MP3oE? Yeah! MP3 over Ethernet!

I became increasingly aware, the more I collected MP3 files, that I really wasn’t going to want to sit in front of my computer to listen to all this great music. Heck, I have a great sound system in the den, but how to go about playing them in that sonically superior environment?

The answer, fortunately, wasn’t too difficult, nor all that expensive. Most of what I needed was in the closet – all those leftovers from five-plus years of computer upgrades. I had a case with motherboard and processor, memory, and a moderate- sized hard drive. But the thought of buying a monitor and keyboard, let alone aesthetically integrating same into the home theater, gave me pause.

A little web research gave me a solution I could live with. Since I was already running a home network (you know – hers, mine, and the other one that talks to the DSL), all I needed was another NIC and a sound card with some good specs. I picked up an extra 100baseT card, and a Turtle Beach A3DXstream for under fifty bucks for the both.

The dreaded crawl through the attic to run the cable to the den really wasn’t that bad, as I had previously drilled holes to drop the surround speaker wires inside the wall behind the entertainment system.

Now, you ask, how to run a PC without monitor or keyboard? The answer – simply, elegantly, and best of all for free. I found a program called VNC that lets me control the den PC from any other machine on the network. It’s a little kludgy, but for free, who cares? All I had to do was set the MP3 box to boot up without a keyboard, and put the VNC server in its Windows StartUp group.

I can queue up about a hundred MP3s in WinAmp, and then kick back for hours. And the MP3s can be served from any machine on the network.

Addendum: Initially, I was somewhat disappointed by the sound quality – there was an annoying hum. Even if the MP3 box was off, there was a hum from the speakers. Unplug the PC, and it went away. After a little more web research, and some process of elimination, I found that the problem was a ground loop. Now it sounds great!