Ever since I ripped my entire CD collection I've been listening to music on the hifi through a PC put together with bits from my old and since replaced HTPC on foobar. This works just fine and the Silverstone LC11m looks right at home in the hifi rack, however the mouse and keyboard have to go, hopefully even the monitor too. The general idea is to get rid of the big monitor and pick up something along the lines of a 7" screen which could live in the hifi rack atop the pc and navigate a snazzy front end via the remote that came with the case. I've encountered a few problems with this though... - Most of the time I'm squinting to see text on even on a 19" screen from the chair - navigating ~1300 albums via remote is painful - some of them freak out when trying to load 4-500GB music over the network (and that's over gigabit, I was hoping to use wireless) A squeezebox manages to be easily navigable despite having a 320x32 VFD display, so one would think that there should be no problem with a low res 7" screen. Its not even difficult to navigate through my music on my AV receiver in the lounge, with its tiny 2 line display. The specs on the PC aren't necessarily hefty, but they shouldn't need to be really. P-M underclocked to 1.2GHz, (for the sake of a 100% passive box) 1GB ram, 40GB lappy drive and onboard i855 graphics, so Vista is pretty much out of the question but that's about it. Any useful suggestions would be appreciated and rewarded with punch and pie Anyone suggesting a Squeezebox or Sonos will have punch and pie privileges permanently revoked. I'm not spending £250/400 when what I've got here has no good reason to do the job just as well, if not better. So there.
I guess the main thing you need will be software that only retrieves data when it opens up or plays a file and keeps a local copy of the library information. Also make sure you disable auto folder monitoring in whatever you end up with as that always hits bandwidth hard. I'm in need of a similar program for when setup and use my htpc properly.
I hope this comes to something, as i have been looking for this for sometime. I have just been using winamp playlist nav.
Shame you're not using iTunes, a Touch + the Remote app would have been perfect. I bet there's some sort of remote program that you could use with a cheap PDA. What are you using to play the music?
iTunes + FLAC = nope Ideally I want the front end to play the music, something like mediportal but not. I've got a HTC Kaiser that would theoretically be able to run some sort of remote access to the pc, but it seems like it would be easier just doing what I do now. I'm going to play with foobar a little bit. I've forgotten how customisable it is, though the falling point may be the navigation by remote.
have you tried meedios (formerly meedio, formerly myhtpc) Get the 'meedio ultimate' and work from there it's extremely customizable, and works through plugins, so if you want it to be used only for music browsing and playback, can disable any other unused plugins. There's a bit of learning to be done as to how to customize the media library/browsing/playback, but i'm sure that wouldn't be too much prob as you guys are all techies... Hope this is something like what you're after... let me know if you need to know anything specificc and i'll try help, still experimenting myself...
I would think that a carputer frontend would be good as they are all made for small screens. Friend of mine has one running ontop elisa media center. Can ask him tomorrow what ist called
