What are the pros and cons of using iTunes as your only stereo system?

[rjung]

@FlyingDragonFan

Most of the responses here seem to be from people who are using the PC version of iTunes. Right? I have a PowerBook, with about 6 days worth of music on it. I recently got the Apple Airport Express wireless thingy, which lets me play music through my stereo wirelessly. There’s a standard audio-out jack on the Airport, which plugs into my amp. It’s great, constant music and no wires.

The Airport Express will work with the Windows version of iTunes, if your PC is in a WiFi network, IIRC.

[Freejooky]

@Hunter Hawk

[audiophile snob]Your computer does not have a great sound system.[/audiophile snob]

Mine does.

[AHunter3]

@DooWahDiddy

We just bought an iPod, and by extension have just started using iTunes. We love it, and were thinking that since we are moving to a small Manhattan apartment soon, it might be a good idea to just transfer all of our CDs to iTunes and solely use our computer (which is brand new and has a great sound system, subwoofer, etc.) as our stereo.

We could rid ourselves of the clutter of CDs, and still choose which songs to put on the iPod while having everything else (we have a lot more than 5000 songs) on our computer. We could still do shuffle, or choose to listen to an entire CD just like we could before anyway.

Just wondering: has anyone here ever done this? Are there any drawbacks we can’t think of? Or was it as great as it sounds?

::raises hand::

I do not, in fact, use iTunes for anything but loading the iPod, but that’s just due to a preference for a different MP3 player (Audion), and the principle remains the same. The CDs are in the basement. My entire library of music is on a 52 gig partition on my laptop, and both mine and my girlfriend’s favorites are loaded onto the iPod which in turn spends much of its time hooked to the BOSE radio with its nice apartment-sufficient speakers.

I wish the iPod had a folder structure — the innate software doesn’t really scale up well for the big-capacity iPods, where you don’t want a single unabridged list of all 290 playlists or all 1390 artists or all 910 albums or all 46,302 songs. 'Twould be far better to be able to drag albums into playlists, playlists into folders, folders into yet more encompassing folders, and then be able to go over to the iPod and pick “Classical” then, within “Classical”, choose “By Era” rather than “By Temperament” or “By Conductor/Orchestra” or “By Composer”, then, within “By Era”, choose “Romantic Period”, and cue up “Playlist E: Bombastic-Melodramatic Stuff” and set it to playing.

But since I have all that on my PowerBook, and my girlfriend is really the main iPod user, it works for us. Either way, it’s freedom from the big cumbersome CD rack and the perennially messy sprawl of CDs taken out and not yet returned, etc.

[Bad_News_Baboon]

We’re on macs and have downloaded our cds onto a hard drive. We use I-tunes.
We keep our cds in a box in the closet. When you have a TON of cds, this makes for a lot of space saved.

We have not experienced any problems at all.

[Arch_Trout]

I’ve got all my cd’s on my mac and use iTunes.
Stream it wirelessly to the Airport Express which is hooked up to my amp.
Not had any problems at all and the bonus of having a party and not waking up to 50 cd cases strewn all over the floor is worth it alone.

[pipper]

One of the biggest issues of having your music collection on a computer is the fact that your computer is usually in a room that is not neccesarily where you want to listen to your music. With some help from people here and elsewhere, we figured out a pretty good solution after we imported all of our 600+ cd’s to itunes. We are able to play them through our main stereo using our Tivo to connect into our computer via our wireless network (we’re running the JavaHMO server instead of the standard TIVO server because the Tivo server doesn’t support iTunes playlists). Best thing since sliced bread!

[beagledave]

We have a TiVo connected to our audio system.

We use the TiVo to stream (over wireless connection) our mp3 collection in iTunes.

The TiVo Desktop software that handles this on my Mac does NOT use a lot of CPU time.

http://www.tivo.com/4.9.4.asp

Another option is to use Airtunes from Apple to stream the mp3s to your stereo

http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html

(Of course in this case you WOULD be running iTunes on your computer and taking whatever CPU hit it involves)