I am looking at moving our music from a rapidly dying laptop onto some sort of server / hard disk that is always on. I then want to get the music to upto 3 stereos, ideally I would like to use either a tablet or mobile phone as a remote to select music / playlists etc.

I have been looking at raspberry pi’s. Can I use one to act as the server and also connect it directly to the main stereo via cables. What is the best way of storing the music files, powered portable hard disk, one of my existing USB hard drives, SD card or USB memory stick.

Can a raspberry pi broadcast music to our existing Google chrome.

I want a nice stable system and will pay bit more for a really good solution that just works. It would be nice to have decent apps to access and browse the music. Cheers for any advice.

Should have said I really need a system that I can get an app to control it for both android and ios.

Pi with kodi on it will do it. I use mine at the other end to play stuff on the Tele but it should do the serving bit too. I use a WD mybooklive for the serving and storing. Nice and cheap and reliable so far. Plenty of apps to access it from the phone. I can ping the content to my chromecast using the phone. Accessible from all the pcs too.

Why not use the free storage with Google Play – up to 50,000 songs on cloud storage. Then as long as you have a wireless connection you send to a Chromecast attached to your stereo or speakers.

I’ve got three around the house – one attached to my main stereo, one plugged into a powered speaker in the kitchen and another in the bedroom. You can send to one, two or all.

I upload the music to my iMac, Google Play automatically uploads it to the cloud, and I can access it via my phone or tablet. Means it’s all backed up too. Also means you can access all your music away from home too.

Chromecast, Google Music or Spotify

I’ve got several raspberry pis running picoreplayer pretending to be a squeezebox system, can be set up as a server or just a player and will serve to multiple players over the network. Using the squeezer app on android to control it all.
I’ve bought a seperate dac board for the pi connected to the main hifi but the standard output is fine for the kitchen/garage/kids rooms etc.
Under £100 for a couple of pi’s usb hard drive and basic boxes etc.

These are currently on offer at Amazon seems to work quite well for me.
Use the info available on the Pure support website to set them up as the App is a bit crap for this.

Why not use the free storage with Google Play

Apart from the trial, it’s not free is it? £10 a month and lose access to your uploaded music if you stop paying it, is how I see it. I could be wrong!

What is budget OP?

Top budget would be around £100 to £150 to get it setup. I would prefer no monthly running costs. Already have 1 Chromecast Audio and several USB powered portable hard discs plus a couple more 500GB sata hard disks if that makes a difference to the planned route.

Many routers now have a USB socket which can be used to share media files over the network. If the budget is limited this might be a solution.

I’ve got 200+ uploaded albums on Google Play and I don’t pay a penny.

Use Chromecast Audio to play the music via an DAC to my HiFi.

The piCore player on Raspberry pi as a Squeezebox player works excellently to.

I use both these solutons.

Music is stored lossley on a Synology NAS running the Squeezebox Server.

Apart from the trial, it’s not free is it? £10 a month and lose access to your uploaded music if you stop paying it, is how I see it. I could be wrong!

Only costs if you want access to streaming or music other than yours.

Free account gives you 50,000 songs worth of storage (up to 300mb per song apparently!) and no limit to accessing your music.

He’s right, you know. Not clear from the front page of Play, but there is a free version (https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/sulp)

And you retain rights to your own stored music, that bit surprised me.
(Section 8. here – https://play.google.com/about/play-terms.html)

Does it play ads if you’re streaming from your own stored library though?

How do you upload songs to play?

How do you upload songs to play?

Use Google Chrome, download the Play extension, link it to your music folder(s) on your computer, it will automatically upload all your music. As and when you upload more music to you computer it will automatically upload to Play as long as you have linked the music folders.

It took about 12 hours to upload 400 albums – I just left it to it!

Whatever you do, maintain a backup or two of your media as you already have some usb drives it should be easy.

Does it play ads if you’re streaming from your own stored library though?

No adds, quite useful for sharing things/farting about with tablets.

My itunes was playing up (ha! For a change) so I used play for a bit on my phone, streaming in the cold for 3 hours a day was killing my battery though, so fixed itunes after a bit.