Playing music stored on NAS drive though HiFi.

I recently stumbled on my old MyCloud NAS drive full of my old albums. I’d like to play these through my HiFi – which has a bluetooth input dongle.

What’s the best* way to do this? I have a MacBook and and iPhone – ideally I will be able to chose the music via my phone.

I tried pointing the built in Apple Music player to the drive and load the albums, but that appears to have only been successful in loading all 165GB of music from the NAS drive onto the laptop hard drive and not synced with my phone.

*By best way, I’m not buying directional cables and hologram stickers to balance out the ions in the HiFi components.

**I appreciate that most of the albums I once cherished owning are probably on Spotify…

Ta

Not sure about apple but on android you can use a music player app that directly reads from a network drive then plays via Bluetooth. Obviously this isn’t just the phone controlling it but actually doing the playing so you can’t wander out of Bluetooth range with it but it works pretty well. I suspect there will be similar iOS music apps. The android apps I use are VLC and BubbleUpnp. Don’t know if they are cross platform with the same functionality

A lot of solutions I found didn’t support gapless playback which really annoys me. I did use an old Squeezebox with optical connection to my amp and Slimserver on the NAS but that stuff died and dated/unsupported now anyway.

My amp has network streaming but it’s not gapless.

Ended up with Plex on my NAS and an Amazon Fire box connected via HDMI to the amp and Plex app on the Fire box. Does gapless now.

Depends on your NAS though and the amp if it has HDMI. My NAS is Synology.

Another option may be to stream from a phone via Bluetooth.

Have a look into plex. Mycloud supports plex server.

Plex server can host your music library to many platforms. So you could use your iPhone to Bluetooth to your hifi.

I use Sonos as my ho.e hifi and android as my portable music players. I have the additional PlexPass which allows me to use PlexAmp player on android.

Wiim mini plugged into your amp will do it.
80 quid from Amazon. Gapless too.

Yeah – have a look at Plex. instuctions

You basically load the plex server software onto your NAS, point it at the content you’ve got saved, and it should recognize it all, index it etc.

You then install the plex client on your phone, and link it to the server.

A couple of things:
I don’t know anything about your nas. Plex should run on it, but if it’s an ancient unit, you might run into difficulties, particularly if your music files are in a wierd format (ogg vorbis anyone?), which it then tries to encode into something else, so the client can play it. More of a problem with Video files, but I thought I’d mention it.

You can set-up your plex server so it works over 4/5G when you are away from your home network. This can be a bit finicky, as it depends on your broadband provider. If you pay for a “plex pass” (which you can do by the month to try it out or “lifetime”) you get a MUCH better music player on your phone (PlexAmp, it’s awesome), which also allows you to save the music locally on your phone.

There are other ways of skinning this cat, but plex is awesome, and you’ve already got a NAS, so you’re 95% of the way there already.

Plex should run on it

Run plex on a WD MyDrive? I was sceptical but seems it is a thing: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/support/software/plex-media-server

This would seem the easiest way. Well, after streaming from Apple Music or Spotify from your Mac or phone.

Someone will be along to say ‘get a cable’ to connect your phone or max to the amp. Don’t bother unless you have golden ears or the BT turns out to be crummy for reasons of dropouts.

‘Old HiFi’ amp? Line in and optical in and no HDMI? You can pick up old Apple TVs with optical out and no doubt hack them to play your files. Seems like hard work and you then need a TV to see what you’re selecting. I’m retiring my old optical out Apple TV as it doesn’t do airplay with my newer stuff. I’ve found myself airplay-ing from iPhone or Mac direct to my amp.

If you want to use Apple Music to play the NAS content you need to change the preferences for your music storage location. Don’t bother though as if the Mac cannot see that location and you open Apple Music it invariably creates a fresh local folder. You then can end up with it thinking some files are here, others there, and trying to wrangle this is meh. I tried a similar approach when it was iTunes and I had a bunch of music on my Synology.

I’ve been through this for the last few years and ended up with a slightly upgraded NAS running Minimserver (free) software and using a Wiim mini as suggested above.

Also have a Raspberry PI running Volumio (free) and both work very well.

Plex is OTT imho and I wanted a system that is lag free and sounds great.
The Wiim is a revaltion in this respect, especially if you use the digital out into a better DAC.

Also runs Amazon Music HD and a load of others out of the box too.

I achieved this with a WiiM Mini after asking on here. It’s perfect.