If you want to start from scratch I would also recommend the MAC Mini as your music server. Start with itunes and rip your music into either ALAC (apple lossless) or AIFF (Essentially an uncompressed WAV file). ALAC saves on space and now Amarra Mini and full can play nice with ALAC. I would suggest sticking with itunes to begin with and then add in the Amarra software later as your comfort level increases. If it was me I would also buy a nice external optical drive for your laptop and use dbpoweramp for the ripping (Windows only). It is a great program, extremely easy, and if you have multiple cores, very fast also. It works great with getting metadata for the rips and uses accurate-rip to speed up bit-perfect copying. The downside to this is you need to be comfortable moving data between OSX and Windows. I have not found a CD ripper of comparable quality and ease-of-use on the OSX side.