Programming a back-end for online mastering service

[efinque]

Yea HP Gen8 machines are very inexpensive machines now, and I think still popular for homelab type setups.

I have an HP Microserver Gen8 as my home server. It was old even 3 years ago when I got it.. but does the job. I upgraded the CPU to a Xeon E3-1265L V2 2.5GHz which was the fastest available for that socket, with a reasonable TDP of 45W. It is not a rackmount server, but I have it on a rack shelf in a rack with a door.

The advantage of this setup is that due to the micro-tower size of this machine it makes do with one large fan rather than lots of smaller ones like the rackmount ones do. So it's already quiet and in the rack it's very quiet. But with some limitations.. only 1 CPU socket, 16GB max RAM (which I have) and 4 swap bays.

I run Proxmox for virtualization and then on top of that I have some containers for my file and media servers and a VM running windows 10, and another one for linux development. And that's about all I can run comfortably with my limited RAM. I have 8GB RAM reserved for Proxmox because I'm using a ZFS filesystem there which needs a lot of RAM to work well.

The machine you are looking at is a lot more capable, you could do a lot more.. but is also going to be a lot louder and use a lot more power.
Since you're a windows guy I assume you'll install Windows straight on it and use Microsofts virtualization.

If you don't have experience with virtualization you might want to give it a try.. being able to snapshot your disk and go back if things get screwed up is amazing when you're doing development.

Thanks for the insight!

The bottleneck here is that I'm limited to a WiFi network (think something like 100/10mbps, at max I've had 8mb/s download speed)

And I don't really have floor/desk space for a server, but getting the quote was a nice gesture from the IT dealer (I also bought a shorter USB cable for my live setup)

[efinque]

To simplify the configuration I could tweak the code so the folders are stored as variables.. like, declare :

$upload = "C:\AirLab\upload"

And so on. Then call the variables in the code.

[efinque]

Here's the latest code snippet :

for (){
    if (Test-Path C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\upload\*.wav){
        Write-Output "File recieved"
        Start-MpScan -AsJob -ScanPath C:\Users\user\Deskop\airlab\upload
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
        Get-ChildItem C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\upload | Copy-Item -Destination C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\tmp
        Get-ChildItem C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\tmp | Rename-Item -NewName tmp.wav
        Start-Process 'C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\airlab.exe'
        Get-ChildItem C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\upload | Remove-Item
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 17
        Write-Output "File exported"
        Remove-Item 'C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\tmp\tmp.wav'
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 90
        Remove-Item 'C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\download\exported.wav'}
    elseif (Get-ChildItem C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\upload -Exclude *.wav) {
        Get-ChildItem C:\Users\user\Desktop\airlab\upload -Exclude *.wav | Remove-Item
        Write-Output "Wrong file type"}
    else {
        Write-Output "Standby"}
        }

Basically now it checks whether the file is a .wav or not and deletes it if it isn't, otherwise it runs the main loop.

[David Bowman]

Well damn, so if you send whatever mp3 in there for mastering it will reject it?

[efinque]

Well damn, so if you send whatever mp3 in there for mastering it will reject it?

Yes.

The code could be very easily tweaked to accept MP3 files instead of .wavs.