A music server is highly exciting, a natural extension to your current lineup and an opportunity to dominate in a space with some lack-luster and overpriced products.
The Vision.
The Schiit Movement takes your audio from wherever it’s stored and delivers it via our all new USB Gen 3 output to any DAC. We’ve built a tiny computer, wrapped it in our signature aluminium case so it matches the rest of your Schiit and developed a beautiful application that lets you explore, discover and queue your music from a web browser on any mobile or desktop device connected to your network. The Schiit Movement brings the online experience of cloud services like Tidal and Spotify locally, to *your* music collection.
Connect the Schiit Movement to a USB drive, NAS or portable hard drive for as much storage space as you need. Connect it to your network via wired gigabit ethernet, or wireless N or AC wifi.
The Schiit Movement - you’ll feel better once you’ve had one.
Yes, it absolutely matters.
I work for a software development company and the biggest 'thing' right now is the recognition that design, specifically user experience design in software is one of the biggest factors that affect purchase decisions for consumer products, or ‘apps’ if you prefer that term. This is something that people who commission custom software have been slow to recognise and embrace as it adds a significant cost to the development phase of an application. Companies who recognise that providing a seamless, beautiful, user centred experience (think Uber, AirBnB) are owning their markets, and herein lies the opportunity for Schiit. No one else with a music server product does this well, or cost effectively.
If you can take the Tidal, Spotify, Rdio etc experience and apply it to your customers own music, on their own hardware and network at a reasonable price point, then you will capture the market because your customers will
want to use your product. And hey, they can then untether their laptop as well.
A music server isn’t about the hardware, it’s not about being technically bit perfect – those problems have already been solved. It’s about providing the Apple experience of software that’s simple to setup and just and ‘just works’.
I don’t want to call out competitors products here. Im summary, I’ve used several – and they fall into one of three categories for me: Schiity software that ruins the experience and causes frustration, prohibitively expensive and closed systems, or no longer supported by the manufacturer.
On doing it cheaper.
Your point about a music server just being a computer is spot on, and that has some advantages – you have a large choice of cheap, readily available and widely supported hardware. The specification for a music server hardware is pretty low – you need enough processing power and memory to run a web server, you want a good USB chip and you probably want network expansion options: wired ethernet and the various flavours of wifi. I don’t see need any need for bluetooth. I don’t think you need a display either. The
https://volumio.org/ project shows that this can be achieved at an audiophile level on a Raspberry Pi. A dedicated board mass produced would be cheaper.
Yes, you will need software support, maintenance, patching etc. This isn’t to be dismissed in terms of overhead – but it can be managed and streamlined to control costs and effort. A build server with continuous integration / continuous deployment for your custom software, a forum for user support and a development roadmap that balances your budget against feature releases is achievable on a manageable budget.
The good news is that as you control the hardware platform, you don’t need to account for variance in operating systems/hardware.
The majority of costs will be in developing your software stack. This is labour intensive, and will require a team. At a minimum, you want someone to manage the project and own the product. You want a talented developer (or two), a designer and a tester. The best software is built by teams – you wouldn’t get the bricky to architect, design, build and decorate your house - you want experts in each field. You can outsource this, though It would be worth running a business case to hire the product owner or dev in house, so that once the initial release is complete you have someone to cover the maintenance, support and product planning. If you outsource, like the Schiit case manufacturers you’ve written previously about, you want a partner that will proactively support you.
I don’t think it would be hard to produce a BoM that would significantly under price products from Linn, Olive etc. The deciding factor will likely be the cost of software development against the number of units you anticipate being able to sell.
On doing it better.
- Build a beautiful, attractive UI that brings the Tidal / Spotify / Rdio / Pandora style interface and experience to locally stored music. Think about how you explore, search and discover music on online services, versus the ‘browse by artist, album or genre’ that’s standard in most available music servers & players.
- Make it web based, so that I can use my phone/desktop/laptop as a remote control.
- Build it on an API that you publish the specs to, so that others can write add-ons and clients for your server.
- Make the hardware look like all your other schiit.
- Make it output data via usb so that the Schiit Movement can be used as a source for *any* DAC that accepts USB input
- Commit to a regular release cycle to continually improve the software
I think that's worth getting excited about.
Woo, first post!
