Requirements: So how the “Home Music Server” should look like? Here are some ideas I had in mind:

• Use ~50w of power
• Be small and generate no noise (preferably no spinning parts)
• Somewhat secure
• Preferably provide access to my collection through the rest of the home (like wife listening to the music in the bedroom, or access some videos in the living room
• Low cost (let’s assume < $300)

System design: What I had on my hands? I had speakers (Totem Hawks) connected to the amplifier (PS Audio Trio C100 Dual Mono), amplifier was fed through DAC (Alien DIY USB Digital to Analogue Converter). I also had about 1.3Tb of music on two 1Tb had drives

So the rest of the system had to be determined. The missing component(s) would be a box that connects multiple hard drives on one side and has USB/SPDIF audio output on the other side. Is it a single box? Or is it several boxes? We will see

Music Collection: Let’s step back for a bit and see what music I have and how I store it. As I mentioned before I have two 1Tb drives hosting my classical and rock/jazz/other collection. I used to have thousands of CDs but I have digitized them all to lossless storage. The formats I have are about mostly FLAC, Monkey Audio APE (I know, I know, it sucks) and 10% other formats (wv, shn, some mp3s too). Music is organized in directories sorted by author and then by album. Every (well almost every) album contains .cue file which lists all songs in the album and songs are tagged with author/album/year/etc information.

Player: I was using Foobar 2000 player for so long I can’t even name other good music players. I’m very happy that it plays every possible audio format and has plugins for almost any situation. So I had big expectations that Foobar will help me connect all my components together while providing some kind of interface to control my library.

Solution: After googling around I bumped into two components that fit the bill (~$260 total):

• D-Link DNS 321 NAS ($99 after rebate)
• ASUS Eee PC 900 with 4Gb SSD drive ($159 on sale Buy.com)

NAS: The NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a very good solution for this problem. You connect ethernet cable to it and all you files are accessible from Windows, MAC or Linux (also supports ftp, iTunes, uPNP, etc). So I put one of my hard drives in there and copied all my music there. It sucks about 30w of power while drives are spinning. The neat feature is that it powers down the drives when not in use (which lowers power to about 20w). It is running Linux in its NAS guts and supports 3rd party software (I don’t use this feature here but it can come handy later)

Netbook: The core of the system is ASUS Eee PC netbook. It’s small, silent and only 18w of power idle and 21w when working which is perfect (see requirements). It comes with Linux pre-installed but I installed Windows XP Sp3 since Foobar is Windows only.

Software: So what did I have to install to get it going?

• Windows XP
• Foobar 2000 player
• To control foobar remotely from any browser (including iphones and smartphones) – turns out there’s a foobar plugin for that: Foobar HTTP Control.

Extras: One of the interesting features of the system is internet radio. I really like commercial free Radio Paradise. Foobar can play a streaming music from it too! Very convenient way to listen to new music.

Alternatives and Next Steps:

• You can install Media Tomb on the NAS itself and use one of the many supported devices to stream audio/video directly (no netbook required)
• See how this system can fit into different home automation solutions
• D-Link 321 NAS supports iTunes streaming. When I start iYunes on any computer at home I see it in the list but no music available. Need to configure it it and see if FLAC/APE files are supported
• Find a low cost hardware player that can connect to NAS and strem music off it like radio

Dealers:
www.china-highend-hifi.com – lots of products
www.pacificvalve.us – toll free phone number, good website
www.newtube.com – Mostly Jolida tube audio equipment
www.nysound.com- not a best web design, weird navigation
www.coemaudio.com – not all pages are in English
www.usatubeaudio.com – many popular products, but have to call for pricing
www.audiophilechina.com – tons of different products at affordable prices

Manufacturers:
www.audiospace-hifi.com – very good website, lots of details. I don’t think they sell direct though.
www.xshn.com/en – same as the one above. Not sure if you can buy direct.

Products are mostly from these manufacturers: Acoustat / Ali / Aurum Cantus / Azaly / CEC / Classic / Doge / Dussun / E&T / G&W / HAL / Image / Jolida / JSMR / Jungson / Korsun / Mingda Meixing / Nanzidu / Opera / Original / Shanling / Shengya / Xindak / Jolida

p.s. I have no affiliation with these websites. I have googled all of them when I was looking for a replacement tube amp.