Streaming music from cloud storage

[GrumpyPatzer]

Having been prompted to investigate alternatives to the very old (but customisable) version of Twonky that I have been using for over a decade on a QNAP 459 NAS, I am now thinking about switching to using a Raspberry Pi instead of my newer QNAP NAS (which appears to have an intermittent power supply problem), and am even wondering whether it would be viable to use cloud-based storage.

Have any of you attempted to use cloud storage with Minimserver (or, indeed, any other music streaming application) and, if so, were you able to make it work satisfactorily?

Because of this NAS problem, I decided to try loading my music collection to Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage (we have 6TB, albeit split into 1TB chunks, as part of an MS 365 subscription). I had intended that as a secure (?), last-ditch backup, but then wondered if — particularly for use with a Pi (to avoid the need for a separate SSD) — I could actually use it as the primary location from which to stream using MinimServer.

As Simon rightly mentions in another thread, the cloud storage would have to be mounted in such a way as to appear part of the (local) file system. It does seem possible to do that, after a fashion, in MacOS but, based on my very limited experience of it, it seems that the way OneDrive works is to download a file when it is accessed. That isn’t the way I would want it to behave — and it would make the initial scan of the music library completely impractical (even with very high speed fibre broadband).

It may be that this downloading of files on demand is specific to the way OneDrive is implemented for MacOS (I do not know enough about cloud storage to comment on whether other providers’ cloud storage would work differently), but one possible solution may be a package called rclone, which allows a variety of cloud storage types to be locally mounted, and may circumvent this difficulty with the initial scan. Another problem, though (possibly specific to OneDrive), is that access is throttled once a certain number of requests have been made in a specified time period. This may make it impossible to do the scan in any reasonable length of time.

I will investigate more fully when I have time but, for now, have two questions (probably for Simon):

1. When MinimSever scans a music library, is it able to access an individual file’s tag information without loading the whole file?

(I’m assuming it must be, given how quickly the scan seems to be done even with spinning disks on my NAS although, for cloud storage to work, rclone or similar would also have to be capable of reading just the necessary part of a file without having to locally cache the whole thing.)

2. Can MinimServer persist the information it obtains from scanning the music library across reboots?

(I’m wondering if it would be possible, having done a scan, to continue using that information until a rescan is manually requested.)

Thanks ….
Andrew