Ok, so I was sitting around one day trying to figure out what I wanted to do to make my ever growing CD Collection more manageable. I gave alot of thought to buying one (or two) of the huge carousel type CD changers such as this one. However, upon doing some research on them, I discovered several potential problems with this idea. First, they are pretty limited when one wants to create custom play lists that utilize multiple disks. Second, they just don't have the greatest reputation for reliability. Third and foremost, they are reputed to scratch the hell out of your disks! Well, at this point, I'm feeling pretty discouraged. Then it hit me. I have an old PC I was keeping in my closet for occasional TiVo hacking. It was complete except for the hard drive (which now resides in my TiVo of course). I wondered about the feasibility of utilizing that PC for a media server (while spending no more money that I was considering on a CD changer). I also wanted to be able to play it through my new Yamaha receiver and speakers I bought earlier this year without loosing sound quality (I don't care what anyone says, I think MP3s suck for sound quality) So, I embarked on a mission.... First I put a 120 gig hard drive (a decent used one I had laying around) in the unit and put it in my entertainment center (if you can call the particleboard piece of junk an entertainment center)...



Next, I needed an operating system (and have I mentioned I was doing this project on a budget?). I chose Ubuntu 8.04 (AKA The Hardy Heron). It is a very user friendly Linux distribution and, best of all, IT'S FREE!!!....



I was able to find Linux drivers for the old nVidia G-Force graphics board that PC had in it without a problem. This enabled me to utilize the S-Video Out on the card to send video through my receiver to my TV (someday, I'll quit being so cheap and I'll get an LCD TV then I can just hook it up directly to the PC connector on the TV but this works for now). Of course I needed a way to get sound to it (Duh). That's simply a matter of getting a cable that is stereo mini-plug on one end (to the PC) with regular RCA connectors on the other end (to the receiver)...



Ok, time to spend some money (to this point, I had everything on hand already). I needed some major hard drive space if I was going to put 500 CDs on this beast in Lossless WAV format (full quality audio nearly identical to how it is on the original CD). I chose a 1 TERABYTE (!) hard drive from LaCie. It set me back 160 bucks at NewEgg.com and now lives on top of my DVD player...



Next I installed a very nice media player called Amerok. I really like the way the playlist looks on the screen and the numerous playback options it has....



Now, it's simply a matter of opening up my CD collection folder, finding what I want and queuing it up!...



All in all, it was a pretty simple thing to set up and best of all, I stayed well within the aforementioned budget! Truthfully, the most daunting part of it was getting all those CDs ripped to the hard drive. That took about a week of working on it with my morning coffee. Don't tell anyone but I used my Windows Vista PC to do all the ripping. I pretty much hate the thing but it does rip music fast (on two drives simultaneously).

The next thing I'll do is take all my son's DVDs and rip them to that hard drive.  Then I'll be able to just queue them up in a media player and I can keep the disks stored in a safe place.

Possible future upgrades:

1) I'd like to get a standard infrared remote control working with it.  This is doable but will cost some money....(Right now I have to actually get next to it and grab a mouse to queue up music, etc)

2) I may get a better sound card that has digital and/or multi-channel output.  This would let me play DVDs with full surround sound and eliminate the need for a DVD player (especially if combined with the above remote)...

3) If I ever get around to getting a hi-def TV, I could add a blue ray drive in keeping with the theme of number 2.

4) Some black spray paint for the case!!!