The Solution

Not being a very tech savvy gadgety kinda fella, I had to rely on my brother to help out with the assembling of the various components that I needed to (a) upload and store my music and (b) enable the music to be broadcasted wirelessly over my local network. For most people who already have their music on their PC, it would have been a fairly straightforward task of migrating their library to a NAS (network attached storage - ok I had to google that) but since the bulk of my music was still on the CDs, my brother suggested that I get a self-ripping NAS to speed up the process.

My brother is an absolute whizz with computers so if that's what the man recommends, that's exactly what I was getting. And I have to say he did an amazing job building the NAS from scratch. He then hooked me up with some software which he downloaded from Vortexbox. Since I don't know enough tech vocabulary to properly describe what exactly it is that the program does, here is the official blurb from their website:

"VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC, it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files , and download the cover art. Vortexbox will then serve the files to network media players such as Logitech Squeezebox, Sonos, or Linn. The music files can also be streamed to a Windows or Mac OSX system."

And the last thing to complete the system was a squeezebox, which I had to connect to the stereo in my living room. I must say I was totally blown away with what this lil fella could do when we first set it up. It is absolutely brilliant and it is one of those devices which makes you wonder how you have survived this long without it! Anyway, here are some pictures of the "perfect solution" my brother put together for me ... thanks Dude!

And ...

Ta-dah! ... presenting the lil ripper.