Listen to Your Entire Home Music Collection at Work

(MoneyWatch)  Now that we know the scientifically proven benefits of listening to music at work, I can unabashedly recommend ways to pipe your Black Rebel Motorcycle Club collection into your cubicle.

While music might help your productivity, it's still probably a no-no to load up your work PC's hard drive with music from home. Instead, I've got a great app that can stream music from your home PC. And it sounds great.

A long time ago, Rick had recommended Simply Media, an iPhone app that streamed music from your home PC. It was great, and I used it almost daily for a year. But then Google bought the company and shut down the service, leaving me without a way to play my 60GB of music at work.

That's where AudioGalaxy comes in. AudioGalaxy is a free streaming music service that has stepped up to fill the hole left by Simplify. Install the AudioGalaxy app on your home PC and, after it catalogs your music, you can play that music from anywhere via a Web browser.

What if your company limits your network bandwidth and doesn't care for you streaming music all day, you ask? No problem. If you have an iPhone, install the AudioGalaxy app and you can play music through your phone instead, either via Wi-Fi or 3G. (I play my iPhone through a dock that routes the audio through the PC's line in jack.)

AudioGalaxy is a superb app, and -- for now, at least -- it's completely free. It lets you play music by artist, album, or playlist, and it streams in the background if you have iOS4. I mourned the loss of SimplifyMedia, but AudioGalaxy is now one of the best reasons to have an iPhone.