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If it has been mentioned before I apologize. The advantage of having a server of any type loaded with all of your music does a great service to your entire music library. Today as i have itunes set to dj, I have listened to a number of songs from the Proprius label that I collected from long ago. I forgot the beauty of these albums. It does not matter the type of music style you prefer. Having all of your music on one source in a variable setting allows you to apreciate, remember and most importantly enjoy the beauty of music. I'm sure it is one of the primary reasons we all got into audio in the first place!

Within the advantage you so correctly pointed out above there lies yet another advantage of particular importance to audiophiles. Provided one has a large music library and one rips everything into lossless files then by using some form of random play feature one will get a similar experience to using one of the online music services, such as Pandora or Last.fm, but at true CD quality and above, in the case of high resolution files, instead of the highly compressed, low bit rate mp3s these services all stream.

I totally agree except for 1 thing. Listening to pandora and to other music services has introduced me to a number of musicians or albums that I otherwise would not know. Example Livingston Taylor's music on the Chesky label and an album of Milt Jackson/Wes Montgomery, "Bags meets Wes" from late 50's-early 60's. At my office at work, playing my itunes library frequently brought comments on who was playing and lead to interesting discussions of music/musicians.

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I totally agree except for 1 thing. Listening to pandora and to other music services has introduced me to a number of musicians or albums that I otherwise would not know. Example Livingston Taylor's music on the Chesky label and an album of Milt Jackson/Wes Montgomery, "Bags meets Wes" from late 50's-early 60's. At my office at work, playing my itunes library frequently brought comments on who was playing and lead to interesting discussions of music/musicians.

I do agree that online streaming music services such as Pandora do serve a very worthwhile purpose and they would be vastly more enjoyable if they started to stream losslessly compressed files rather than the lossy files currently being streamed.