Has iTunes, etc. impacted your listening habits?

iTunes or more to the point Computers have made a difference in the way I listen to music. It started with an old Gateway and the Boston Acoustics cube speakers that came with it. Darn thing sounded pretty good. The computer was set-up in a home office and was 20 feet away from my dedicated (Den, LOL) listen room. I found myself spending more time surfing the web and listening to music in the office. At one time I was down to only an hour or two in the music room a week.

That was 3 years ago. Since than, I’ve switched to Mac computers. A Mac Mini music server sit’s next to my turntable. There is a MacBook laptop sitting on my lap while I type this and Mozart is playing on the server.

Now I spend an hour or two a day, either surfing the web or reading a book, but always with music playing through the big rig.

I am keeping all my ripped music. I have spent 17 years and a boatload of money collecting them.

I seems that most prefer an external hard drive for storing music. Is this a preferance over just adding more memory to your Apple Computer?

iTunes interfaces to the iPod. That's it.

Regards,

Brian...Looks like you are a candidate for a Squeezebox and a wireless router...I did this about 2 years ago;ditched by cd player and never looked back.

I seems that most prefer an external hard drive for storing music. Is this a preferance over just adding more memory to your Apple Computer?

You wouldn't be adding "memory", but you'd need to add more storage space (a larger hard drive). There is no room in a laptop (nor a MacMini) to add an additional drive. If you are using a tower, sure you can add a larger additional hard drive internal to the tower. Folks use external drives because they are portable and can be moved from one computer to another, are relatively cheap, and do not interfere with the operating system running smoothly by clogging up that drive with additional information. With the current operating systems, at least where Mac OSX is concerned, it is better to give the boot drive plenty of free space for the operating system to run (I try to keep at least 1/3 of my disc empty). You have a faster happier computer that way. A moderate CD collection can easily fill up a hard drive in lossless or especially uncompressed formats (300mb/CD in Apple Lossless and 600mb/CD in WAV). I can take my entire music library to share listening while visiting a friend, or while traveling, simply by packing my external hard drive which is about the size of a small hardcover book. If I stored the music in an internal drive in my tower computer I would not have that option unless I wanted to tote my entire computer along. My collection currently fills a 300GB external drive in a mix of WAV and Apple Lossless files.

Marco