Squeezebox - the simplest ideas are often the best
Recently my wife and I got a new car, and being as mechanically inept as I am the only customisation I felt happy with was purchasing a replacement head unit - the one I ended up with was a Sony "Giga Panel" one with 1GB of memory built into the face-plate, which plays MP3s (this was a must).
We embarked then upon the consolidation of my previously sampled CDs and her project to go through her CD collection and go sample-crazy - ending up with a single repository of all our MP3s on the file server.
This was a healthy exercise which led to the deletion of tracks which came from albums purchased for single songs (it's rather sad how often we have both done this), and the standardisation of sampling rates and normalisation.
Now we could not only load the head unit for the car with ~250 tracks we both enjoy, but could also stream straight over the network from any computer.
Nifty.
But then came the question of how to play MP3s in the living room, and I recalled hearing some talk of a "Squeezebox" (on this very forum, I think) which sounded just like the ticket.
Well colour me impressed - ordered it Wednesday afternoon and it turned up on Friday morning, it took no effort to connect to my WPA-protected wireless network and coxially hook up to my Marantz SR8500 amp, installed the song-serving software on my server and within minutes the speakers were merrily playing away.
The interface and design of the connectors are as simple as they need to be whilst giving access to all the necessary features.
A product that does exactly what it says it does, and it just as easy to set up.
Now comes the tricky part - fixing up all the ID3 tags to make sure the "genre" is correct so we can play random tracks to suit our mood (typically metal/rock) - it's strange how some people have categorised songs as completely the wrong genre (Michael Jackson "Off The Wall" != Rock).
