Cat5TV does unRAID

A few years ago, I watched a good bit of Category5 Technology TV (around the time I was building my first unRAID system), but for some reason stopped watching

They've just done a show on unRAID 6 and it reminded me how much I enjoyed it;

Looking forward to unRAID 6 release next week.

Making Movies

I recently came across a review of the MOTU 1248 AVB external audio interface on yabb.jriver.com and figured it's the ultimate in flexibility for my needs - it would drive my home theatre sound system AND whole house audio system AND anything else I threw at it.

The only problem was the price - at over €1,600, it's somewhat pricey. (This blog has brought in the sum total of €50 over 2 years to give an indication of when I could afford it!).

However, it does have a baby brother, the Ultralite AVB which at under €900 would be a little more palatable. It would give 8x outs for the home theatre and can be expanded. Still out of range though, so I turned to eBay and found a Motu 848 MkII for a lot less that will work as in interim solution and will work as the ADAT expansion unit if I ever get the UltraLite.

I first tried the unit with a KVM Windows 8 VM in unRaid but found a lot of pops and clicks, particularly with higher resolution audio files. Additionally, when I introduced the longer FireWire cable I needed, it just wouldn't work at all. So with a tinge of sadness, I've retired one of my VMs and migrated it back to a physical HTPC that will run the home theatre.

So with that decision made, I set about re-configuring the HT A/V set-up. The biggest task was to physically move everything behind the screen. The photo above shows my current 110" 16:9 screen in position, but I can swing it up to reveal...

Lost Weekend

Now that Xen is slated for total removal from unRaid, it was time to seriously look at migrating to KVM. The easiest solution would probably have been to start from scratch and re-create all my VMs under KVM but that would require reactivating windows VMs, downloading all the updates, re-installing and re-configuring software etc.

The more attractive route was finding a way to migrate existing VMs from Xen to KVM. Thanks to jonp from LimeTech who published a how-to guide, this become fairly straightforward. I even recorded myself following the guide. Having done my Windows 7 VM, I then set about two Windows 8.1 systems and a Netrunner (ArchLinux / Manjaro) VM.

The Windows 8.1 migrations were as straightforward as the Win7 one had been. However, the Linux one just wouldn’t work for me. Once I’d set it up in KVM, pointed to the disk image and booted, I was greeted with a Grub error indicating that the root disk UUID could not be found. A quick check indicated that the UUID was in fact the same and no amount of Google Fu revealed a solution. I ended up re-installing the OS and dealing with a world of hurt in the updates (lot’s of conflicting dependencies).

So, with 4x VMs migrated, it was time to start playing with my shiny new KVM flavour of UnRaid. With a full weekend of playing around under my belt, I can now report that some things worked well, some didn’t. Some things I liked, some not so much;

Converting Xen VM to KVM

In recent days, it's become clear that LimeTech plan to support only KVM virtualisation in unRAID 6 (as well as Docker). When they started out with version 6, Xen was the only virtualisation available and that's the one I went with.

I've been anxious about the learning curve required to migrate to KVM but since Xen is likely to disappear sooner rather than later, I figured it was time to bite the bullet.

LimeTech have published a 'how to' guide on migrating a Win7 VM from Xen to KVM so I decided to record myself following it;

Overall, it's a breeze with just a couple of small hiccups, one relating to not being clear on how to set up KVM support in unRAID and the other not figuring out how to ad an additional virtual disk in the UI. Apart from that, all good - though the new VM UI doesn't seem to support all PCI/PCIe devices for passthrough so I need to figure out how to do that now...

Why I'm leaving Tidal

I signed up for music streaming service Tidal a few months ago, thrilled with the quality full-resolution audio I heard on the meagre 7-day trial and excited by the way I could integrate it with my squeezebox setup via ickstream.

I'd been a Spotify user and enjoyed that service. It too integrated well with Squeezebox but as a family we were sharing an account and more times than not, I'd find the account in use when I wanted to listen. I needed either a second Spotify account or an alternative.

I've been using Tidal a lot for the past couple of months, out and about on my Sony Xperia phone in low-res mode, on my Macbook at work in HiFi mode via the desktop and occasionally home via the web interface.

During this time, the service was re-launched with much ado by a bevy of singers that I never listen to. It passed me by.

I've enjoyed using Tidal but now I'm leaving and here's why;

Bi-Amping with JRiver Media Centre

Having recently acquired a pair of long-coveted B&W 803N speakers, I've been running them from my almost-vintage Pioneer VSX-2011D receiver. This is very much old-skool analog with nary a HDMI connection in sight.  It's configured as purely a power-amp using the multi-channel inputs fed from an M-Aduio Delta 1010LT sound card. This card is connected to a MediaServer8 Win8 VM running JRiver Media Centre.

I plan on purchasing a proper power-amp to drive the 803s but for now, budget doesn't allow so I wanted to see if I could bi-amp the speakers using the re ever. It's a 7-channel system and does support bi-amping, just not in multi-channel mode.

Since I'm using JRiver as a receiver, I wanted to see if is possible to configure it to bi-amp the speakers. Turns out it is. Here's how;