Question: How can I liberate my music collection from my single PC, store it somewhere central on my LAN, and access it from multiple locations?
This question is a little like the onsite backup one we answered last week, and what methods you can use depend on how simple, expensive, and extensible you want your centralized music collection to be. Clearly, there are a ton of ways to tackle this problem, and this answer does not aim to be comprehensive. Rather, we’re just throwing a few ideas out there that newbies to networked music sharing should investigate further. (Regular Ars readers should feel free to pitch in with further suggestions in the comments.)
On the low end, you don’t even really need to move your media off your PC in order to liberate it. Both Home Sharing on iTunes and Windows Media Center make it easy enough to stream media directly off one computer to others in the same network. But this method can create a lot of extra work for the central computer, and makes it hard to sync devices, since non-local music through these services isn’t accessible for that purpose (you can download music between computers with Home Sharing, but this might fragment your collection and will take up extra space). A better solution is to set up a server or a network-attached storage (NAS) device that can be accessed over your home network, which gives you more options and has varying costs.
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