I thought accessing the new library while away from home was going to be one of the trickier parts in this whole process. Some quick poking around last night and I found Simplify Media. Took only a couple minutes to set up, and I have R.E.M. playing from the library at home (while I am on the train with iffy Wi-Fi to Seattle). It compresses the sound on the fly down to a 160 kb MP3 stream … not great, but not bad either. I’m curious if the quality will be better when I have a stronger internet connection.
Playlists are one thing I notice as a bit of a problem at the moment. I’m organizing the discs into playlists that are stored inside playlist folders on iTunes. For example, ‘Automatic For The People’ is stored in Playlists->Rock / Pop->R.E.M.->Automatic For The People. But Simplify Media just shows a flattened list (no nesting). As the library grows, this will be more and more of a problem, but this isn’t bad at all for the first app I tried for doing this.