this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Some of us figured this out 20 years ago and never turned back. (I figured it out about the time that I realized I had more music in my mp3 collection than the college radio station I volunteered at in 2000.)
My Cinemageddon account turned 18 earlier this year.
I'm evolving a "music player" system which basically consists of a fleet of individual players, each with a full copy of the music library because, even at today's storage prices, why not? Storage for 10,000 songs at higher fidelity than a brand new LP vinyl album costs less (adjusted for inflation) than an album of 8 songs did back in the 1980s, and only 2 of those 8 songs were usually any good...
So, have a music player in every bedroom, living room, family room, kitchen, car, patio - turn them on when you want, synchronize them when you want - split off and listen to your own playlist when you want - and every player contains a synchronized backup of all the music so you can just drive off with one, go completely off-grid and never interrupt the playlist. The only network traffic is from your phone interface to choose your playlist or synchronize with players nearby - or across the planet.
This does sound very attractive. I’ve been trying to get a few family members of of Amazon Alexa’s and this is one of the biggest arguments they give me against it. I’d be curious to hear how far your evolution has come with this. I do have a rather large collection of music mostly from the olden days of piracy but would be interested in some doing some ‘updating’ to the library and the possibility of getting some family further away from Amazon.
How "techy" are you? Do you have a couple of Raspberry Pis or similar laying around basically unused? Can you clone a git repo, open an LLM coding agent and get reasonable results out of the chat interface?
The ultimate goal is to get this 100% AI/LLM free, but for now the LLMs are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting of configuring the target devices to install the player.
why don't you use ansible for that, or even just some bash script? you could generate it even if you want
So far, every target is different - like the one with the 3.5" touch display built in, that has its own display driver module. Then there's Windoze vs Ubuntu vs Raspbian OS, and the Pi Zero 2W has a few different considerations than, say, a Pi 4 or 5, and basically every place I have deployed this so far has had something unique that needed custom attention. Once that's all worked out, sure, ansible or whatever, but customizing for each target isn't something "last year's tools" did as easily as the new agents.
Techy enough. I self host a bunch of stuff, have a few servers and am more or less comfortable cloning a git repo. I actually currently have 2 rasp pi’s begging for a job.
I'm just about to run my first test of the "echo mode" where each player plays its own local files, synchronized to one player's play list (a few issues of delay/clock rate synchronization to deal with in that approach). After that, I discovered I need to do a project rename (I've duplicated another project name from 2021, so... time for a different name - on 100K lines of stuff...) then remind me and I'll give you a pointer to the (new, renamed) repo.
100k lines? are you sure you couldn't outsource more tasks to existing tools?
45K of those lines are documents, specifications, testing results... It's an overbloated mess bull-headedly pursuing a couple of arbitrarty goals of mine that not many other people have pursued (use of Disk At Once (DAO) audio files with passages defined as sub-sets of the file, 71 dimensioal passage "flavor" determination for next track selection using the now offline AcousticBrainz algorithms, deployment on 5-6 so far various hardware/OS platforms adds a bit as well...)
On the bright side: synchronization of 2 independent players is "coming together" - got some decent performance in the steady state case last night, now chasing the edge cases for faster convergence at startup, etc.
Finally, a way to properly listen to The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka without needing to own four fucking cd players and stereos.
I lived this. It was a great way for me and several of my closest friends to learn about the variable latency among devices between pushing the play/unpause button and when a cd track actually starts to play.
In University, I drilled a hole in my dorm closet wall to my neighbor's room so we could run a wire between our stereo systems and I could play whatever he was playing through my speakers. This is like that, for the digital-networked age.