I have a rather large music collection that I’ve ripped to MP3s. I personally find it much easier just picking a playlist or album from my hard-drive than having to physically find the CD I want in my rather large collection.

The trouble is, my sound card and speakers never sound as good as my seperates Hi-Fi equipment so I’d like to build a music server that’s connected to my Surround Sound DSP Amp that I can control across the network.

I’d also like to be able to stream music from the server because sometimes my partner and I want to listen to different music at the same time and she doesn’t currently have easy access to the MP3 collection on my computer’s drive.

Project goals

• The music server must be able to hold my entire collection of music.
• The server must be controllable over the network.
• I should be able to add new music to the server from my desktop.
• The server must be able to stream music to desktop clients
• The server must be able to directly play music through my seperates music system
• As the server will be in my living room it should be as unobtrusive as possible (both in aesthetically and audibly).
• Possibly streaming to my netBook across the Internet. This will require some kind of authentication to ensure that it’s only accessible to me and not every music pirate on the planet.
• I probably don’t need a GUI on the actual server as my ultimate aim is to manage the server across the LAN and not have a monitor cluttering up the set-up. A GUI might make initial configuration easier though. Perhaps remote desktop configuration might be a possibility too.

Current Images

None so far (it’s a new project)

Progress

18th February 2009 : Project inception

I’ve defined the project goals so that I’m clear what I want to achieve and I’ve already been looking into a number of ways to proceed.

Hardware
I’m going to be using an P4 old computer that has a relatively small case. It should have sufficient power for both encoding, decoding and possibly audio files. It should also be able to handle transcoding should the need arise. Although it only has 512Mb of memory, that should be more than sufficient for the project.

The relatively small 80Gb HDD could be a problem as I don’t think it will hold all of my CDs.

Software & OS
A couple of weeks ago I replaced Windows XP on my laptop with Linux and I’ve been overjoyed at the increased system response and reduction in system resource consumption that this has resulted in. I’ve looked into the possibilities and Linux seems to offer a number of solutions; some distro specific and some application specific. I’ll be investigating these further before making a decision.