I listen to music on my desktop machines pretty much all the time. While I have bought a few tracks via iTunes I’m still buying physical CDs. Recently I’ve been using Spotify quite a bit, but I still like being able to listen to the music that I have in my own collection.
My desktop machine in the office has a pretty large hard drive, so this isn’t an issue. Unfortunately my machine at home isn’t as well endowed!
Here’s what DaisyDisk tells me about my own usage:
Unfortunately that’s pretty much the entire hard drive!
So would playing music from an external hard drive work?
I’ve got an external iomega drive that’s got plenty of capacity, though it also holds backups from my other machine (the one that was stolen) and I’d rather not lose those backups since I haven’t got anywhere to put them ..
I have a somewhat bashed up external drive that I use for media. It’s plugged into an Iomega iConnect [which I would not recommend incidentally] which has a built in Media Server. It can stream the media over the network no problem, but it does tend to also find any sounds or images on software backups. In the end, I decided to only use that disk for media, and backups are done into other external drives.
I use a ZFS pool which I keep in the attic. It’s shared out to a number of computers through the house.
I’ve had too many losses when using external drives – bit-rot, damaged partition tables.
Maybe the media server option is the way to go then .. I guess I could pick up a mac mini or something fairly cheap ..