Music jukebox notebook?

[nineball9]

I am currently recording-cleaning-burning my old record collection and when I finish (if I live that long) I want to rip my entire CD collection and put the whole collection on some sort of dedicated PC/jukebox/server to play through my home stereo system. I've looked at various music servers and contemplated building my own system, but physical space is a major concern. I do not have space in my stereo "cabinet" for a tower (even SFF), monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I was wondering if anyone had tried using a notebook as a music server.

My system requirements are simple as I have no desire to network the jukebox and I do not expect to update frequently. I do not want a Home Theatre system as I do not watch TV or movies/ DVD's etc, and I do not have any requirements for portable music like an Ipod. What I do have is a lot of music and not much space. I have over 1000 CD's, 40% of which are classical music, and 200-300 cleaned records. I do not consider MP3 a viable music option, so I've been using FLAC and using dBPowerAmp to organize my music collection.

My thoughts are to purchase a small notebook - no larger than a 12" screen, slap in a Creative PCMCIA SoundBlaster Audigy sound card, and add an external USB drive, probably 400-500 GB, to store my music. I'll simply plug the soundcard's analog stereo output in to my stereo's integrated amp.

I was wondering if anyone had tried using a notebook as a music server or if anyone has a better solution. Thanks!

 

[deathwalker]

I have a dlink DSM-320 media server. I use both my desktop and laptop depending on the occation as the media player. There are occational pauses in the playback when using my wireless laptop as the player. I suppose the extra wireless hop from my laptop to the router then to the media server causes occational slow downs. I dont usually have that problem with my desktop though. It has one less wireless hop since it comunictates to the router via a Network cable instead of wirelessly.