Here's what i did, which is a pretty serious hack but it works nicely:

1. I exported the music library on my laptop as an NFS share
2. I installed mpd on the n810, which is available from the garage
3. I copied (important point) the tag_cache file from my laptop, which lists the music files in the database
4. I mount the NFS share on the n810 (http://maemo.org/community/wiki/settingupnfs/)
5. Now I can run mpd on the n810 itself, using NFS as the source for all the music, and use sonata as the frontend.

Note the step above where I mention copying the tag_cache file. This is very important, because when you rescan the mpd library, it's going to basically download all of the mp3s over nfs to get the tag data. I tried this, and it does not work. Luckily the tag_cache file is an extremely simple file format, so you can just copy it from the main computer (which also, therefore, needs mpd set up).

With a few scripts to automate nfs mounting, this is an easy way to get all the music from your computer onto your nokia.