First off, I've been running JRiver in my main (livingroom) stereo system for awhile now. I bought it, it's great, gets me wiffy points because I can listen while she looks at family pictures on a 19" monitor. It's running on an old PC with music and pictures stored on a small sata drive. The OS runs from an old ide drive that isn't in the best of shape.
In our family room I have another (noisey) old PC hooked up to the TV. Wiffy likes playing Pandora with windows background set to play a slide show of family pictures. She turns it on and presto, music and pictures appear.
In my Den I have a one year old PC with a 1TB drive. This PC is backed up regularly to a usb drive using windows RoboCopy. The usb drive is kept in a home fire safe; periodically, the at home usb drive is swapped with one kept in our bank safe deposit box.
Currently we are paying our kids to scan many many many photo albums. In short I know I'm going to run out of disk space soon.
My question is how to configure JRiver for my house.
I want to be able to listen to my music w/o turning on more then one PC. A complete set of Photos is not required on all three PC's. However, I like the redundancy of having everything stored on more then one PC.
Family room music is played on a soundbar; local 320kps mp3's would be ok.
Someday, I would like to build a music (only) server for the living room.
I do all my ripping, tagging, copying etc with the PC in my den. I'm on a mission to buy all the CD's I can before they stop making them.
My thought is buy another drive for the PC in my den and let it act as a JRiver server for music in the living room and somehow keep a mp3 copy of my music on the PC in the family room.
I want nothing to do with NAS or usb drives as a long term solution. I really do not want the expense or the headache, its just something else to take care of. I figure within 5 years everything will live in solid state drives anyway.
Ideas?