Following on from my previous thread about getting HiFi stuff, I bought a traditional separate setup augmented with Google Chromecast Audio (with more CC for other rooms) instead of going Sonos.
I didn't buy a CD separate as I reckon it's not much difference in price to have a digital library accessible over WiFi - probably using Plex(?) - for my local content that isn't available on Amazon Prime which is my streaming service of choice.
As I understand it I need two things to stream audio (and video if I wanted) around:
1)An always on data store device
2)A server to do the streaming/decoding
So I know I can get a NAS which IIRC is a network drive with a very basic server... I've seen Plex can run on several NAS in a limited fashion ie audio-only.
I also believe I can get a USB drive and plug it into my router, this is then just a drive with no CPU at all.
Then I can have a server running full-time... either with it's own storage, or serving up content from some network drive (I assume).
I've seen people here recommending microservers over the years so I wondered what recommendations and knowledge people might be able to share?
I should say my main focus is on audio here. I don't have much local video and while ChromeCast can't stream from network storage as far as I know, mobile devices might be able to, thus avoiding the need for a Plex server for me to view video content on my iPad, etc.
I didn't buy a CD separate as I reckon it's not much difference in price to have a digital library accessible over WiFi - probably using Plex(?) - for my local content that isn't available on Amazon Prime which is my streaming service of choice.
As I understand it I need two things to stream audio (and video if I wanted) around:
1)An always on data store device
2)A server to do the streaming/decoding
So I know I can get a NAS which IIRC is a network drive with a very basic server... I've seen Plex can run on several NAS in a limited fashion ie audio-only.
I also believe I can get a USB drive and plug it into my router, this is then just a drive with no CPU at all.
Then I can have a server running full-time... either with it's own storage, or serving up content from some network drive (I assume).
I've seen people here recommending microservers over the years so I wondered what recommendations and knowledge people might be able to share?
I should say my main focus is on audio here. I don't have much local video and while ChromeCast can't stream from network storage as far as I know, mobile devices might be able to, thus avoiding the need for a Plex server for me to view video content on my iPad, etc.
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