The Beginning Of It All
I knew I needed hardware. I learned that it didn’t have to be some big server farm with racks, and racks of servers, and it didn’t need to have a massive fiber channel storage array with fail over and redundant disks or RAID arrays costing thousands and thousands of dollars.
A simple desktop computer with 4GB of memory and a decent CPU would do it. It didn’t need a honkin’ video card, the typical onboard would do nicely. I didn’t need a fancy multichannel sound card with multiple inputs and outputs either. The onboard sound card on the motherboard will suffice.
A simple Dell Inspiron desktop machine would do it.
I acquired my first desktop computer for my project from a friend, who reported it was running really slow so she bought a new computer. She offered it to me, asking if I would like to have it. It is still in service as my broadcast computer today.
A 2015 Dell Inspiron desktop with a CDROM drive, 8GB RAM and 500GB SATA hard drive. I ghosted the Windows OS, formatted the drive and installed Ubuntu 14 on it from a USB stick I had created some time ago. (How-To coming soon)
The Birth of Greystone
I configured my desktop and named the PC “Greystone” after the name of my man-cave/bar. I installed a Toshiba 1TB SATA drive for additional storage, leaving the 500GB drive for the OS.
Weeks flew by as I began the hunt to build a digital music collection, and using BitTorrent, acquired complete anthologies of my favorite artists. For hours I would watch the Transmission software panel display the progress of the torrents being downloaded, giddy as a school boy that I was getting music for free. I felt a bit guilty, but that feeling was short-lived and I justified it as “private use” anyways, and the artists wouldn’t mind me having a copy of their work without paying for it because it was for a really good cause (me).
Collecting All The Tools
I needed a way to hear my music without using a service (Pandora, etc), and certainly without interruption of those pesky commercials. I needed a local copy of the songs, and didn’t want to use something like LimeWire or any of those other music sharing sites which are long gone now anyways.
I noticed that YouTube had just about anything out there in the music world. Playlists, whole albums as videos. I was intrigued and found a diamond in the rough – a little known software called YouTube-DL. YouTube-DL had the ability to download and extract the audio from a YouTube video and save it in a file on my machine. (See YouTube-DL HOWTO coming soon)
The Birth Of Jarvis (soapbox)
Then, two weeks later, my son in law brought me an old Dell machine with the same complaint – slow windows computer. Each came with a monitor, LCD 17″ and a keyboard and wired mouse.
I had heard UBUNTU Linux was a great OS for reviving old tired Windows computers, so I created the USB boot key, and booted it up. Surprised to say, it did really well on the USB key so I went ahead and ghosted the drive and did a full install. It went flawlessly, and the next thing I knew, the old machine had new life, a blank slate for my newborn infant project under Ubuntu 16 LTS.
I named this machine soapbox, because it was the machine which would be running LiquidSoap (more on that later). And then later became known as Jarvis.
I found my old hard drive collection in a box in the attic, and some SATA cables and installed a 1TB hard drive for holding the music collection. With this new storage I began to get as excited as a child on Christmas morning and promptly began to set up and customize my desktop environment. “Here we go!” I chirped with glee.
My first task was to set up my network. I had an old CISCO WiFi router and dumbed it down to be a simple switch, ran an Ethernet cable to it from my cable modem, and got the first computer connected to the internet. I named it “Soapbox” and within an hour I was able to shell into it from other machines, and transfer files and software quickly.
So now, I have 2 computers on the network (Greystone and Jarvis), both running Ubuntu LTS and looking all happy to be alive again. That night, I turned off the lights in the room and just looked at the glow of the monitors, and smoked while future tripping about the project becoming an obsession.
It was time to take certain steps.