Mine just beeped a lot
At some point, logic would dictate, your music system should actually play music.
Mine just beeped a lot.
The practice of intentional listening, of (re)building your own music library, sounds fun and self-deterministic. But when you find yourself returning hard drives and rebuilding song libraries again and again, it’s time to see another strategy.
I believe we should own our music and not drift into the Spotify dream of music as barely-noticable background noise.
One way to do this is to rebuild (or blow the dust off of) your CD collection, rip those CDs to digital copies, and store them on a home network-accessable storage system. A NAS, built, curated, and collated by you.
A simple, self-contained music system … right? Right?
The NASty truth
I purchased a home server from Synology and two 4TB Western Digital hard drives. Thanks to AI draining the world of computer memory, it took weeks for the drives to arrive.
With two drives installed in the server, you can create a mirrored situation that gives you an instant backup for all the files you’re storing. If one drive goes down, no worries. The other has all the same files. You can remove the bad drive and swap in a new one. Seamless. Safe. Foolproof.
Yeah, right.
Although seemingly delivered by Wells Fargo wagon, the first drive finally arrived. With Claude’s help, I configured the Synology system and had it running pretty easily. Then began the process of transferring thousands of large music files (FLAC format—lossless and uncompressed) onto the hard drive from my Mac. Claude wrote a script for me to use in Terminal that automated a process that took hours.
With the files transferred, I used Plex software on the server and Plexamp on my iPhone.
Plex, for someone with their own music collection, is pretty great. The UI is beautiful. There are lots of capabilities for intentional listeners who want deep stats about their listening habits and library.1
It was slick. It worked well. The files were mine, on my own system, accessible from anywhere with wifi.
For awhile, anyway.
Further down the space-time continuum, the second drive eventually arrived. I installed in on the server.
Dead on arrival. Apparently, this is a fairly common occurrence for hard drives shipped through the mail2. They can have a delicate constitution.
No worries. I returned it and awaited the replacement.
Then, after less than three weeks of operation, the server started beeping in protest one cold Thursday morning, sounding angrier than R2-D2 in the swamps of Dagobah.
The initial drive had died, too.
So, disappointed and music-less, I awaited the arrival of both replacement drives. I set them up as new. I started the process (again!) of transferring thousands of music files.
More beeps. Something went sideways in the mirroring process. The drives were not broken, but the setup process had to be restarted from scratch.
Cool, cool.
I reset everything from the beginning. I began the file transfer process again.
After several hours, I noticed the file transfer was no longer running. No beeps of protest. The transfer script just chose quiet quitting.
And that’s when I quit, also.
I just wanted to listen to my music
I like to tinker. I liked setting up the hardware and playing around with the Plex software. I did not like being an IT firefighter, battling beeps and bad drives and lazy scripts. I just wanted to listen to my music.
I unplugged the server. I pulled the hard drives. I sent it all back.
And moved on to Plan B.
In 2026, there are simpler ways to both own your music and get to the process of enjoying it.
We’ll cover that in the next post.3
Subscribe to Steady Beats for less beeping, more music.
The deepest features require a subscription, of course. Like everything in 2026.
Or covered wagon.
There were more headaches, of course.