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You don't say how far along you are in the ripping process. Before you begin you should install Squeezebox Server on either the WHS system (if you already have it) or to another computer. Then rip an album and see how it appears in Squeezebox Server. Once you decide how you want to rip your CDs (rip that first CD a dozen times if need be until you have the process down to science) rip a few more. Again, see how they appear in Squeezebox Server. Are they in the right order, do the artists appear correctly, are tracks in order, do compilation albums appear as such? Only once you've figured out the process should you go all out on ripping hundreds or thousands of CDs. It's not fun to put a couple weeks of work into it only to discover that you either want to rerip or retag everything you've done so far.
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Download a good tagging program like
Mp3tag so that you can modify and add fields to the file tags you end up with when ripping. At the very least you will later find typos. At the extreme you might find yourself retagging the whole library to get it to appear as you like in Squeezebox Server.
There are a couple of tagging details, some of which are unique to Squeezebox Server, that you may want to pay attention to:
- To get all of the CDs from multi-disc sets to group together into a single album, add DISCNUMBER=n tags to all files in the set, -OR- do away with the 'disc' concept altogther and either number tracks sequentially through the whole set, or to keep the tracks in the correct discnumber/tracknumber order, prepend the disc number to the track number within the TRACK field. E.g.
1-01
1-02
1-03
2-02, etc.
- Do not add DISCNUMBER tags to single CD albums.
- Multi-disc compilation albums (think about that one) also require a COMPILATION=1 tag in all files for the discs to group together into a single album correctly. Not strictly necessary if you don't use the DISCNUMBR field, as mentioned above.
- You can get artists to sort by firstname, lastname by using an ARTISTSORT tag. It's possible to set up a saved 'action group' in Mp3tag to swap the names.
- You can get 'guest artist' albums to appear under the lead artist by using ALBUMARTIST for the lead artist and then placing the individual arists in the ARTIST tag. Otherwise, these albums will be determined by SbS to be compilation albums and stuck under the generic 'Various Artists' moniker.
- You can use ALBUMARTISTSORT in the same way as ARTISTSORT.
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Make sure you keep good backups. When initially ripping the library and adding 10, 20 or more CDs per day I would backup every day or two. After that, monthly backups should be fine.
If your library fits on one or two hard drives, this can be done relatively easily to external USB (or eSATA) connected drives using some type of directory mirroring software. Microsoft Robocopy (command line), Microsoft SyncToy (GUI) and some other free and commercial programs all can do this. You don't need to do backups using conventional backup software, as your library shouldn't change much over time (it may change if you make wholesale tagging updates) and you seldom need point-in-time backup and restore capability.
If you actually have 8 TB of data, backups won't be so easily done to external drives. It's almost like being back in the days of swapping floppy discs or CD-Rs to do backups. When you reach a certain amount of data the only feasible thing to do is to have another storage system at least as large as the original onto which you can backup.
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I prefer the stable branch nightlies of Squeezebox Server, which contain small, safe bug fixes. They're not official releases, but they tend to smooth over many of the small bugs that end up in every release. When it's been 2, 4, or 6 months since the last release, the number of fixes can be significant. That would be version 7.5.2 beta at the current time. You don't want to install them every day, but I've always found that the Windows SbS installations go smoothly for me, although I don't have experience running SbS on WHS. From what I've read in the Squeezebox forums, upgrades on WHS do seem to be a little more problematic, probably due to the unique installer requirements. I'd do them once or twice a month unless you run into problems, at which point "if it ain't broken" is probably the smarter course.
http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/?ver=7.5*****
Ideally, the server should be wired into your network. It won't improve audio sound quality, but it will avoid dropouts (which, arguably, is a sound quality issue). In most homes without in-wall wiring that usually means locating the server near the switch/router.
