Neat! That was a dealbreaker back when I last tried it.

I use Jellyfin with the Symfonium mobile client.

Navidrome is popular but does not support multi-tags for some fields, like artists.

1. There is no “special” benefit to a pre-built NAS. They have convenient software but there is nothing exceptional about them. They’re just computers with storage drive slots. Using a bunch of external drives via a USB hub would be fine. But is that your only expansion option on the system you have? Access speeds via USB, especially if using a hub, won’t be ideal. It’ll certainly work, though. You can also get enclosures to put full size HDDs in, which can connect to an existing system.

2. RAID is still the way to go, but since you don’t need much storage, I’d start with RAID 1, not 5. 5 will require a rebuild with a new drive if something goes wrong, while RAID 1 will work with 2 drives and give you complete mirroring. Since you intend to have a “local” backup copy anyway, why not just skip that and use RAID 1? It’s literally the same thing, except it’ll actually provide uptime in case of failure, unlike a backup drive or raid 5.

3. So RAID 5 plus a local backup, plus another offsite? This is overkill IMO. (Not the offsite backup that’s good. But raid+local copy. Just use two drives and mirror them using whatever you prefer.) In your place, I think I’d go with BTRFS in raid1c2 mode. This is like raid1, in that with two drives, you only get the capacity of one drive. But, the “c2” means that each data block is mirrored to two drives. With more than two drives, you can expand storage. (With three 2TB drives you’d get 3TB) You don’t get as much available storage as with raid5, but you get expandability, which you normally don’t with raid1. And you get uptime in case of failure without an array rebuild (though for this you must mount the volume with the “degraded” option, unlike actual raid using mdadm). You also get filesystem snapshots.

4. You intend to do this manually? That is fine. My current solution is a second NAS at my dad’s home, to which my system is backed up daily using Kopia. Kopia deduplicates and compresses the backups, efficiently keeping versions up to two years back. The simplest version of this would be a router that can host an FTP server using an external drive in its usb port. This way you could automate off-site backup and have it happen more frequently. Asus routers can do this, and even come with free dynamic DNS and automatic https with letsenrypt. You literally just plug it into WAN somewhere, and you’ll be able to back up to it over the internet.

Finally, just some mentions.

MDADM, is what you’d use to create a software RAID array.

BTRFS has built-in multi-device storage, of which only single, raid0, and raid1 are stable. Do not use the raid5 and 6 modes. While named raid, the modes differ from actual raid. BTRFS is able to convert from one mode to another, and can add drives in any mode (though will need to “balance” the drives after changes, to make additional capacity available). It is also able to evict drives. It will not auto-mount a volume after drive failure, and requires the “degraded” option be added.

Mergerfs can be used to merge filesystems to expand storage non-destructively. It is able to arbitrarily combine volumes of any type, to combine their capacity. This way, it can for example be used to expand a raid1 array by combining it with a single disk, or another raid1 array, or whatever else. This can be done temporarily, as the combined volume can also be disassembled non-destructively, with each file simply remaining on whatever drive they were on.

dlock dlock dlock dlock dlock

Are yuu da qaeen?

Oh for sure. Tons of studios would probably still exist, and a lot of people would still have jobs, had Embracer just not bought those studios.

TBF, Eidos under Embracer had a game in progress, but it was one of the projects they cut when the saudis ended up not investing in them.

Embracer had bought up studios and started projects they didn’t yet have money to fund, and when that bit them in the ass, it was the studios and games that got the axe.

Haha.

Glad he didn’t take being told to stop talking about Deus Ex too seriusly.

Deus Ex has ben doublesnubbed now, first by Squenix, and then by Embracer.

They don’t seem to get that we do want more. Mankind Divided got hated on because Squenix tried to put fucking microtransactions in a full price single player story.

Should be. I have it under “sort by>image>date photographed”. Important to note that is not always a populated metadata tag.

You might not need to entirely switch, you can install just Dolphin (the KDE filebrowser) and use it with Cinnamon just fine.

Edit: Nemo, the file browser shipped with Cinnamon, should also have support for this. I don’t personally use it so I can’t help you further there on how to do that or what might be wrong if it isn’t working.

I’m not saying it wasn’t.

I’m saying the problem wasn’t “all audio being upscaled”. That’s nonsense.

Something obviously went wrong. It just can’t be what you think it was.

What you tried should be completely possible and not come with any significant difference in CPU usage.

Which means you ran into a bug. Not some inherent difference in how linux works that means what you attempted is impossible.

The “cause” you describe (audio resampling to match the samplerate being used), is how all digital audio has worked on all devices since the inception of digital sound. It’s not something stupid that only linux/pipewire does.

