Making my music accessible throughout the house

Editor's Note: Patch welcomes Bruce Pappas to our 'Local Voices.' Pappas is a Golden Valley resident who's giving blogging for Patch a try. We hope you enjoy his thoughts, and as always, if you're interested in posting your own, send me an email. Good to have you, Bruce!

So...first blog. One of my projects over the Winter Break was to make the music on my computer accessible throughout our house. I relegated our CD player in our family room to the give-away pile awhile back. I've been attaching my iPad to our amplifier. While that has been working okay, I wanted a way to control our music in a better way and to have it sound as good as our original CDs.

In the last few months, I've taken several steps to move in this direction, which I will outline in future blogs. Here is what I have done:

1. I installed an NAS (network attached storage unit) in our basement and attached it to our modem/router/switch. 
2. I installed a small nettop computer and connected it to our TV and stereo.

I use iTunes to manage my iPod and the music on my computer. I like using my iPod 120 because I can take it up North for the weekend to play music on our boat and listen to it on the drive to and from Duluth.

A few years ago, I digitizied our complete CD collection, using the MP3 format. With the explosion of larger hard drives, there is no need to scrimp on hard drive space. So I explored newer digital music formats and settled on AAC encoder with iTunes Plus for importing future CDs, using iTunes. In addition, I'm slowly re-digitizing my entire music collection using this new format, but that will take awhile. AAC encoding creates compressed files that are comparable to the original CD, while conserving space. Tracks created with AAC are about double MP3s from what I have seen.

Last, I set the media folder location in iTunes to the NAS, so that all changes I make using my computer will appear on the NAS. I also checked "Keep iTunes Media fodler organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" to make this easier.

Now all our music is available to every computer in the house using iTunes, as well as the nettop in our media center, even if my computer is off. And over time as I re-digitize with the newer format, we will have sound that is as good as the original recordings.