Can anyone suggest the best software that would allow me to listen to my mp3 collection at home, through a web interface, on any PC in the world? I'm not after anything that feature rich, just something that is easy to use and looks good. thanks in advance!

I think Jinzora may be exactly what you're looking for:
http://www.jinzora.com/

It's free.

Note that Jinzora requires:

# A Webserver that supports PHP (Apache and IIS are offically supported)
# PHP 4.2 or higher (5.x is fully supported)

Another alternative, for music only, is slimserver, free from www.slimdevices.com. It runs standalone, not requiring a web server or content management system like php, but it does require perl.

Their squeezebox product uses it and it can stream to any player. The user interface is ok and easily useable, but "nothing to write home about."

Mark

I spent 8 hours trying to set that up, and I've actually done some SQL programming. I never got it to work correctly, which is dissipointing since it looks pretty cool.

Finally I ended up using squeezebox since it does the same thing without requiring me to intimately understand the interworkings of PHP and mysql.

And don't forget about the way cool SoftSqueeze SqueezeBox emulator that runs in Java. It is included with SlimServer. Both are free of charge. I have used it on both Macs and Windows at work to listen to my collection from home and it works great. You can also change the streaming bitrate on the fly if you don't have a fast connection. http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

I just installed Jinzora and imported my 8000+ ogg/mpc/mp3 collection in less than 2 hours, total. (The non-sql version : filesystem backbone.)

You can mount a Windows share over the Internet, so in theory you could use any media player to play back your files. This is more of a theoretical option though, since SMB is slow over the Internet.

I just read this article. I don't run the software, but PCWorld liked it:

PC World Orb Review

Mark

Share mp3s with apache. Store a winamp.exe on web server as well.....