Fazer Owners Club - Unofficial
General => General => Topic started by: locksmith on 21 June 2016, 09:28:34 am
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OK, time to turn to the foccers font of knowledge!
I have Hifi separates, these days mainly using either a DAB tuner or digitally stored music on an old ipod nano connected to the amp.
The nano is so small and fiddly to use, the wife cant use it and even I take a while trying to find what I want to play.
I'm thinking along the lines of maybe an android tablet wired to the amp, with a really straightforward music playing app that looks something like a pub jukebox does nowdays? Is there such a thing or some other solution that I know nothing about?
Been reading up on NAS (not really understanding) but dont want a storage centre for ALL my music but that would still need a display/play control option I believe.
Dont think I want to stream off the internet, just want to play my own music easily!
My music is stored on my macbook and I load different stuff on to various devices like phone, car, van etc.
What I first thought of was a separate that has a hard drive and good size colour display but that doesn't seem to exist.
I know audiophiles will be choking on their tea reading this, but the sound quality (using a nano) is acceptable for my needs.
So which direction should I be heading?
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We have a mini pc connected to our TV which we use as our media centre. We play the audio through the TV but there's no reason why it couldn't go through a hifi amp as per your ipod. The mini PC runs Windows 10 and we use a small wireless keyboard with built in touchpad to control it from the sofa. It works pretty well for our needs.
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A NAS is just the storage device similar to your MacBook. makes sense to use a NAS device as a backup for your MacBook anyway,
The ipad or android tablet can then content to that as a "local" storage device via your Wifi and play the music through your app of choice.
The only difficult thing now is to find the Jukebox app you like.
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A NAS is complete overkill for just music, you want something small and simple to use. Also you are correct, a NAS is usually a dumb system that just provides file storage and most standalone systems do not support any sort of built in control or audio output. A simple PC would be better, but realistically that's still going to cost a lot of money.
This brings us on to an android tablet is just a hard drive with a decent colour display; and there are plenty of apps to choose from for organising and playing music. It is effectively a handheld mini PC and can cost a fraction of the price. The fact that it is mobile will make transferring media to and from it fairly simplistic without any complicated networking - I personally use WiFi and an FTP setup to transfer data, but that's going a bit far beyond the simplistic approach if you aren't overly tech savvy
Some modern amps can be controlled remotely from a PC / Mac / Phone via your local network. The amp connects to the network and allows other devices to stream media; my mum has this setup with an iPad
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Trying to avoid wireless streaming tech as it will only complicate things for err indoors. (i've no experience of modern media things either :lol
I'm really trying to keep it simple like turning the amp on, turning the music device on, select an album or playlist, press play.
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Just remembered I got an Android tablet here at work. Browsing music apps, will try a few and see if I can achieve my goal.
Just thinking out loud with other people works!!
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I totally agree, I don't even need someone to understand what I'm talking about but through trying to explain it I get ideas :P
I reckon a tablet is a good approach for you, particularly one that has expandable storage via a MicroSD card - that should give you plenty of space to store all of your music
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- If all your music is on the Macbook and it's in the same room as the Amp then why not just have a really long 2.5mm plug to RCA lead and use the Mac to browse and play.
- If you've got an android tablet then you could hook up the headphone output of the tablet to the amp then wirelessly transmit the music from the mac[/size].
So many options.
Personally I've got a DLNA enabled NAS with around 2 Tb of music/vids, I use an app called BubbleUPnP on my Android Phone/Laptop to browse the music on the NAS then play it via a WDTV Live box connected to the receiver, the only wireless bit is the browsing, everything else is hard wired.
[/size]It still impresses me, I turn the amp and WDTV box on, 10 seconds later I can scroll through my music on the phone, touch an album and it starts playing....
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Pc options doesn't have to be expensive, I have a recond pc wired to a marantz amp via 3.5 RCA and works fine, only real expensive item would be the monitor but most modern tv have hdmi input so use that for your display
Using a pc/amp gives you the option of streaming movies etc with hifi quality audio if you feel the need in the future
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I just use my phone with a docking station plugged into the stereo!!! It automatically registers the dock and opens my music player,with all my play lists or a search feature