Got a portable hard drive to fill up with music, got a raspberry pi, got speakers. What do i do next? Anyone on here done this – presume so?

I would put XBMC on it, add all the music to the library and then use the XBMC remote on my iPhone to control it.

If it’s running headless, also setup some scripts to update the library every night to save you needing to connect in and do it on a screen.

what would you use os wise? raspbmc?

XBMC would be a very good place to start and http://www.raspbmc.com/ or http://openelec.tv/ can make it very easy.

I personally have one build on openelec and one on Raspbmc. No real difference between the two these days.

I see you’ve already found raspbmc. Not a big deal to try out more than one and see what you like.

cool – something to play with 🙂 What about playing vids onto tv? can stream iplayer and youtube can’t i?

Playing vids is easy, just put them on the same HDD and add the Vids folder to your library and it will index them.

Not sure on iPlayer etc via XBMC, you might be able to use something like an iPhone or iPad with the app on and then airplay it to the XBMC unit.

I’d advise putting icefilms and Navi-X on as well, both great resources for watching online content.

If you want videos as well then raspbmc or openelec are very good, if its just music then I’d look at some of the squeezebox style distros.
I’m in the process of setting up a second pi just to handle music through a DAC into the stereo as I don’t find xbmc that friendly searching music. Still not decided on an os but will try volumio once the DAC is here later in the week.

Using a galaxy s5 and sony tablet so android

Yatse is a great android remote for xbmc, there are several squeezebox controllers and mpd remotes on Google play to control it all from

Get a bluetooth adaptor for it & turn it into a bluetooth speaker too.