After my CD player in my truck made short work of destroying a half dozen of my CDs including a Charlie Patton boxed set and a Brownie & Sonny album that is out of print costing me $200 to replace them I now rip all of my albums to WAV and print disposable cds to play in my truck.

So I have an external hard drive with 500 GB of blues albums ripped to wave stored therein and I am kicking around the thought of playing them back through my hifi.

I have been told a used Pentium 4 with a Audiophile 2496 sound card will allow me to record my vinyl and has a DAC that is pretty good for feeding the files out. The cost of the above ~$50 for a computer and $100 for the sound card.

Now am I on the right track?

if you've already got the music on the harddrive you are halfway to having a music server. a squeezebox ($300 retail) is probably the easiest way to get you there, but a DIY option is a very viable (and less expensive) solution.

as for transferring vinyl to the harddrive, there is a thread on it here somewhere, but i cant find it. clint e. will likely point you in the right direction.

Maybe this could help : Look for Transferring LPs to CDR: Some Advice
http://soundt.18.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=347&st=45

Here's another post for turning your records into CD's:

http://soundt.18.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=912&st=15