I spent a chunk of Sunday afternoon getting my old, secondhand Mac mini that I employ as a central home jukebox running properly again.
The computer hadn’t stopped working, per se. I could still listen to the music files on it remotely — both at home and away from home — on my phone, laptop, and iPad. I could — when at home — add to the computer’s hard drive new music files from albums I’ve purchased or received advance copies of from musicians, record labels, and publicists. I could also play the tracks at home from the living room television, because the software I use to keep track of my ever-growing digital library/archive/collection has an app that appears as part of the television’s interface.
However, two things had stopped working in this somewhat fragile system:
First of all, the Mac mini’s physical audio jack was no longer sending music to the living room amplifier, which is, in turn, connected to a proper pair of speakers, which sound better than the television’s speakers.
Second of all, the secondary software service that I use to keep the library of music files backed up in the cloud had stopped working.
The existence of these two issues was ironic, because I had spent lunch the week prior with an old friend providing some advice to him about how to manage the modern hassle that is maintaining a personal audio library of digital files.
By the end of Sunday afternoon, one of those two problems had been fixed, the first of them. I made an attempt at sorting out the second issue, the cloud one, and my efforts didn’t appear to do the trick, so I’ll try again soon.
I run my Mac Mini “headless,” which means without a screen. It sits on a shelf below the television alongside the amplifier and record player and CD player, etc., just a modestly proportioned aluminum box with some cables coming out of it, including those connecting to small external hard drives.
When I do need to access the Mac to actually use it as a computer, which is infrequently, the process is a minor hassle.
First, I have to attach a small wired keyboard and a small wired mouse that connect via USB.
Second, I have to hook up my iPad to serve as a screen. An iPad can’t serve directly as a screen, and the software options for doing so are better when the iPad is serving as a secondary screen, not a primary one. To use the iPad as the sole screen for the Mini, I employ an app along with a special dongle called a “video capture card,” which attaches to the iPad via USB, and then connects to the HDMI cable coming out of the computer.
Now, the first rule of tech support is to make sure your software is up to date, and neither the Mini’s operating system nor the music library software was, which seemed odd, since I was pretty sure I had set both to update automatically. I took care of these updates immediately.
The second rule of tech support is to reboot the computer, which I did as well.
After I did steps one and two, the playback-through-audio-jack issue had been solved. The backup issue remains. And there are two additional things I want to sort out: (1) how to add files to the Mac Mini when I’m not at home, and (2) how to remotely access the full Mac Mini at home with my laptop (that’s in contrast with merely dragging files to it over the wifi network), so I don’t have to do the whole iPad/dongle routine each time I need to actually do something to the machine beyond filling up its drives.
I haven’t yet mentioned the specific software I use, because the situation is fairly generic and lots of tools do the trick. For the record, I use Plex (plex.tv) as the server and Backblaze (backblaze.com) for backup, and on the iPad I use an app simply called “HDMI” (apps.apple.com) to serve as a second screen. I have experimented with Tailscale (tailscale.com) for the remote access I mentioned, but haven’t managed to get it to work.
The moral of this story is that the music industry remains broken. While it’s the case that streaming causes lots of financial and cultural damage, the alternative scenario has its own shortcomings, which have nothing to do with streaming. The main opposite of streaming music is to own your own digital files of music you have purchased. However, there are no simple means by which everyday listeners can take the files they’ve acquired, and play them back with the ease that used to be the case with LPs and cassettes and CDs and so on. There was a brief period of time when iTunes did the job, but the era of iTunes has long since passed.
I remain hopeful that someone will try to do something to answer this ongoing problem. None of the existing solutions do so sufficiently, except perhaps for those of us who are willing to give over our Sunday afternoons to trying to fix something and who will be satisfied when only half the fixing has been completed. Listening to music shouldn’t be reserved for tinkerers.
Update: All the sub-items on the to-do list mentioned in this article have, as of June 15, 2025, been taken care of. Plex (www.plex.tv) runs as a server on a Mac mini at home. The Plexamp app — on my phone, tablet, and laptop — lets me access the audio from anywhere, including in the car (via Apple’s CarPlay). I can tweak stuff on the Mac mini while at home via Screen Sharing (see: apple.com), an Apple app. When not at home, I can now transfer files to the MacMini using a secure network (there are several options I explored, including Tailscale and ZeroTier, and I’ll likely go into further detail on those down the road).
