There is still no (to my knowledge) killer NAS setup for music.

Everything is slow, or messy, or has a crap interface. Sometimes all three. Then you take your laptop out of your house and you don't have access to any of your music.

iTunes Match is the closest I've gotten. I pay for the upgraded storage and its enough to store my entire music library. Anywhere I go I can listen to anything I own with no delay (assume a decent network connection).

I've had a similar experience with Google Music. I have iTunes Match for my iOS/Mac devices, but prefer Google Music as it works on my Android devices and anywhere a decent web browser is. If there was a nice web interface for iTunes Match so my play counts and playlists synced nicely, I'd probably use that, but for now Google Music works.

Bonus benefit of iTunes Match + Google Music is that I can redownload my older iTUnes songs DRM-free so the uploader will pull them in.

I was under the impression that iTunes Match doesn't eat into your iCloud storage, which is why it's a separate expense.

It doesn't. You're limited to 25,000 of your own (i.e. not purchased from iTunes) songs.

It does if it can't find matches for your tracks. This will happen generally with obscure tracks or live recordings, but sometimes it just fails to match things that are clearly in the iTunes store too.

Does it work abroad, or would you need to use a VPN?

Works fine

(Source: I have a US iTunes account and I'm living in Germany)

My Synology NAS coupled with a Squeeze Box service is fantastic.

The Synology NAS does include the Squeeze Box service software that can easily be streamed and played seamlessly on your PC or on a physical Squeeze Box server.

My wife and I utilize box in our house and have had zero issues with network latency, file indexing, and general performance.

I use Subsonic. I stream music locally/remotely to my phone/laptop without a problem.

As do I. I use the MiniSub Chrome app when I'm listening on a desktop computer, the included web interface when I'm importing or curating my library, and iSub on my iPhone/iPad.

I'm only a week or so into this setup, but I'm loving it so far - I really feel like I have control over my music once again, vs. Spotify which I'm planning to downgrade to the free edition.

A NAS is obviously the better option if you're always working in the same location, but for people like me who often move between locations it's much more convenient to use one or two large flash drives.

For instance it's much easier for me to keep my VMWare images and snapshots on a flash drive and back that up to a home disk once a day, because it means I can use the images wherever I happen to be. Mostly that's just between home and the office, but that's not always the case.

I have the regular assortment of (multiple) generations of NAS devices at home and in the office as well. But, when you want to go throw that Windows 7 image onto VMware and use it for a few days, or you want to do some editting of your family vacation photos, or you happen to be on a business trip to brazil, it's _really_ nice to be able to just pop a USB/SSD into your laptop and edit/view a way. I sync back to my external drive/NAS when I get back into the office/home.

For those of us who travel for extended periods of time, USB/SSD Flash Drives are a nice alternative to external Hard Drives and/or spending a fortune on Internal Drives w/Apple