MAC MINI as Music Server?

Turning off sleep mode is one of the recommendations of using a Mac as a music server, Get rid of all other programs: power saver, disable Spotlight and Time Machine. Par the thing down to just having iTunes, Pure Music, and Safari. The whole key is to reduce CPU usage.

I've been using a mac mini as a music server for the last four months and turned off sleep mode almost immediately after I purchased the mac, for the very reason you mention. So far there have been no negative effects.

i always put mine to sleep when not in use. you can go into energy save and click the box to turn on wake on network access. when i start remote on my ipad or iphone to connect to the mac mini, you can see all the hard drives light up and it only takes a couple of seconds for it to wake up. since i use screen sharing from my imac to control the mac mini for upgrades and other things, i use the program "wake on lan" which will show you all devices on your network and you can click on the mini and wake it up. why have it stay awake when your no using it.
also, i have pure music setup so it plays the song after it reads it into memory. there is a couple second delay but i think it is worth it.

Turn sleep off, and you can sleep it manually if you feel the need to in the apple menu at the top left of the screen.

Thanks to all! Good advise.

Or instead of going to the Apple menu, use the Keyboard Shortcut [Command-Option-Eject]