Questions about wireless access & iTunes

[thenoiseboy]

After many years of ignoring the fact that my CD collection will soon be obsolete, I'm finally caving and will begin ripping my CDs to an external hard drive. Here's what I would like to be able to do -- but I need some help in understanding if it's possible and how best to do it:

1) I'll probably need a couple external hard drives daisy-chained together to hold all my music. I have about 1,500 CDs, plus a good amount of additional digital music. I would like to be able to access this music WIRELESSLY through my iTunes using my MacBook.

2) Then, I'd like to set up a wireless speaker network throughout my house so that when I'm playing music on iTunes I can hear it in different parts of the house.

3) If possible, I'd like this wireless speaker system to also be compatible with my home component stereo and my iPod (which could just be run through the stereo or through a doc that comes as part of the speaker system).

Can someone tell me if what I am describing seems doable, and if so suggest a cost-effective option for building this (i.e., buy this and this and that). I do not currently own an AirPort, which I'm guessing I will need.

Thanks in advance!

 

[BlueRevolution]

1) I'll probably need a couple external hard drives daisy-chained together to hold all my music. I have about 1,500 CDs, plus a good amount of additional digital music.

Even ripped to lossless @ 350 MB per album, 1500 albums only weighs in at 512 GB. You can get hard drives up to 2 TB now.

I don't know much about home audio setups, so I can't help you with much of the rest...

 

[thenoiseboy]

Even ripped to lossless @ 350 MB per album, 1500 albums only weighs in at 512 GB. You can get hard drives up to 2 TB now.

Possibly. But I've got another 500 or so albums already on mp3 (in addition to the CDs), and I'd like to have room to eventually rip a good number of my 900 LPs.

 

[BlueRevolution]

If you need more than 2 TB, you could look into RAID external storage like a Drobo.