Keys Corner

We have three cupboards containing around 530 CDs in our lounge and several further shelves of DVDs. The cupboards are almost full, and for some time I have been toying with the idea of using a Mac Mini as a music- and video-server and banishing the CD and DVD collections to the cellar.

However, if it’s going to look at home in the lounge, we really need a pretty small TFT screen – nothing bigger than about an 8 or 9 inch diagonal and the sort of sleek styling you expect from Apple or Sony, plus some sort of pointing device (remote control or mouse) in the lounge, so that we can select what we want to play, and so far I haven’t found anything I like. A small laptop or a sub-notebook could be an alternative, but for the moment, we have chosen to go in a different direction and just make the CDs redundent. We have hooked up a 60GB iPod to the stereo, added a Griffin Air Click to be able to remotely control it, and have put all 530 CDs onto the iPod (which leaves around 12 GB free for further acquisitions).

We like to be able to listen to a block of music by one artist or in one style and the iTunes smart playlists cover that need quite well. What is not so good is if we want to listen to a specific album, as with 530 albums, it can be a little tedious choosing the album you want using the Apple click-wheel. However, with the Air Click remote control listening to our Spanish language course CDs is very convenient – it couldn’t be easier to pause the recording or skip back to the beginning of a track to hear something again. Overall, we think it is an improvement over the 5-CD changer that we previously used, and in a few years time, there will probably be a good selection of reasonably priced UPnP devices to replace it, if it eventually breaks down.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 16:09:52 and is filed under Computing, Family / This Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.