For years I’ve bought, stored and played my music digitally. I’ve come to resent having to buy compact discs or vinyl to get music that’s not for sale any other way. Over time the way I listen to music has changed too: although I sometimes still decide to listen to an individual album, much of the time I want to hear a variety of music that falls within shifting boundaries for intensity and style. I’ve replayed my music either through my desktop computer with its 24/96 audiophile card, or through a DAC of modest fidelity connected to my laptop.

Nearly two years ago Richard and I moved in together. Richard has a serious audiophile system built around a large compact disc collection. There was no easy way for me to integrate my music with his and the two libraries have lived separate lives in separate rooms until last weekend. Last weekend we installed a music server.

There are a dozen ways to set up a music server. The approach we took must be one of the cheapest, but despite the low price tag it does its work capably.

The core of the music server is a retired Compaq D500 ultra slim desktop. Hewlett Packard produced a series of these units, and the later models had reasonable specs. Ours, however, admits to a 1.7GHz processor with 512mB memory and only a 40GB drive; rather basic by today’s standards. There were good reasons for choosing this box, though:

1. It’s effectively silent.
2. It has very low power consumption.
3. It’s small.
4. It was as cheap as chips.

Given today’s inflating food prices it will no doubt be cheaper than chips before long. And despite its modest specs it’s entirely capable of processing high quality audio with headroom to spare.

The box came with Windows XP Professional pre-installed. I added a USB wireless adaptor, created a user account and set up the box for its new role in life. There are some excellent internet guides to optimising XP for audio; I chose to work through the list provided by Audio Forums. I installed the open source Foobar2000 audio player along with its web interface extension (foo_httpcontrol), setting Foobar2000 to start when Windows was launched. I added the open source audio grabber Exact Audio Copy and, for storage, connected a decommissioned 250GB USB drive provisioned with my existing music library. After looking at options and reading reviews I’ve ordered a digital-analog converter from Canadian company HotAudio.

After testing the software I edited our wireless router to give the new box a static IP address, rebooted and checked that I could reach it with a remote desktop connection as well as via the web interface. I unplugged the screen, keyboard and mouse and installed the music server in Richard’s sound system rack in the livingroom.

Foobar2000′s web interface means it can be controlled from any computer in the house, and I’ve since installed an Android application that lets me drive it from my smartphone. Despite the modest specs, there’s not been a single stutter or drop out since the music server was installed. Playback quality is acceptable through the onboard sound card, and will get a boost when the DAC arrives in a few days. No doubt we’ll soon run out of storage (those 24/96 FLAC files take up a lot of space), but this has been an inexpensive introduction to the delights of having a music server.

How inexpensive?

That inexpensive.

Better yet, it gives me a hobby for the cold winter nights ahead. While they’re all very good, none of the available foo_httpcontrol interfaces is entirely what I want … and it would be great to have a web interface for grabbing audio from CDs. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind having a web interface to the Windows sound mixer … and how about adding a scrobbler to post the currently-playing track on the web? And …

… you get the picture.