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Mar 13, 2005

Whole-House Music Storage and Access

First in a series of musicstorage [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7] entries.

I have a problem that I think exists in many households today. I own about 350 music CDs, and I want to be able to access that music any time I want from anywhere in the house, on a portable device, in the car, and remotely via the internet.

However, sound quality is of the utmost importance to me. Wherever possible, I want the music to be perfect bit-for-bit copies of the music originally on the CD. I will not settle for lossy-compression (read: mp3) when I don't have to. I will also not settle for any copy restrictions, such as those found on Napster and the iTunes Music Store.

Note #1: I do not plan to use SACD, DVD-Audio, or multi-channel audio sources in this scheme. I'm fine with using those solely in a tuned listening environment… for now.
Note #2: I rarely buy music online. Paying $0.99 per song for compressed music with dubious sound quality and restricted copying simply doesn't make sense to me.

So here's what I want:

1. Bit-perfect copies of my current and future CD collection stored in a universally accessible location
2. Ability to access to the music collection from any music playing device made by any manufacturer in any location
3. Ability to transcode the music to any proprietary file format as needed by a music playing device
4. Ability to transcode the music to a compressed scheme in cases where storage quantity is more important to me than sound quality, such as a portable music player

I am going to find or create a solution to the above requirements. Stay tuned.

category: /media |
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Please contact me as i have been working on a similar solution, maybe we could help each other.