The stereo for the 21st century: What's your solution?

[peppergomez]

Because there's no mp3 player around that can hold my collection (Which will likely be around 2TB when I'm finished deduping and adding a friends' collection), I'm thinking of selling my "old-fashioned" stereo and getting a laptop to use as my stereo.

A few things I was considering:

One nice feature of my mp3 speaker docks and regular stereo is the remote control, allowing me to skip tracks and adjust the volume from afar. Does anyone know if a remote control is possible using a laptop? I doubt it, but curious.

It would be nice to plug the laptop into my HDTV so that one 5.1 speaker unit could do double duty on both TV and music. The more integrated I can make it, the better. Is it possible to plug the laptop into an HDTV and use the larger TV screen?

Do any folks here have an integrated setup of TV and stereo? And how do you folks with very large collections go about it? I don't game using TV and don't own a console, so I'm not really that interested in a Xbox or PS3. I'm hoping to get away from the limitations of mp3 players as my at-home stereo because they can only hold a fraction of my total collection.

Any tips would be welcome. Thanks.

[nohitter151]

http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... icleid=120

You can of course use a remote with a PC, and even with MM. A regular remote can only get you so far though (with basic commands like next/previous/play/pause/stop/volume, etc.) Plus a regular style remote will need line-of-sight in order to transmit the signal. The best way is to get a high-tech device for use as a remote, like an iPod touch or iPad (or android phone or tablet) so you can actually browse your MediaMonkey tracks/playlists/etc. via the touchscreen over wifi, then transmit via wifi and play tracks on your laptop.

[Lowlander]

Instead you might want to consider a DLNA enabled stereo. This way you can still use a stereo and still access all your MediaMonkey Library.

There seem to be few DLNA enabled stereos (like http://www.onkyo.ca/model.cfm?m=TX-8050 ... ceiver&p=i), but there are many more 5.1 to 11.2 channel systems with DLNA capability. Then there is always the option of dedicated systems like Sonos and Logitech SqueezeBox.

If you want to use the TV in the mix you might want to consider a DLNA enabled TV.

Although you don't game, a PS3 is worth considering as it will be able to navigate your music in MediaMonkey over DLNA, play Blu-Ray and play Internet TV like Netflix. For $250 it isn't a bad deal.

You can also go with Smart TV boxes (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Smart-TVs-D ... 1700050017) which are often fairly cheap.

And of course you can always go with a HTPC/Laptop. You tend to be able to connect the video out to the TV and the audio out to the stereo. If you have a HTPC/Laptop with HDMI and S/PDIF/Coaxial you have a good image and good sound.


I myself currently use 2 DLNA enabled TV's and a DLNA enabled Roku Soundbridge Radio to connect to my MediaMonkey 4 library. For me this works really well as I mainly use AutoPlaylists for playback. This means I don't run into navigation issues some DLNA devices have. For example my Sony TV can only scroll down, so if you have 2000 Artists it will take an eternity to get to Artist 2000. If DLNA is the way you decide to go make sure you read up on file formats the different devices support. MediaMonkey can convert audio files before streaming, but you might want to be able to stream high quality FLAC instead of having to convert to MP3. Add to that mix video formats and internet TV capabilities and you'll have some researching to do.