I have music on most of the time. I owe a debt of gratitude to whoever first coined the term 'eclectic' to describe music collections like mine, as I'd otherwise be left only with 'bizarre' or 'eccentric'.

I'd wanted a Bang & Olufesen system since I was eight years old. There was just something so ... right ... about them. The sound is fantastic, and the aesthetics are the perfect blend of form and function.

Now, at this point, I have to make a confession. I'm no audiophile. I listened to this system, and I listened to a Denon system costing less than half as much - and I couldn't tell much difference. Or, at least, couldn't say that one was better than the other. But I didn't care. I knew that every time I looked at the Denon system, there would be a little part of me wishing I'd bought this instead. So I did.

These days, I have a single music source: a dedicated netbook permanently connected to the hifi.

This has three music sources:
- my entire music collection in mp3 form on the hard drive
- a premium Spotify account to provide streaming access to a vast array of music
- Firefox with tabs set to last.fm, iPlayer radio stations, etc
providing a hifi system with an effectively infinite supply of music

All the screengrabs are clickable links, opening the sites in a new window.

The iTunes screengrab is showing radio stations simply because I no longer have my music stored on my main laptop, not because my musical tastes are that dodgy!

I dislike with a vengeance the way iTunes tries to control the way I access my music, so I use Sharepod when I want to access my iPod as a hard drive. The reason I use iTunes as my music player is that I have an iPod dock connected to the netbook, so inserting my iPod into the dock automatically synchronises it with my main music collection (both netbook and iPod have 160Gb drives, so the iPod can hold all my music).

Spotify Premium gives me ad-free access to vast amounts of music. A tenner a month (or about the cost of one CD a month) is a small price to pay to get rid of the ads).

last.fm provides another way of accessing individual artists, and I also like it for the artist-driven 'radio stations' where you type in an artist you like and it then plays music it considers similar. Its idea of 'similar' can be a bit dodgy at times, but it can work well.

There are almost an infinite variety of radio stations available online. The iPlayer provides access to all the BBC ones, both as live streaming coverage and programmes-on-demand.

I run TightVNC on the netbook and my main PC, allowing me to control the netbook remotely - generally from my main laptop while sat on the sofa, creating a rather sophisticated hifi remote control. :-)

In the bedroom, I have a Squeezebox Boombox so I can stream music from the netbook via wifi. In my car, my iPod is connected to the car stereo so I also have access to the same music while on the move.

Online music really has revolutionised things. Were I starting a music collection today, I'd just buy the obscure stuff that can't be found online; for everything else, I'd rely on the net.

Not being limited to our own music collection is also great when you have friends round: anyone can choose their music from a virtually infinite source, rather than being limited to what I happen to own.