Question: How can I liberate my music collection from my single PC, store it somewhere central on my LAN, and access it from multiple locations?

This question is a little like the onsite backup one we answered last week, and what methods you can use depend on how simple, expensive, and extensible you want your centralized music collection to be. Clearly, there are a ton of ways to tackle this problem, and this answer does not aim to be comprehensive. Rather, we're just throwing a few ideas out there that newbies to networked music sharing should investigate further. (Regular Ars readers should feel free to pitch in with further suggestions in the comments.)

On the low end, you don't even really need to move your media off your PC in order to liberate it. Both Home Sharing on iTunes and Windows Media Center make it easy enough to stream media directly off one computer to others in the same network. But this method can create a lot of extra work for the central computer, and makes it hard to sync devices, since non-local music through these services isn't accessible for that purpose (you can download music between computers with Home Sharing, but this might fragment your collection and will take up extra space). A better solution is to set up a server or a network-attached storage (NAS) device that can be accessed over your home network, which gives you more options and has varying costs.

A bootleg NAS is an option here—either network a computer (making an internal or externally attached drive available on your LAN), or connect an external drive to the USB port on your router, if your router has such a port. With this setup, you can drop all of your files into the drive, and then direct your iTunes or Windows Media Player to use that space as their own media location.

This solves the issue of music syncing, as now you can sync anything from that networked folder to your devices. But this setup can also be on the slow and hiccupy side, especially if the computer acting as a janky server is in regular use and you're working over WiFi. Again, it also creates extra work if you're routing through a computer— really, what you're doing is piggybacking server tasks onto a regular computer. So if there are a lot of people in your house looking to access the centralized music, a dedicated setup would be a better choice.

Absent a compatible router or a willing computer, a regular NAS is the next step. These devices will be a bit more expensive than a standalone drive, being that they are low-power computers, and they often come with their own media sharing interfaces. If they are universal plug-and-play (UPnP) compatible, you can also share the content on UPnP devices like an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3 (this can be done with bootleg-type NASs as well, but it requires installation of a third-party program like PS3 Media Server).

If you make your own NAS, either from scratch or out of an old computer, another good option is to install FreeNAS on it instead of just dealing with folders, as FreeNAS is UPnP-capable if you check the right box in the settings.

Likewise, if you build or have a NAS- or server-type device, you can skip right to making it into a legit server. Windows Home Server ($103) does pretty well with media sharing, and will let you stream music to computers (most easily with WMP Media Connect) or an Xbox 360, but it doesn't play so nice with Macs or PS3s.

This brings us to the potential use of DLNA standards, if you're up for it. DLNA is the latest thing in the media sharing scene (still a couple of years old by this point) and ensures you will be able to stream media between two compatible devices. It can be a little tweaky between platforms, as is to be expected when you try to make everything work with everything else, but if you're patient it's not a bad way to go about media sharing.

If you have a DLNA-capable TV or box in your living room that you'd like to use, like a Boxee Box or Blu-ray player, TwonkyServer can be installed on a Windows Home Server or any computer runnning Windows, OS X, or Linux, so it will even work with your bootleg NAS setup. Once Twonky is installed, most DLNA-compatible devices will be able to stream media from that computer. Twonky comes pre-installed on many NASs, or can be bought separately for $19.95.

Coherence is a free alternative if you're looking to stream via DLNA or UPnP on a server that is otherwise already set up, though its last stable release was over a year ago. Coherence runs on a variety of platforms, including BSD.

If you're looking for a server solution that's a little friendlier with multiple OSes, including Linux, another option is Samba. Samba is a framework that installs over Linux that supports Microsoft's sharing protocols, but also works with both UNIX and Linux systems. You can install Twonky or Coherence onto it, for that DLNA goodness. If you're dealing only with Linux/UNIX computers and derive joy from playing with Linux, you can also set up NFS on a NAS for file sharing.

Any experiments in local sharing over a small network will likely be enhanced by using wired connections, especially if you have a less-than-reliable service provider. This increases the cost of the setup, but not by too much, if you know where to get your cables.