How to easily create a central and shared place for all of our music?

After a months-long process of digitizing media in our spare time, we have our entire large collection of music on a Synology disk station accessible to anyone who is permitted to connect to our household network: mount the drive and use your favourite means of locating and playing specific music. Works well in our multi-OS environment (including OSX and iOS as well as non-Apple) and with various Bluetooth speakers tethered to computers.

If you are willing to use a different music player than iTunes on your computer... We've had pretty good luck with our dedicated http://vortexbox.org/ device. If you are super handy, you can build your own out of an old computer or cheap parts; VortexBox itself is open source. Or if you want something more plug and play (as I did), you can buy a prebuilt system from http://shop.smallgreencomputer.com/. To me it was worth the money; it's quiet and low powered. The software is managed through a web browser, and you can copy files to it directly over the network. You copy all your music to a special MP3 folder on the device and then can play it using a Squeezebox player. For us, it's a Squeezebox Boom in our kitchen. Don't have one? You can also download a http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/ for your computer. Apparently Logitech isn't making the hardware players anymore anyway. The software also supports Sonos, XBox, Apple TV, and more, though I only have used the Squeezebox bits.

It sounds like you're talking about a NAS. Here's http://www.macworld.com/article/1163242/organize_and_play_your_media_from_a_nas.html that describes the process.

Sorry, I was confusing Spotify with another service that let's you upload your songs for sharing called 8tracks, but that only lets you create mixes so please disregard. Also, how does Plex work and would that be an option?

Does http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2688 not work for you for some reason?

My husband and I both have so much music, we want to move the bulk of it off of our computers and into some dedicated storage device to free up space. I guess we could get a computer that is just for music, but wondering if that is the best option. Sorry, should have made that clear in the first place!

What about just using iTunes Match, if you're not iTunes-averse? It does let you download songs, but you can just stream them too.

I guess we could get a computer that is just for music, but wondering if that is the best option. Well... kind of. Cloud storage solutions exist, but if you're talking about as much music as I think you're talking about--I've got about 200GB myself--then this isn't practical. The kind of space you're probably talking about don't come cheap, particularly when you're talking about access fast enough to stream reliably. But a fully-functional computer is probably overkill. You want a server toaster, not another PC. I'm thinking your best bet is probably to spring for something like one of http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0092ML8QW/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/, i.e., a router with built-in storage and media streaming capabilities. $185 for just the router, $350 with included 2TB HDD. Given that you can get a fast 2TB HDD for well under $165, it would seem to make sense to get the bare router and buy your own HDD. I haven't used one of these things personally, as I basically use my desktop to do this with http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp and our phones. But if I were looking for the kind of network storage you're talking about--and why limit it to music?--I'd seriously look into one. Apple even makes their own (the Time Capsule, I think), for their accustomed premium ($300 for the base model), but it does work with their Time Machine backup software, so that's worth looking into. The upshot of something like this is that you'd be able to access your music from anywhere with an internet connection, provided you set it up right.

Should have stated this earlier, we have about 600 GB of music that needs to find a home. All currently on assorted external HDs or laptops. If we actually got around to digitizing our LPs and CDs would be closer to one TB. We are music lovers, having both worked in radio and other parts of the music industry, and with only somewhat overlapping tastes we have a big collection. One question, we had a Time Capsule, but opted for Crashplan after the Time Capsule failed and lost all of our backups. The Mac store made good and gave us a new one, but we never set up the new one. It is somewhere in our office and could be set up again. When we used the Time Capsule for music sharing before, it would make us save a copy of the music on our own computers before we could play it, which we don't want. Is there a way to use Time Capsule for playing music without saving copies hither and thither?