I've got a collection of close to 500 CD's that I've built over a period of twenty some odd years. That may pale in comparison to the collections that some of you guys have got, but it is still a lot of CD's to pour over, and sadly--they've been sitting in a cabinet gathering dust. About 90% of them haven't seen the light of day in almost ten years. I've been telling myself for at least a few years now that I'm going to build a music server and burn everything to a PC. I'm starting to get that itch right now, and unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting started. First of all, I started searching out websites dedicated to HEC's, and I'm not finding all that much. I remember there being a lot more out there a few years back. Are they no longer called HEC's? My questions are varied and numerous, and mostly, I'd be happy with people just pointing me to the best sites out there to educate myself on these things. What are the best cases? I remember really liking the look of the Sterlingtek cases as I'd like to incorporate this into my stereo rack. Are their specialized sound cards that will do a better job for this type of application? Say.....with full size RCA outputs--or better, some type of digital output? Are their specialized video cards that are geared towards displays on TV's? The biggest question is software? My wife and I both have iPods now, and we both love them, but I have concerns about marrying myself to iTunes for the software. iTunes works nicely, but it's so damn proprietary, and I'm about sick of restoring my wife's hard drive based iPod every time something goes wrong with it. I don't mind paying for something better, and I have NO qualms about switching to a less proprietary mp3 based type player for us later on. Software is way up in the air, but I want to get that question right the first time......I don't want to have to reload this whole collection later on if I'm not happy. And then my last question really involves Windows Vista. I was looking at the website for it, and it mentioned how it can use "your" xBox 360 on a home network to access your music library. At first, this just pissed me off. I'm 40 years old, and I really don't care about video games; why should I buy a damn video game to help play my music--but then I started thinking about it. What they're really saying is that my music library can be stored on some PC anywhere in the house, so instead of building a special HEC, I just rip my music to my current desktop, and I use the xbox and it's remote to access the files on my tv and play them through my home's network. Granted, I don't need the xbox, but it WOULD get used if I owned one, and this would negate the need to build a separate server in my media room. Hell, it would be more expensive just to buy a silverstone case and Windows than it would be to buy a 360. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Anyway, if any experts out there can point me in the right direction, I'd sure appreciate it.
