With our recent age of downloading much of our favorite music content to our PCs and mp3 players, you may want to play your music on your regular stereo or you may just have hundreds of CDs laying around taking up space and cluttering up the house or office. A good answer to both of these problems may already be at your fingertips.

You can use a desktop computer (which is often called a media server) to store and broadcast your audio. You don't need an up-to-date, lightning fast system with the latest version of your operating system (although that does help). An older computer running Windows XP, with a decent amount of memory, and a fair sized hard drive is usually more than adequate.

Using a software media player -- like Windows Media Player, iTunes, RealPlayer, or WinAmp -- you can create play lists, or you can play all of your audio in bulk. You can copy (rip) all of your CDs to a media server and use a media player to sort, view and listen to your music by artist, genre, year, etc.

If your stereo is close to your media server, you can connect directly via cables, or you can connect by using a wireless music system. A wireless music system consists of two parts. The first is a small transmitter that plugs into a USB port on your computer. The second is a receiver that connects to your stereo or a set of wireless speakers. Then, simply start up the media player on your computer and you're ready to play music through your regular stereo. Some of the wireless music systems on the market will play Internet Radio to your stereo as well.

With a media server (as described above), you can listen to your downloaded music on your stereo, consolidate and organize your CD collection, and finally, put the CDs up and out of the way. I have done this recently and have put all of my CDs in a box in the spare bedroom (Well at least the Christmas music so far). We listen to satellite radio over the Internet and play it on our home stereo without the need to remove our satellite unit from the car. We've managed to straighten out our music collection and don't have the CD clutter anymore.

If you have a need to get rid of CD clutter, or need a little more music storage space, or just want to listen to some of those mp3s on a regular stereo, contact us here at GTS and we can help you set up a media server and help you organize all that music.