud. Sometimes your cooling would be effective enough to not require fans running at full throttle to keep the CPU cool. Plus, what are you going to do with all those 5.25″ drive bays?

• NZXT SENTRY 2 $25
• Scythe Kaze Master Pro KM03-BK-3.5 $43

Optical Drive

Optical drives are very loud. If you don’t need one, don’t get one. Most programs can be downloaded nowadays or installed through USB, even Windows and Mac OS X. I don’t even see a point of Blu-ray burners, or even Blu-ray drives.

Storage

For noise and energy consumption alone, I would suggest buying an SSD. SSDs are faster, quieter, and more energy efficient, but also much more expensive. If you can only afford a cheaper SSD, I would suggest waiting until the Z68 chipset is released for SSD Caching. For regular hard drives, I won’t be able to tell you which ones are the quietest. You can always buy hard drive silencers.

In choosing an SSD to buy, I would go down this list and buy the best SSD I can afford.

Graphics Card

Unfortunately, most graphics cards today that can do any decent amount of computation have huge fans on them. When you boot up your compter, you’ll hear these fans spin at full throttle. These are also very small fans, so you’ll hear a high pitched noise.

First of all, I’d recommend a card with lifetime warranty. My favorites are EVGA and XFX as I have had good experiences with both. You can have your video card replaced with a similar model in the next decade!

Then I’d make sure that the brand you’ve bought allows third party video card coolers. From what I’ve read, EVGA is okay with video card coolers as long as you don’t ruin the GPU itself.

Then I’d buy a good video card cooler. Personally, I don’t know what graphics card cooler you should buy because I never found it worth my time.

Add Canonical Partners to Software Sources

1. Open Software Centre –> Edit –> Software Sources
2. Go to “Other Software” Tab and select “Canonical Partners”

Download your favorite programs:

• sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre gnome-gmail chromium-browser vlc gnome-do filezilla pidgin rtorrent transmission openoffice.org gmountiso p7zip guayadeque ubuntu-restricted-extras gnome-gmail vim nfs-common python-setuptools build-essential rar unrar p7zip-full

Update your computer:

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Flash:

• http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html – Download plug-in for 64-bit linux
• tar xvf flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
• sudo mv libflashplayer.so  /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins