Quick and Easy Whole House Music System
The digital music age has given us the ability to unlock our music collection and distribute it in countless ways. One of the coolest new features is the ability to listen to your music from anywhere in the house. Here is what you need.
- Personal Computer with wifi capabilities
- Wifi Router
- Home music client (Xbox 360, Roku Soundbridge….)
- Home stereo system or powered speakers.
Your personal computer has the ability to act as a personal music server for your entire music collection. Even a computer that is a few years old will have the necessary processing power to run a home music server. There are many different software programs that can serve as your digital music workhorse, but I recommend Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11). Its free, it works well, and it can perform every task you need to get up and running.
If you have a personal collection of CD’s, you can use WMP 11 to rip those CD’s onto your hard drive. I would recommend setting your rip quality at a minimum of 192 kbps. This will give you a great sound quality without taking up too much hard drive space. 100 CD’s should take up around 8 MB of hard drive space at this bit rate. Make sure you are connected to the internet when you rip your CD’s so that WMP 11 can download all of the artist and song information for each track.
Once you have your CD’s ripped to your hard drive, you need to activate media sharing in WMP 11. In WMP 11…go to tools->options->library->configure sharing. Give your music library a name that is easy to remember. Once you have your music clients set up, they will appear in this window. You can then select which clients you will allow to access your music library. You can even configure specific rules for each client such as only show songs that you have rated 4 stars or higher.
This article assumes that you have already set up a wifi network in your home. If you haven’t, all you need is a wifi router and a computer with wifi capabilities (if your computer is not wifi enabled, you can purchase a usb adapter that gives your computer this capability).
The next step is to set up a music client. If you have an Xbox 360, you can use it to access your entire music collection. See this article for more information.
My favorite home music client is the Roku Soundbridge. It costs under $200, sounds great, is easy to set up, and works without interruption. The soundbridge does not include speakers, but you can easily hook it up to your home stereo, or hook it up to a high quality set of powered PC speakers. The latter is a great option if space is an issue. The soundbridge supports digital audio output and also includes an ethernet port if you would rather set up a wired network.
When you start roku, it will walk you through connecting to your home network. It works with both WEP and WPA wifi security standards, and if you have security set up you will need to enter your network key. Once it connects to the network, you will see the name of your home music server (you may need to go back to WMP 11 and allow this device in your media sharing window). You should be able to see your entire music collection organized by artist, album, playlist, etc…
Roku even supports subscription music services so if you are a Rhapsody subscriber you will be able to access all of your Rhapsody tracks. You attach up to 10 soundbridge clients around your house - which should be more than enough for most people.
That’s it. Pretty easy. Enjoy.
