It’s finally happening: I’m sitting on a train on my way upstate and listening to a CD that is part of my music collection at home. I’m actually able to access my music at a distance, streaming from a home server. This has been, as they say, a journey. Years ago I began ripping my CDs to a hard drive on my computer. That was rough enough. Then for a while I used Google play music, a system that supposedly fused my rips with digital purchases, backed them up on Google cloud servers and let me access them anywhere. Never really worked all that well, and then Google scrapped the service and started YouTube Music, which failed to back up most of my library. For a while I gave up and then started trying to set up a Plex server, which proved too difficult. Current solution? Roon with my home computer set up as a base and the Room Arc app. on my phone. Why is this important? I have almost a terabyte of files on the home machine and I’m irked by Spotify and other streaming services.

Fingers crossed going forward I’ll be able to rip the rest of my cassettes and LPs and then I’ll be able to access them from anywhere I go.

Currently playing: Caron Wheeler: Wind Cries Mary