I've been planning for whole house audio all along. But the longer I have to think about it, the more good ideas I come up with. The latest inspiriation comes from messing around lately with MP3 files and Win2k server. Yeah, I know I'm a few years behind the times on this whole MP3 thing, but I promise I'll make up for lost time.

I am planning for speakers in every room. Plus on the front and back porch. And I'd like some flexibility in mapping sources into different rooms. And I'm cheap as hell. So where is this going?

I own several hundred CDs, partly as a byproduct of having been a professional musician (they were tax-deductible). And I like to listen to them, but I haven't got a big changer, so it's pretty inconvenient. And I don't really want to fill my house with equipment. I just like the idea of touching a button and getting music throughout the house. (Equipment is a necessary evil.) But I do have a lot of peecees.

So it seemed natural to rip my CD collection (including over 100 Miles Davis albums) to MP3. But I'm going about it somewhat differently. I don't have a nailed-up Internet connection (yet) so I went and downloaded the CDDB files from freedb.org and installed them on a local machine (one dedicated for ripping). I use CDex, which handily reads that local file database. So I get all my ID3 tags created automagically. And maybe I'll get around to catalogueing them properly as a bonus.

Before you dislocate your jaw yawning, the reason that's important to me is because CDex is also generating a playlist. One per album, rather neat. And this makes ripping sort of a one-click affair, which is lowering the aggravation threshold enough that I will take it on. Yay for CDex mainly.

Okay, the whole house audio tie-in is coming. I'll just have a server to host MP3s in my equipment rack in my basement. And I'll have one or more playback peecees as well. And they're gonna run terminal services, so I can 'project' their winamp onto any machine in the house to control the music on the playback peecees. Fun for sure. But to take it up a notch, my good pal eddie the dane sent me this touchpanel peecee. It has a 12" touchscreen LCD, so it's going to make a beautiful whole-house music remote mothership control panel of doom.

So thanks to terminal services I won't need a bunch of monitors and keyboards and mice, and I'll still be able to control my server and my playback peecees. And those need not be rocketship machines, they just need to be able to run winamp and server files. The server wants to have a lot of disk space of course.

The only thing really lacking is some audio switching, so I could listen to different music in different areas of the house. Or at least in the bedrooms, they should be able to detach from the playback peecees and play forom another source, maybe even a local one. So I got to thinking about that, and this idea of using 4066 quad bilateral switches occurred to me. I can get them for $0.25 each, and one would make a nice stereo A/B switch. And since it's controllable by logic levels, two bucks worth of them controlled by a printer port would make a dandy whole-house A/B switch, with each of the 8 zones selectable individually. Just write a word to the parallel port. Problem solved (at least conceptually--implementation is another matter).

So what will I drive? I found these relatively inexpensive 30W amplifiers at All Electronics. I'm planning on ordering one to give it a spin, but if this works, I'll have gotten my whole house audio system for under $200 (provided I pull my own speaker wire).