If you’re going to store your music for instant access, it’s time to think beyond the laptop

The computer, and the home network, has made possible what was once merely a dream: music anywhere in the home at the push of a button, with access to an entire library. No more searching shelves, extracting discs and dropping them in the player: a few taps on a keypad and anything in your collection can play through the highest of hi-fi systems in seconds.

True, this has been possible for years, but the route involved an investment in expensive music servers, not to mention all the domestic disruption of having cabling installed all over the house, keypads slotted into walls, speakers set into ceilings and so on. The end result was all very 21st-century – well, that’s how we saw it back when it was much talked-about back in the 20th! – but getting there was both time- and labour-intensive.

Home computers, networking and cheap digital storage has changed all that. Now it’s perfectly possible to rip your music from CD to hard drive, buy it online or even stream it from a range of online “radio stations”, and make it available anywhere in your home using one of an ever-growing range of network player devices.

Affordable hard drives make storing large collections, even of music at CD quality or beyond, cost-effective: no longer do we need to use quality-sapping levels of MP3 compression – the real low bit-rate stuff – just to eke out the storage capacity available. So you could just hook up your computer to an amplifier, either using the headphone output or via a digital-to-analogue converter for better sound. Many computers now have a digital audio output, while converters increasingly have USB inputs for just this purpose. However, apart from the “point and click” access, that doesn’t gain you much over a wall of CD cases and a player.

Of course, if you have a wireless home network (wi-fi) set-up, you can set your computer to share its files with others, and can then access your music either on other computers or via dedicated media players, or “clients”. Products such as Apple’s simple Airport Express, previously covered in these pages, make this easy, and you don’t need much computer know-how to set it up. However, doing things this way has disadvantages, not least of which is that your computer, containing the library of music, must be kept powered up. Fine if you have a desktop computer; perhaps not so convenient if your music is on your laptop and you need to take it somewhere else for whatever reason, instantly depriving the rest of the household of their music.

The answer to that is Network Attached Storage, or NAS, devices: plugged into your network router using Ethernet, and with a piece of sharing software installed – it comes as standard with some NAS units – they make your library available to any computer on the wireless network. Instantly you have music available anywhere in your home: a streaming client for your main system and all in-one “internet radio” units in the kitchen, bedroom, study or even the bathroom. All can be accessing different music wirelessly on demand, and all will also stream high-quality internet radio.

Which is all well and good – but there’s a significant “but”: when I first set up a wireless network at home, ours was the only wi-fi service the computer could “see”, but at last count there were 15 networks visible on our computers. Amazingly, some of them are wide open, with not even a sniff of security to stop me logging on! The result? The music network has frequent drop-outs, and struggles to stream high-resolution music.

For that reason I have taken a step back and set up a sub-network for my main music system: now the NAS devices connect to a router, which in turn connects to my main network music player via an Ethernet cable. Yes, a cable, giving me faster access to an extensive library, and rock-solid delivery of the music. It’s not as whizzy and hi-tech as wi-fi, agreed, but it works beautifully. Mind you, the control of the system is still wireless, but that’s another story for another time.