I went with a Logitech Squeezebox Duet system..well..actually three of them, for my music listening on three audio systems in my house. They work great and I could never go back to playing the CD's.

I ripped all of my CD's, over a thousand, to a lossless format onto my main computer, and they sound every bit as good on a high end audio system as playing a CD direct.

The Duet remote is amazing. It uses your existing wireless computer network or can also use it's own built in wirelsss network, to communicate with your computer and the Duet receiver located with your audio equipment. It has a great color LCD screen and a scroll wheel that allows you to look through all of your music and sort by artist, album title, genre, etc.

The response is instantaneus...you select the music you want and there it is. You do need to download and run a small piece of software from Logitech on the computer you have your music stored on. It runs in the background and does not interfere with using the computer for other things at all.

Once you enjoy the benefits of a music server, you will never go back to using the CD's directly.

More than a year later, here's what I did: because I've built computers in the past (thus, not intimidated by the prospect) and that I had some core parts already in inventory, I built another one. I'm running Ubuntu on it (9.04, I think), and I have it on my home network. I experimented a bit with player software from the native Rhythymbox to a couple more advanced players.

Although I initially didn't care for Rhythymbox, I was completely underwhelmed with any of the alternatives. I went ahead and started ripping all my CDs (using FLAC encoding), plus copied hundreds of albums loaned to me by a friend. Eventually, the capabilities of Rhythymbox won me over and I have a very satisfactory music server.

The bonus is I also have full internet capability in my media room although having a 52" monitor isn't as great as one might think. Still, it's been fun finding album artwork for all my CDs--even the most obscure--and it's especially fun to pause in the middle of a TV program to go to the internet for a bit of background or fact checking.

So thanks to all for getting me thinking about a music server (HTPC is the key word I learned in the process--Home Theater PC) and encouragement to anyone thinking about centralizing and digitizing their music collection. HTPC is definitely a worthwhile pursuit.