Media Server setup ideas

[CorySCline]

Hello all! I come bearing a question that I have been pondering. I have a possible solution, but it does not completely fullfill my wishes. Heres the equipment setup I have:

3 Laptops.
1 Wireless Router

1 of the laptops runs a magicjack 24/7 and is connected via the headphone jack to a high end home audio system I have. The other 2 laptops are for general travel / college use.

At the moment I am walking over to the magicjack system and playing song after song in my media player over my sound system. I would like to be able to control this remotely from either of the general use laptops. The idea I have been pondering is to use RDP in a windowed pane to control the media player. This is a great idea for me and I would be ok with it. However, my fiance, (not so technically inclined), does not like the extra step required to do so. So with all that in mind, here are my goals.

1) Set up a media server that will store all my music.
2) Control the music playing on the remote machine with a program designed to do so, Not remote administration.
3) Have the option to play the remotely stored music on my general use laptops without physically transfering each one I want to play.

Any ideas?

 

[berry120]

Firefly is what you're after Put that on a server somewhere and then programs like itunes will connect to it and be able to play the music from it across the network. Everything will work pretty much as before (it'll just show up as a remote library in itunes.)

If it were me I'd put together a low powered small form factor system (some of the new intel atom boards would be suitable - cheap and use very little power), whack a Linux environment on it without any graphical stuff and then setup firefly (and anything else you want) to stream your library. It shouldn't be difficult at all, but there are beta versions that run on windows if you're happier using that. I can't vouch for their stability though since I've never used them.