Category: Home Audio

  • Stereo HomePod Pair in Music Assistant

    Took me a little while to get this sorted out so I thought I’d document it here: Music Assistant supports grouping speakers so, briefly put what you’re doing here is just creating a group with two HomePods, one playing the left channel, the other the right channel. Key here is configuring the individual HomePods to…

  • Tailscale, iOS, self-hosting and Home Assistant

    It feels like magic to have no open ports on my router and still be able to access all of myself hosted services. Jotting down a few notes here on how I approached this. First off, my primary server that I self-host all of my services on is always running a VPN so I don’t…

  • Personal Tech/Self-hosted wins.

    A few weeks ago I worked with Claude.ai to generate some journaling prompts that were unique to me and my goals. It’s made for some great journaling this month so far. Today’s prompt and response is one worth sharing as I think it’s something a lot of folks like me would benefit from thinking about…

  • Adventures in Self-hosting HiFi Audio Streaming.

    I’ve been through a bunch of self-hosted music setups over the past 10 years or so. There are a long list of good reasons why owning and hosting your own music is better than streaming but I’ll save that for another post. Still, despite years of home streaming my audio collection, I haven’t found the…

  • audio & self-hosting updates

    It’s been a busy few weeks as I reorient myself from the warm-weather version of me that spends almost zero time on personal technology projects to the cold-weather version of me that spend most of my time on personal technology projects. As always, I know I contain multitudes but sometimes the difference between some of…

  • The Right Amplifier

    A few years ago I picked up a pair of KEF q150 speakers for my small listening room, at the time I had them paired with a NAD 7125 amplifier. When I first fired up that pairing I was a bit dissapointed in how bass-heavy everything sounded. I learned that the KEF’s came with some…

  • On Mic Preamps

    I recently rewired my home studio and added the capacity to include some outboard gear in the process. Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some recordings to work out the kinks and get set up to record a new batch of originals that I’ve been working on. As is inevitable once my recording…

  • Re-listening

    The shift to hosting a personal Navidrome server has shifted my listening habits, fostering more repeated listening contrasted with Apple Music’s constant novelty aspect.

  • On Listening

    Let’s start by agreeing that there is so much great music out there—old and new—that it’s not possible to listen to all of it. Today, discovering new music now can feel like drinking from an algorithm-fueled firehose, but I can remember before the internet came around where all we had were music magazines, really good…

  • AirPlay 2 on Shairport

    This is still in its infancy but it’s fantastic to see AirPlay 2 support making its way into Shairport/Linux. I haven’t tested this yet as I’ve been buying old AirPort Express (amazingly, they support AirPlay 2) devices to replace my Raspberry Pi’s but it’ll be fun to pull out a raspberry pi and try to…