My goal was to get a music/HT room that I can easily sit down and just enjoy. After much research and probably spending far more money on needless things, I am getting close. I thought I would document some of what I found, set-up to give others some idea's on what I found works for me.
My viewing habits are rather sporadic, and I don't really watch all that many movies. I found that many of the TV shows have turned into mini movie productions, so the two seem to overlap. Lets face it, Game of Thrones is more movie than TV clip. Some times I watch an older classic depending on my mood at the time.
Music seems to be driven by my mood too. I wanted to be able to on the fly queue up some music that I wanted to hear without the hassle of finding a disc, and loading it into a CD player to get that one song I wanted. Sometimes I will listen to great album from start to end, but I am just as likely to stack the best tracks from 3-4 albums of the same artist. So with this in mind, all my music is copied via .flac onto a large NAS so it can be called up on the fly by any of my receivers throughout the house.
In my listening room however, I wanted to get the best possible within my budget. I picked up a Zbox ID80plus HTPC when they were on clearance for $180. The unit runs silent and acts as the media server for my audio and video needs. I run Windows 7 with FooBar2000 and Kodi (XBMC) as the interface.
To get Windows 7 to play nice, you need to strip out all the extra's that Microsoft likes to force upon you. After installing Windows, I reset the graphics to performance mode by eliminating all the fancy win7 graphic enhancements. Then went into Add/Remove windows components and removed all the unneeded extra's like the built in media player, printer support, ie, indexing, games, tablet components, search, XPS.. the list goes on. Once all that is removed, then win7 runs rather fast on a lower power PC.
For my music server, I used FooBar2000. it does a great job of indexing all my music and most important for me, has a great app for my ipad called monkeymote that makes it very easy to search all my music, queue it up on the fly and easily modify it on the go. FooBar also support the WASAPI that bypass all the windows sound control so I can do direct digital output to my receiver via my toslink at 24/96 (but for the most part I only use standard CD 16/44.1
Kodi is a great app that does all the catalog for my TV shows I record. I also handles all my movie watching. As I can configure it to do all the sound output through the HDMI, then there is no conflict with foobar and you could run both at the same time to different zones.
For me the secret to enjoyment is to have a simple user interface to make it easy to enjoy. I am there to relax and not have to jump up and down to find and start the media I want to enjoy.
