Digital Home Thoughts: Ever Wonder How To Better Manage Your Music Collection?

"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."

"Ah", you are thinking. Finally. The answer to that pesky problem you have been dealing with for the last five years. Unfortunately, you may not be happy to hear that we don't have the definitive answer. What we do have is the observation that the options for you are ever expanding. Ars Technica was recently posed the 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?", and in their response they listed a least a half a dozen options. The comments on their article listed more. There is certainly no consensus on how to address this common need, primarily because each potential solution has some limitation or lack of flexibility that people wish was included.