Still haven’t figured out how to sort pictures in a folder by date taken, but I’m gonna take a wild guess that’ll need the terminal…

It wont. File sort would be a feature and or setting of your file browser. How to use it would depend on your particular file browser.

In KDE dolphin though it would be under “right click>sort by” or “hamburger menu>sort by”.

If you want this to be set separately for each folder, you’d open Dolphin settings (again, the menu, or the shortcut ctrl+shift+,) go to the view tab and set display style to "remember for each folder).

Well having my cpu maxed out by this simple change was my experience and that’s with a 7800x3d.

I promise you. It was something else. Audio resampling simply cannot max out a modern CPU, and is something your system does regardless of what samplerate you are using.

That’s it. I don’t want to learn about PCM mixing sound channels or upsampling or latency. I want it to fucking work.

That’s fine. But then don’t make claims about how it works and why it has problems. Just say you had problems.

Worse is that setting this then results in automatic upscaling on everything

This is true on all systems. Windows and MacOS both also use internal sound servers to mix all audio sources into the single PCM signal that goes to the sound card.

If incoming PCM signals are at some other samplerate than what is being fed to the audio device, they must be resampled.

You can’t feed two PCM signals at different samplerates into a single output any other way. Or even a single one, if the input samplerate is different from the selected output samplerate.

This is how it works everywhere. Not just linux. It is a fact of digital audio.

which will have your CPU maxed out.

Just. No.

Your system is not going to be burning up the CPU doing audio resampling. It simply isn’t that demanding a task. It’s something all system do regularly anyway, whether it’s upsampling or downsampling, one audio stream (or at least two for stereo) or a dozen, or more.

Linux in general is awful for audiophiles.

This to me is an admission you have no idea what you’re talking about. Linux is PREFERRED by tons of audio engineers because its audio handling and routing capabilities on a system level are unmatched, as well as the ultra-low audio processing latencies it can achieve when configured for it on a kernel level.

As mentioned by someone else, the reason guides and linux helpers tend to tell you to use terminal, is because it’s already installed, and will work almost regardless of distro.

That doesn’t mean a GUI option does not exist. It’s just that distros essentially being collections of independent software, rather than monolithic integrated systems like windows, they tend not to come installed with all the GUI applications that exist. And if they do, guides and people helping you still can’t rely on you having a particular one installed.

For audio there is a litany of control panel applications you might install, some of which allow doing things that are a right pain on windows.

As an example, I use qpwgraph to route audio from a co-op game into a remote sunshine stream while excluding other system audio, while simultaneously using discord to voice chat with a friend who’d otherwise have to listen to themself as well as the game.

Qpwgraph allows you to route audio in almost any way you might imagine. Want to send each stereo channel to completely different audio devices? Sure. Send system audio into the mic input of a discord call? Why not. Use multiple audio devices at the same time? Go ahead. Flip the stereo channels? Weird, but ok.

And the app isn’t what does it. It’s just a GUI for capabilities that already exist in the pipewire sound server.

Similar cases exists for all kinds of things you might otherwise do in the terminal.

Mint was the most user friendly maybe 5 years ago. But even back then I had lots of problems with it.

Its development has been slow while strides have been made to the point that I’d consider either Bazzite, popOS, or Zorin the simplest for a new user to get into today.

What about marzipan?

I mean, most people haven’t experienced a single day of existence where they’d have rather… Not.

And it follows they have no concept of how someone can still function if they feel that way. Intuitively, you’d think those two things are mutually exclusive.

So, probably also wierd how easy it can be to continue to go through the motions of life even as there is less than nothing inside.

I hope the “days I want to be alive/days I want to not exist”-ratio improves for you.

Oh it’s plenty useful. Like I mention, at work with people who have no business knowing whats going on in your head it can be great.

But it’s not good for you.

Yes.

As I mentiomed, this is why indies are succeeding in the genre. Each individual game only needs to be enjoyed by a small number in order to succeed.

But that approach doesn’t necessarily scale. Konami thinks it does.

Unknown.

It’ll be running some kind of ARM soc. Hades has been demoed running flawlessly on it. No VR titles yet, but there is no reason they couldn’t work, too.

I think you made a common mistake. See, you don’t just bury the darkness, you need to also disossiate from reality so that even if you internally suffer accidental contact with the void, it doesn’t make it all the way out to become a physical expression.

This way, you can disconnect your outward behaviour from you active thinking, so that even if you mentally implode, no-one can tell!

Neat, huh?

(This is horrible advice, do not attempt. Never hide this level of anguish with loved ones. Potentially useful in professional settings, but still harmful.)