Music Nirvana (nearly) Achieved
A few years ago, I started to see the potential of the combination of the Internet, digital music, and mobile technology. I could feel that it should be possible to collect all of my music onto a computer, have it fully indexed & searchable, and available pervasively throughout my house. I was imagining the ultimate expression of this, which would be a computer in audio form factor that would catalog your CD collection automatically, make audio controls available via the web, and therefore place total control of your collection at your fingertips.
I'm starting to benefit from the realization of this vision through the excellence of implementation of Apple's iTunes, iPhone, and some of its supporting infrastructure. As I write this, I'm listening to my most recent playlist both from my notebook and my living room speakers (song is being streamed to an AirPort Express). I have Signal installed, so I can carry my iPhone with me and walk away from my notebook, and still have the control to skip songs, change volume, change playlists, search for other songs to play, or anything I'd like.
Most of my collection is on my iPhone itself, so if I wanted to just use earphone/earbuds, I could have nearly the same experience (but somewhat less comfortably).
I've had pieces of this working for a few years. I bought the AirPort Express to stream music to over a year ago, and stopped using it because it dropped out too often. Now that I have the AirPort Extreme with Gigibit Ethernet, I haven't had a single drop.
I spent a few hours yesterday searching for album art online, so that I could have a nearly complete collection for display via CoverFlow in either iTunes or on the iPhone. There are a variety of classical CDs that I still don't have covers for, but I can scan them if it really bugs me (I did save all of the covers...)
The only remaining fly in the ointment at this point is the lack of a reasonable audio-style form factor box from Apple that I could use to replace the Linux box in my house, so I could run the music completely off my server and still access iTunes DRM-protected tracks. The pieces to stream non-DRM tracks are clearly available for Linux, but I don't want to spend time on a solution that isn't complete.