This is why I love having luks covering my entire system disk. If I want to upgrade the system with a new drive or move the drive to a different pc or sell it or dispose of it I just dd the first couple of gigs to obliterate the luks header.
It’s obviously essential to have a backup strategy, of course, but full disk encryption is the only way to go for me.
It’s only been around for less than a year as far as I’m aware and from what I gather still seems to be finding its sea legs as far as balancing between what rolls in immediately(ish) and what comes in through the big “tumbles”
Your biggest tech challenge will likely be in installing linux. So take your time and work through a tutorial.
Linux is a fundamentally different OS from Windows. Some desktop environments resemble various Windows versions, while others are very different: they might be more Mac like, or more mobile like, or completely unfamiliar.
Installing programs is generally easier on linux because the default is to use the package manager (basically an app store) rather than downloading sketchy programs off websites that all want to update on their own schedule and all want to start when you boot the OS. Just search them, set updates to pop up weekly or whatever your preferred schedule is, and your package manager will do the rest.
Troubleshooting is harder for new users but easier for experienced users: it typically requires more work that can be daunting for casual users, but it lets you get much deeper into the OS to fix problems, where on Windows you might just be stuck waiting for a patch.
Compatibility is usually the biggest frustration, since many programs do not release a linux version, so you need to find alternatives or run them in a compatibility layer. Both of these solutions can sometimes cause problems getting the exact functionality you need, whereas if you’re using the natively supporting OS it may be smoother.
If your winamp is still functional, I’d just suggest you convert all mp3pro to wav using the disc writer plugin and then use ffmpeg to convert to mp4 or normal mp3.
Then you won’t need to worry about the mp3pro codec issues.
At some point you’ll have to use a new codec, even if it’s in 10 years. So it might be a good idea to download the music instead of converting.
Soulseek with Nicotine+ seems to be a good way to download music. Or streamrip/deemix with a (temporary) Deezer/Tidal subscription supports high quality audio.
More time than trying to shoehorn a defunct package for an abandoned codec in to a random player which even if it works would only be a temporary kludge not a fix?
That particular conversion is lossless but the original MP3 Pro file is lossy and converting to MP3 again would be double lossy. Best solution is to rerip or download a good copy.
wav takes too much space, the collection will grown 5, 6 times the size… I just don’t have that much online storage at my disposal, my NAS is 4 x 2TB drives in RAID5, I have about 6TB at my disposal for everything (personal stuff as well as media).
If it doesn’t work out or you find yourself tight on space in the future you can always recompress to mp3 or ogg and take the quality hit at that point.
Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.
Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.
Ummm… I don’t live in the US and $50 is A LOT for me. My monthly salary is about $500. All of these 2TB drives are used and dicomissioned (replaced for larger one, they’re from work). I just don’t have the funds to replace them. The NAS is DIY as well.
And drives are not that cheap around here. They are, but not as cheap as in the US. SSDs are about the same price though… but our salaries are not.
Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.
And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand. Plus, you can’t find 4TB or above drives second hand here. People use them till they die or repurpose them.
Second hand PC parts are generally overpriced here. People wanna get like 70, 80% of the price they paid for them. There are some reasonable sellers, but as I said, they usually don’t sell drives or sell drives that no one would need anyway (250GB, 500GB, 1TB spinning drives).
Your last suggestion is kinda good to be honest, I might opt for that.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand.
I think this actually depends on a lot of things. I have an old Dell rack server and I buy ex-enterprise SAS drives for it. I use them in RAID arrays with dedicated hot spares and cold spares on standby. The eBay seller I buy from replaced a drive for free once when it was “error predicted” on arrival.
I have the original source for some of them, but very few, like maybe 1 or 2%.
Doesn’t matter, I’m just gonna redownload them in flac, store them on optical media as flac and keep them as HE-AAC on my NAS for local playback. It’s the only option that’s acceptable in my mind.
It seems that BT 5.3 in USB format is a challenge to find, let alone support under Linux. If 5.0 is acceptable, the TP Link UB500 uses an RTL8761B chipset which has been supported since around kernel 5.16.
I have a few UB500 and UB400 adapters and both have worked OOTB without issue under Fedora.
You shouşd definetly give mint a try it is one of the most just works distros. great for beginners, maybe test the software you want to use on the live environment before installing, if all goes well than give it a spin.
You are probably gonna want to chroot into your laptop using a livecd for linux. This will allow you to basically access your terminal without being able to login or boot, and then you can uninstall Nimdow, or turn off auto-login.
If you want to automate your system install Nix is a good one to look at, nowadays when I use a new system/wipe an existing one I can just install NixOS drop my config, sign into the things that need signing into and go
Obviously doesn’t work as well if you’re trying other distros but you can still use it on them
The main thing you are doing wrong is reading howto articles in the web. Most of them are written by newbies who did the thing they describe for the first time, got something likely working and want to describe this for themselwes an for the other world. This does not mean they did everything right, and howtos usually contain numerous mistakes. Better read official documentation. This will take longer time but you will understand what you do. I don’t know if Mint has GUI tools to configure samba server. I would better edit config file manually, it is more or less simple.
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