Music in my shop.

[kevin nee]

I have a 300 CD player in a dust free spot and 4 large speakers mounted high.
I put it on All Disc Shuffle. and sometimes I just look out the window and enjoy.

[Larry Browning]

I find this thread pretty interesting. When I built my shop about 5 or 6 years ago, I ran a cat5 Ethernet cable to it. Everyone thought I was crazy for doing that. I was already listening to internet radio stations in my office at home and I had a pretty good selection of music on my computer as well. I researched and found a bookshelf stereo that also played internet radio. That was pretty cool, and I posted a thread about it here, and asked everyone about music in their shops. Many said they didn't have, and didn't want music in their shops. Others just had a small radio tuned into their favorite station. Very few folks had even heard of internet radio, and most of the comments were that it just sounded too geeky for them.
Now, it seems that streaming music from the internet is the most common way of listening to music in the shop. It just goes to show you how quickly things change.

BTW: I now stream music from a now obsolete Roku Soundbridge or pandora thru my iphone via wireless streaming. All hooked up to a old AV receiver and the speakers from that original bookshelf stereo (which blew up in a thunder storm)

[Greg Just]

Pandora through my iPhone which is plugged into my 3M WorkTunes Hearing Protector headphones. Works great and I don't mind the occasional commercials which last about 15 seconds.

[Eric DeSilva]

I remember the soundbridge! Roku is still around, anyway. My first networked audio player was even earlier--the Turtle Beach Audiotron. Problem with that one was it wanted a local copy of the database, with tags, to work--it was smart enough to do most things locally, like build playlists and sort by genre/whatever, but still used the network address to pull the .wav or .mp3 file off a network resource. Problem was that every time I went to use them in a room that I didn't use every day, the dang things would have crashed--I'd have to reboot, so it would have to crawl the network shares looking for music and rebuilding the database every time. Awful--it would take 1/2 hour before I could actually listen to anything.

Nowadays I use the Slim Devices (now Logitech) for audio throughout the house. These guys are just thin clients, so you need server side software running on your network they connect with--program called Squeezecenter. Luckily, my NAS is smart enough to run that, and since that houses all my ALAC files, it works pretty well. For my main stereo, I use the coax digital out and run PCM to a DAC and then into the big stereo. In places like my shop, I just use RCA analog outs to a stereo. In the garage, they have a sort of "all in one" boombox device that will connect via Wi-Fi. Since the server software controls everything, you can sync all the players to play the same thing, or have all of them running different streams, and you can also interface with other audio sources--internet radio, Pandora, Last.fm. I tend to mostly listen to my own collection of ripped CDs at home and in the shop, all tracked by Last.FM. I like Last.fm, and some other sources, for music discovery and then use Spotify to preview stuff before buying. I love digital audio.

I've also got friends that use the Sonos system and have been quite happy with that.

[Larry Browning]

Wow Eric!
You are way beyond me! I didn't want to spend a lot of time or money to get tunes in the shop, but I still wanted to take advantage of my network and the internet. At this point it is pretty simple, when I get down to the shop I just turn it on and go about my business. Not much different than turning on the radio.
In the house I have a networked AV receiver that has a Pandora app and vTuner for internet radio stations, as well as a connection to my music collection on the server.

[ryan boyce]

Just got into an app for the Iphone called Spotify. Like $10/month but endless selection of tunes.

[Salem Ganzhorn]

Similar for me but I use an AirPort Express so no wires required. I can stream pandora, songza or any music from iTunes. Phone calls and texts mute the audio. The amp is a class-D: no heat, no vents for dust to get into and I dont have to dedicate much precious space. It is a wonderful solution!
Salem