Audiotron

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I like music, in fact I listen to music more than I watch television. While I have a particular liking for soundtracks, I listen to many different types of music, classical, jazz, new age, ambiance, acoustic guitar, Disney, kids songs, and little pop and new wave thrown in as well. I have a lot of CD’s, probably in the neighborhood of 500 - 600 CD’s. When you have that many CD’s you have to organize them so you can find what you want, when you want to hear it. Unless you’re John Cuzac in High Fidelity, alphabetically is usually the best solution. However if you live with other people who aren’t as obsessive about maintaining your filing system as you are, eventually you’re going to have problems, and end up with little piles of CD’s scattered about the house.

So a buddy of mine turned me on to MP3’s. I messed around with the WMA format for a little while but eventually saw the light. The problem was I was used to hearing sound out of a pair of real speakers, not the cheezy things that come with most computer systems. So after doing some hunting around I came across something called an Audiotron.

This piece of equipment hooks into your stereo system like any other component, and then it get hooked into your LAN. Viola’ you can now listen to MP3 files through your stereo system! Now if you’re into internet radio, you can listen through your stereo as well.

See my Audiotron

Now like I said I listen to a lot of soundtracks and classical music, and it turns out the original MP3’s I burned were at a low bit rate to save on hard-disk space. They sounded well, pretty crappy. I could reburn them but I had two problems, first shortage of hard disk space, second the PC had to be on when I wanted to listen. So I scoured the stores for a cheap PC. I found a old 233mhz IBM PC with 64K of ram for $50. I bought a 160GB hard disk for another $120, and for less than $200 I had an MP3 file server.

So over the next month I ripped all of my CD’s at a higher bit rate. I then had a shocking realization, if this PC crashes it will take a whole month to recover it. Back to the discount store who luckily had a few cheap PC’s left. I have a nightly backup solution firmly in place, however the Audiotron discovered the second PC on the LAN and now thinks I have two copies of everything! Ok with some minor network configuration changes I blocked the Audiotron from seeing the backup PC.

Setting up and configuring an Audiotron wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I did have to do some research on networking, give the server a static IP and check the help forums for the Audiotron but people were pretty helpful and I did manage to get it working. So while it’s not for everyone, if you know a little about computers and networking, you should be able to get it working for you.

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