Bliss – A New NAS music organizer for Synology and QNAP
Bliss is one of the several apps and services which have been written for storing music on NAS devices. It is an automated organizer for large music collections. It assesses and fixes problems in your music collection, and works alongside your music players. Bliss is available now for Synology and QNAP. One of the reasons for home NAS’ continual growth is its use for storing media, including music. Storing large collections of music on a NAS makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most obvious one, and why a lot of people eventually get a NAS, is that it frees up storage space on other computers and devices. The advantages run far deeper though. By centralising your music collection on a NAS device you’re adding a great deal of flexibility to your home music network.
Why do people use NAS for their Music and How does Bliss help?
One of the big plusses is no longer having to have other computers switched on, just so other devices can play music stored on those computers. Let’s say you have a wireless music system, like a Sonos or similar setup. The Sonos system has to access the music files somehow; having them on a NAS means you don’t have to walk around the house turning computers on just to listen to some music. Your personal collection is always available.
It’s not just playback though; by centralising your music you also afford centralisation of control. And that applies to multiple aspects of your library as well as playback: security, backups, and organisational. We have seen multiple apps moving to NAS devices; examples include Plex, MinimServer, CrashPlan (for backups), BubbleUPnP, Serviio and more.
Bliss and how it Organises large music libraries
bliss is an organisational tool for large music libraries. It was built from the ground up to run on devices like NASes. It’s not a music player, it’s a music organiser and it’s intended to be a sidekick to the playback apps. So why use bliss? Bliss makes music libraries more searchable, browsable and beautiful with minimal effort.
How does it do it? In bliss you define rules. Rules are things like:
- Album art should always be larger than 500×500, and should only ever be JPEGs.
- All genre names should be in upper case.
- Album names should be canonically correct and not use common aliases.
- Track numbers should be padded with zeros.
These are just examples. The rules are applied to your collection, highlighting non-compliance with these rules and fixing problems automatically where permitted. The point is that by defining a rule once, this is encoded forever and can be continually applied to your collection as you add new music. The ensures consistent results and is particularly appropriate for large collections.
How can I use Bliss on a Synology and QNAP NAS?
By combining tools like Plex and bliss on your NAS, you can create what amounts to your own private streaming service, “cutting the cord” to the likes of Spotify. Plex takes care of playback, while bliss takes care of grooming your library so that it looks professional. Not only that, but also so that it is structured the way you want it. Bliss is available now for Synology and QNAP platforms. It also runs in Docker and on Linux, so porting to other NAS devices should be straightforward (get in touch if you want to help with an official port!).
