Hoping someone in Axiomland can shed some light on this, or at least share success/failure stories.
I'm currently searching for the best (balance of cost vs. quality vs. ease of use) way to make my 6,000+ track MP3 collection accessible from my home theater. I've done this before in two different manners. Once via Tivo and another time via a dedicated HTPC. The HTPC was clunky and I lack a HDTV so it was difficult to use. I don't have a Tivo anymore (satellite DVR), but it was simple and worked well but couldn't do playlists or protected AAC files.
The caveat is that I want to be able to navigate my collection from the theater room and pick songs or playlists with a nice display of Track+Artist. I had thought that the iPod AV dock did this. Apple in their infinite wisdom does not display the iPod menu through the Video out - just actual Video files. Neither I nor my wife really want the iPod in a dock sitting next to the listening positions with cables running 30 feet away to my AV rack. I want it docked by the rack, accessed via a remote and viewed on my TV.
I was excited about the AppleTV device. At least until I learned that a HD TV is required. Another excuse to trade in my current set, I suppose.
I'd sort of prefer a stand-alone solution that doesn't require my PC to be on all the time, but I realize that may not be possible. Since I have a couple of iPods, I'm thinking that there should be a way to use them to hold the music. I've looked at
this by DLO - the concept looks great, but the reviews are pretty much dismal. To be fair, it appears they have a new version coming out soon that might address other people's complaints. I've also looked at
this , but haven't read any reviews.
Expanding my search into the "I-need-your-PC-to-be-on" camp, I'm looking at the
Roku Soundbridge , which looks lovely but doesn't support protected AAC files of which I do have a few. I could go through the process of burning+ripping them to non protected files, of course, but that's kind of a pain. I've also thought about the
Logitech DJ, but it's fairly pricey and I've read some not-so-stellar reviews about its software.
So do any other axiomites have a solution in place that's working well for them?
