Hiya!
I have a Raspberry Pi 4B set up as a print server, so it has to run 24/7. But it irks me that it’s mostly idling.
I’d move my website to it, but I don’t want to deal with it being open to the internet. The same goes for an e-mail server.
I was also thinking of running a Minecraft server on it. (Being able to play on the same world from different devices is kinda cool.) Alas, my RPi only has 4 GiBs of RAM. I worry that such a load would interfere with the print server.
Any ideas what I could run on it?
Another vote for a music server. Gonic/Navidrome is pretty low power and super useful!
Home assistant is another option, but I’ll say that if you’re serious about home automation you’ll quickly outgrow a Pi. It’ll run if you only have a handful of devices though.
I like the music server idea! Where do you get your music? Many artists don’t even sell CDs nowadays.
Home assistant is probably not for me. The house I live in is still very analogue. I enjoy not having to debug software when investigating why there’s no hot water.
Seconding Bandcamp & Qobuz, or ripping CDs. I use fre:ac to get accurate FLACs.
Plenty of artists still do sell CDs though. I often buy them at the merch stand at shows. Many also sell DRM free digital files on sites like Bandcamp. I also buy a lot of music at the thrift stores and rip them. If all else fails, there’s always the high seas.
Almost every time I look on Bandcamp, the artist I am looking for isn’t there. :( Also, last time I tried buying something there they only accepted PayPal which I stopped using a while ago. But it seems they accept normal card payments now. Neat.
I buy CDs – I even bought a CD drive to rip them – but international shipping really kills me. I guess brick-and-mortar music shops are still a thing…
There’s also qobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.
Its Qobuz 😅
You are right. I’ve corrected my comment
Weird. It must be that my taste is very indie/alternative. You can always also check if the artist has their own shop.
That’s how Jonathan Coulton does it. They Might Be Giants does it as well (in addition to a Bandcamp), but most of their stuff from 1990-1996 is stuck on their former label, so they can’t sell DRM-free audio, only vinyl and/or cassette.
For CDs, Amazon, ebay, or discogs. Digital music I usually get from the artist’s webstore if possible, otherwise I’ll buy it from Amazon or BandCamp.
One heads up, Buying and downloading digital music from Amazon is a pain in the butt if you have an Amazon Music subscription. Easy and straightforward though without.
Apple music is also possible but you have to burn the tracks to CD using itunes to move it out of Apple’s ecosystem.
I also hear good things about Tidal but I’ve never used them.
I did not know that Amazon sold digital music. But it kills me that Amazon and Apple are the two big choices. Out of the frying pan into the fire…
I thought that Tidal was a streaming service, and that you can rip music from there like you can from Youtube or Spotify.
Nowadays, Apple is only really big for digital music if you are (or were) already really deep in their ecosystem. Not sure I’ve heard of any devices that play nice with their DRM in a while and last I had looked (admittedly many years ago) they did not have a compatible app for Android.
Apple music was bigger back 15 or 20 years ago for digital downloads due in large part to the iPod, though I occasionally hear of some odd band or another that only releases their stuff on iTunes.
And since this is a linux community, as a heads up, iTunes is only marginally functional, last I heard, in linux. Apparently it can’t detect connected devices. You’ll probably need a Windows or Mac system to run iTunes if you want to go that route.
There’s also a lot of smaller solutions, like smaller record label websites, and legacy music stores in whatever country you are.