On 11/10/2019 11:38, Chris Green wrote:
> I'm considering my options for music playing around the house.  I have
> much of my music digitised now and available from a file server that's
> on all the time.  What I need is some simple 'clients' that can access
> the file server and play the music.
>
> So, a Pi can do the 'mechanics' as it were, access the files and play
> them, *BUT* (and it's a big but) what do you do for a user interface?

I used a web browser and a smart phone!


>
> I have getting on for ten thousand items arranged in a classified
> hierarchy, when deciding on what to play I tend to navigate down the
> hierarchy to the album I want, often I'm not looking for a particular
> name, rather I want to be prompted by what Isee in a particular genre.
>
> So how can one do this with a Pi, or is some other sort of approach
> going to work better?  It needs a display of some sort and a means of
> navigating, a remote (as in a TV type remote) would be nice, can one
> get them to interface to a Pi easily?
> #
What I did was use a pi zero W and a HiFiBerry  D to A converter for the
hardware.
That runs a homebrew daemon that forks to play either internet radio or
flac or mp3 files on a mounted partition from my server, using standrd
tools.
Web server communicates with this and there is a shared memory area in a
ramdisk so daemons can write current state and the rowser read it.,


Very happy to to share source etc.



> ... and I'm pretty much against a mobile phone interface, it's too
> small for my (gently) fading eyesight and I don't get on well with on
> screen keyboards.  I've actually just changed back from a smartphone
> to a feature phone with real buttons for this very reason.
>

Oh, well the backend would still work, but you would need to find
another UI to drive it.

I dont have a huge problem using a smartphone as the text is
deliberately large



--
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Jonathan Swift.

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