Best way to manage huge FLAC library on laptop & smartphone?

[Kevin Schaich]

I have a huge music library, most of it being FLAC. It totals around ~400 GB on a portable hard drive that I have shared on my network right now, because it's just not practical to keep all this music stored on my laptop.

Here's my dilemma:

When I use MusicBee to stream all my music across my network it works beautifully. Everything goes through without a hitch. But whenever I take my laptop away from home, or even lose an internet connection, I lose the ability to play any of this music on my laptop. Is there an easy way to automatically "cache" a selection of these tracks by my favorite artists to my laptop so I have them available on the go?

I'm also in the same boat with my android smartphone. I'm currently using Google Play Music to store all my stuff in the cloud at the moment, but again, no internet connection on my smartphone = no music, it eats up a TON of my monthly data, and doesn't update my playlists correctly. Any way to physically copy a selection of tracks at a regular interval onto my phone? On-the-fly conversion to 320kbps MP3's would be great also as I don't have a ton of space to work with on my phone.

I'm not opposed to trying new things but I've had really great luck with MusciBee so far. Any suggestions would help me out greatly guys, I appreciate the help in advance.

 

[lunyone]

I haven't tried this yet, but do you have expansion room on your phone for a SD card? If so, I would move some of your favorites over from your HD to a SD card and keep that on your phone, so you have at least some music to play from.

 

[Kevin Schaich]

I haven't tried this yet, but do you have expansion room on your phone for a SD card? If so, I would move some of your favorites over from your HD to a SD card and keep that on your phone, so you have at least some music to play from.

I already do that, it just gets to be a pain copying and pasting things back and forth. What I'm looking for is more of an automated solution since practically none of the "one click" solutions like DoubleTwist or iSyncr work with FLAC.

 

[lunyone]

Yeah I know what you mean. I find the swapping of files back in forth to be a bit of a pain, but at least your not tied to iTunes

 

[manofchalk]

Sounds to me your in need of a HTPC/NAS. Build a cheapo rig with a few HDD's in it, hook it up to the home network and use MusicBee manage it all on the software end.
You could even use it as a more traditional NAS, so you can store large files off of your local devices.

 

[lunyone]

Sounds to me your in need of a HTPC/NAS. Build a cheapo rig with a few HDD's in it, hook it up to the home network and use MusicBee manage it all on the software end.
You could even use it as a more traditional NAS, so you can store large files off of your local devices.

Yeah I think he was a bit more concerned about getting it on his phone, but I could be wrong.

 

[manofchalk]

Pretty sure there are Android apps that can be used to connect and browse through home networks, if it isn't built right into the phone.

 

[Kevin Schaich]

Pretty sure there are Android apps that can be used to connect and browse through home networks, if it isn't built right into the phone.

I believe you're correct. What I'm more concerned with is a way to "cache" these files to both my laptop and smartphone, which I haven't found a reliable way to do yet.