I came across rather interesting article about the challenges and questions involved in migrating a substantial music collection to a digitised solution which allowed the media to be streamed around the home (the article can be found here ongoing · The Great CD Migration).

Its a challenge that both a friend of mine and I have been dealing with for a couple of years now – both of us have significant amounts of media (legitimate I hasten to add). We’ve both arrived at slightly different solutions, but they reflect the difference in emphasis of source – one being music the other video.  But the core solution seems to be the same – a small box stashed away acting as a file server and a dedicated D/A component (Squeezebox in on case and a modified XBox in another).

With hard disk capacities rapidly rising the cost of a file server – we’re very close to a single drive holding 1 terabyte now. As well as the fact that the processing power of the machine doesn’t need to be powerful – a simple Pentium with the right O/S will be enough.

The thing that may intimidate less techie people is avoiding the loss of the digitised media once the mammoth task of conversion has been completed.  We’ve both ended up configuring the storage into a basic RAID array – so a single disk failure can be recovered from.

I think that as the media solutions such as slim devices becoming increasingly more mainstream it is the ease of managing things like storage that will become the next big challenge.

 We recently introduced a DAB radio into the house more for Mrs Monster than myself; but I’ve discovered listening to radio can be a pleasing experience (until now I’ve always got annoyed at the sound compression, and noise if there are poor atmospherics or tuning drift).

 I also happen to an iPod owner, and rather attached to the little box of magic. Until the arrival of DAB I’ve never been worried by the idea of not having radio incorporated into it, always believing that dedication to a single purpose is a good thing. But now I’d like to combine the two, rather than having to carry two larger devices which are bound to have overlapping features, I wanted something small and compact so it can travel with me and my iPod which can use the iPod’s audio capabilities.

So trawling the net I thought I’d find a raft of possibilities – but this isn’t the case!  There are radio alarm clocks that will dock your iPod and have a DAB tuner – but something small enough to travel with the iPod – nada, nothing. The best I can find is an article (Get DAB Digital Radio on your iPod) about a product due out later this year.  The picture I found of a prototype elsewhere makes it look pretty funky – and will be going on my wishlist.

If you know of anything available now though – I’d love to hear about it.

 Google Reader – the online RSS aggregator now has offline capability by utilising Google Gears libraries (more details here Access your Google Reader feeds offline with Google Gears).  This brings the tool very close to being an all killer RSS solution – all it needs to address is the storing of private username and passwords for those feeds that require authorisation to pickup.