general storage questions.

geek4hire625geek4hire625 Member
in Storage

I am one of many who is jumping ship at the loss of google play music. at the moment we are looking at doing a year of google one and sharing this storage between my wife and myself for astiga but as I've used the web interface tonight i noticed that there seemed to be a significant delay in loading songs. The music i have up right now for testing is on a google drive account. Is this delay on the google end or is it something else? Is there a storage option that is noticeably faster than others? What about a local SFTP server? I do have some technical skill and could build one if i had to at some point.

Comments

  • AgistaAgista Member

    In my experience with streaming to different apps, OneDrive is better than Google. I haven't used Google with Astiga though.

    pCloud is recommended by the developer.

    While streaming via Astiga might not be as fast as, say, Spotify, I have not experienced a delay that I would consider significant.

  • CoyleyCoyley Member

    After moving from Google Play, I did not want to be dependent on them again so use pcloud for storage. It works perfectly with no streaming delay. I find it important to set the right caching within the app on each device. I do not use the web interface for playing.

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    Purely based on performance, you are probably best off with Amazon S3 or compatible (such as DigitalOcean Spaces or Scaleway) in Western Europe (as close as possible to Amsterdam). WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, Dropbox, pCloud, Backblaze tend to be quick as well, again especially if the server is fast, and located close to Amsterdam. Also heavily depends on the server of course. Google Drive and OneDrive can be a bit slower due to rate limiting, and not adhering to the traditional file tree structure*, but once again you probably won't notice it, unless you store your music >10 levels deep. A local SFTP server may be fast, if your upload speed is sufficient (preferably 100mbps+).

    How long it takes for a song to load differs, and it also depends on the specifics of the song. What happens is that you request a song, Astiga forwards that request to Google Drive, Astiga downloads that file from Google Drive, checks whether it is actually an audio file content-wise (and not a PDF that is called tax-report.pdf.mp3) and then streams it to you. Generally speaking, downloading the song to Astiga takes the longest. However, subsequent songs should be preloaded.

    * At the time of writing, folders in OneDrive/Google Drive are actually more like labels, and they don't have the same invariants a standard file system has. For example, /a/b/c.mp3 and /a/e/c.mp3 can both be the same file (as a file can exist in multiple folders at once, and thus have multiple parents), and /e/f/g.mp3 may apply to more than one file (as you can have two different "folders" (labels) with the same name). This means that unlike most other storage solutions, one cannot just request the content of /v/w/x/y/z, but rather has to request the children of the root, then find v, get the children of v, then find w, etc. etc. This is more work, and thus tends to take longer, which is the slowdown you noticed with Google Drive.

  • geek4hire625geek4hire625 Member

    So based on this situation with the file structure, which services would you recommend? I have seen other people recommend pcloud for storage. The big point of google is that we already have android devices, use google home devices ect.

  • bobthegoat2001bobthegoat2001 Member

    You're probably looking for an answer from Koen, but I'd like to point out the main reasons I like pCloud;

    • The biggest being that they have a Lifetime deal, which they have previously had on sale during Black Friday for around $250, which normally costs $350 for the 2 TB plan, then I never have to pay for it again (theoretically, I have done it twice so far during Black Friday to up my storage to 4 TB).
    • But for a more related not for Astiga, I like that I can have my music sorted in a folder (in pCloud) called "My Music" and that's the folder that's synced with Astiga. This allows me to play either in Astiga or play directly from pCloud on my Laptop/Desktop or even through Kodi, without needing to sync [over 800 GB's of music] to my computers. I can edit the music [tags] directly in pCloud also.
  • geek4hire625geek4hire625 Member
    edited August 2020

    i have not 'officially' uploaded all of my media yet. just kinda played around with it but i have both a google drive and Dropbox connected to astiga and last night i moved the music from google drive to Dropbox to test what koen was saying about folder structure and it really worked ! that maybe... i want to say 30 seconds or more of delay to fetch songs was gone! This is a neat discovery but very frustrating as we are primarily Google users and p cloud does not have a comparable storage offering to google one in price. I don't need 500 gb of storage for my music and photos. We currently use the unlimited option for photos on google photos and are just fine with that. We just need more than the free google account offers for music and the fact that Google one allows you to share that storage with your family is a nice touch. With pcloud, does it let you shore storage on the 500 gb plan?

    Or do you have to have pcloud family which is way more expensive?

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