It took more than a year and several stages to get to the current state
It all started with the birth of my son. It proved to be difficult to operate a conventional CD player to play some nursery CD while carrying him as a baby in my arms. So I thought it would be nice to have all music stored on a system that allowed easy playback using a remote control. In addition the same system could store all the baby pictures and allow us to view them on the TV set. Extending from that I wrote down my first requirements list:
- Listen to internet radio, FIP, Oe1 and WGBH Boston
- Listen to all our music from CDs stored somewhere
- Present classical music in a "musical" manner,
(e.g. as Epoch/Composer/[Group]Work/[Performer]/Part) - Visualise lyrics of songs being played as an option
- Watch all our pictures stored somewhere
- Perhaps record films and watch them later
- Digital content not locked into a vendor's software
- Nice, compact, stylish and non intrusive
- As few devices as possible.