[Pubcrawler]

I'm in the process of updating my home entertainment system and want to now put all my singles etc onto a hard drive . This can then sit on my network and play through my new 5.1 amp.
Question, which is the best HD and is there one or a software package that allows me to categorise my music into years, type etc?

[chrisjr]

How were you planning to use it? A raw hard drive on it's own is useless with out something to put the songs on there in the first place and then play them back.

So do you want something that can stand alone and do all the work by itself or something that uses your computer as the control interface?

I was in the same situation myself and looked at a number of options for transferring my CD collection to a hard drive system of some sort. What I settled on was the cocktailAudio X10 unit. It handles all the ripping of CDs, playing them and has a song database that you can use to sort by album, artist, song, genre etc.

Not cheap but a nice bit of kit, though it does have it's little quirks.

http://www.cocktailaudio.co.uk/
http://www.richersounds.com/product/...-audio-x10-2tb

[Pubcrawler]

That is why I posted this topic, happy to recieve any help to point me in the right direction.

[jjne]

You'll need either an always-on PC with a DLNA server installed, or an external hard drive linked to a DLNA server (some routers have these, anything with NAS built in essentially).

You could use a smartphone with a DLNA client installed.

Or, if you want true hifi sound, you could invest in something like this:

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...eno-dnp720-blk

(which, if you save your music files as either lossless WAV/FLAC/APE etc, or high-bitrate MP3/OGG/AAC+, will give you sound quality the equal of a fairly high-end CD player).

DLNA servers and clients generally have the ability to search on the ID3 tags attached to the stored music files, so you can search based on album/artist/year/genre etc etc.