Happy to help. As I have it configured, my local network is set to prefer direct play, so any transcoding gets done from connections that traverse the boundary of my network. If you don’t live with your parents this would likely apply.

Transcoding may also occur when you have subtitled content and I believe for certain audio formats, but the transcoding would be limited to the audio track.

No worries. I got a beelink S12, non-pro model with 8G RAM and 256G SSD. It was on sale for about $150 USD. Fit my use case, but maybe not yours, although you might be surprised. Perhaps those extra plex share users won’t be concurrently transcoding?

The drives are all USB, the portable type that requires no power source. Like you, I don’t need much. I have ~12T across 3, with a small hub that could provide more ports in a pinch. This model I believe also provides a SATA slot for a 2.5” drive, but I haven’t used it. All of these drives were previously connected to a rpi 3B+, haha!

The drive shares are done via samba and also syncthing. I have no need for a unified share via mergerfs, but I did take a look at this site for some ideas. I’m the type that rolls all their own services rather than using an NAS based distro. Everything is in an ansible playbook that pushes out my configs and containers.

Edit: I should make it clear the NAS is for other systems to access the drives. Drives are directly connected via USB. All my services are contained in this single host (media/backup/microservices/etc). My Pi’s are now clustered for a k3s lab for non critical exploration.

I’m a bit of a minimalist who designs for my current use with a little room to grow. I don’t find much value in “future proofing” as I’ve never had much success in accomplishing that.

You may want to consider a mini PC. That was my upgrade after torturing my raspberry pi for many years. I landed here after agonizing over building the perfect NAS media server. Still very low on power consumption, but the compute power per dollar is great these days. All this in only a slightly larger form factor over the pi. I brought over the drives from the pi setup and was up and running for a very low cost. The workload transferred from the pi (plex, NAS, backups, many microservices/containers) leaves my system extremely bored where the pi would be begging for mercy.

I don’t do a lot of transcoding, so I’m no expert here, but looking at the documentation I believe you would want a passmark score of 2000 per each 1080p transcode, so 8000+ for your 4+ streams, not including overhead for other processes.

More recently, The Dø there is something really special about this performance. This version of Hangover is much better than the recorded version in my opinion.

All of the Blogotheque videos are pretty incredible, something for almost anyone to find compelling.

This is it. It’s not the worlds most well written book, but its repetitiveness and concepts are effective. Worked for me.

Voyager, mostly because it’s similar to Apollo, a very popular app for Reddit, in many ways. As I was an Apollo user, it is nice to have some of the features replicated.

You should be able to do wildcards with acme V2 and a dns challenge: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-and-wildcard-certificate-support-is-live/55579

You would manage internal dns and would never need to expose anything as it’s all through validation through a TXT record.

You could use also something like traefik to manage the cert generation and reverse proxying:

https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/https/acme/

I’m going go against the grain and recommend a spinning disk for your situation. Writing backups and serving files will likely be overkill with and ssd. Depending on your version of pi you might even saturate the USB bus before you get anywhere near the speed your ssd provides. I’ve been using WD 2.5” spinners on a pi for the very purposes you describe for years.

Hey, I’ve been a drummer for over 30 years. When I started I got a practice pad. That was really the only option outside of a full set and it worked well. You’ll need to build your fundamentals with rudiments that you can apply on a full kit. This takes some time. That’s not to say you can’t jump into a drum set right away, but I can be a frustrating starting point and as you point out, expensive.

As a work around you can set up other objects around your pad and tap your feet to get a feel for coordination on a full set. Once you’ve made some progress and reach the level of uncontrollable tapping on random objects and air drumming day and night, it’s probably a good indicator you’re in deep and probably need to invest in something.

I will add that buying an electronic kit was the best decision I made, and I wish I had done it earlier, and not been such a purist. The main reason being, I can practice more often, and it provides a more drum like experience.

For a first pad there’s lots of options, gum rubber is a favorite, there are some multi surface pads that you may also want to try, if you want to pretend you’re playing on the worlds tiniest kit. For sticks, start with marching drum sticks or “corps” sticks and get a pair of 5A or 5Bs. Work with the corps sticks for a few months and bring in the smaller sticks to get used to those too. The larger sticks will help you build strength and are over all easier to work with. All this should be obtainable for under $100 USD.

Good luck and hope you enjoy drumming!

Have you tried meditating? I find it helps with what you are experiencing with panic. Consciously practicing letting unwanted thoughts pass can help when difficult moments occur in everyday life. A good book on the subject that I’ve read is Full catastrophe living by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Hope you find some relief.

David Hilowitz is my go to for interesting music technology content. It’s engaging, relaxing and they’re always tinkering with something. Each video is just the right length. No clickbait titles. Patrons get free sample libraries. David seems like a genuinely good person as well.