Home media / music servers and wireless streaming to HiFi.

[thai-wronghorse]

I'm having a major redecorate, re-shuffle and equipment update in the living room which means il be losing my desktop computer and external hard drives which are currently wired directly into my HiFi separates system.
The plan is purchase a fairly decent laptop and be able to stream / transmit music wirelessly from it to my HiFi whilst retaining some audio quality....Squeezebox, Pinnacle soundbridge?
I have a pretty extensive digital music collection which I'd ideally like access from all the laptops we have in the house so was thinking maybe going along the lines of using a NAS with it all stored on there...ideas and recommendations greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[tshirt2k]

There are a few ways to do it. Ps3 using a media server. If you use iTunes you can also use airport express and control from iPhone or iPod touch.

The airport express way could be a cheaper way of doing it than sonos. I use the remote on my iPhone to wake on LAN my pc and can control music on my pc. If like to get an airport express to have music in other rooms but also need some active speakers. I think you'll need a decent router that you can modify.

[Ridg]

any of the qnap / synology devices will see you right.

Are you looking to consolidate all the drives you have knocking around into one central store? As in will you need something will plenty of space to copy the music of the external drives or you planning to simply plug them into the NAS?

I personally use one of these;

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-proliant-microserver-turion-2-2-2gb-250gb-nhpl-sata-lff-in-704941-421

Loaded with a 250GB for OS and 3*2TB for audio, pictures and video.

[bobbarley]

Thumbs up for Synology, they make top stuff.

[Kerrse]

For music & films I use usb drives into a 7 port usb hub into airport extreme can access them from my apple tv's my tv or my mobile devices, works a treat 

[bobbarley]

I've got a cheap Xytel NAS drive at home connected to my router.  It has media streaming and all that jazz.  It shows up on my Xbox so I can stream movies and stuff.

Great NAS system for just £35!

[brett]

hmmm will have to look into this myself,like the sound of these gadgets ,no pun intended btw lol

[damien010685]

Synology FTW i have it setup in my loft with 12TB running to 3 Lenovo Q190 systems all running dual boot to XBMC works perfect best thing i bought!!

[Shady Pioneer]

I went a bit extreme with my set up but I wanted to do something that will hold up the text of time and just run in the background.

I've got a Mac mini running iTunes 24/7 with a 2TB HDD with all my media on, hooked up to my TV but rarely used directly. I have an AirPort Extreme hooked up to the network to that basically allows me to beam all content to Apple TVs, iPhones, iPads etc without a hitch.

Because I'm completely anal about things I did it this way because I love my Apple stuff and wanted to embed metadata to each film/show so it all comes up when scrolling through and what not. Very slick and easy to use but just pricier than other options out there.

The benefit I get is I can access my Mac mini from anywhere when I'm out and set it to download something, and it'll be sorted for when I'm home.

[bobbarley]

The benefit I get is I can access my Mac mini from anywhere when I'm out and set it to download something, and it'll be sorted for when I'm home.

Illegal torrents?