What do you all think of my idea for a hi-fi spotify and digital file playing pc?

[Guest]

Hi everyone;

 

I've been looking at reviews of new cd players even though I have a NAD cd player that I love the sound of, basically I really love the idea of plugging in a hardrive filled with good quality files into one of those types of players.

 

But than it suddenly dawned on me that what I want is not a new cd player but in fact some type of network streamer and digital file player for my hifi.

 

I had the idea of getting a refurbished silent thin client desktop like a dell optiplex fx100 and marrying it with a 1TB ssd (silent, holds lots of files, will last longer than a hard drive) and a dac like a schitt modi or audio quest dragonfly. For software I have a spotify subscription that I would like to use on my hi-fi and using it on this pc with my phone should be simple and require no setup, the hard part is finding a media player that sounds good, will read mp3s, flacs and wavs along with any other audio file type and which I can use with my phone as this pc probably won't be hooked up to a screen at all after the initial setup.

 

I'd also prefer to use a linux distribution as it would be free and require less system resources than windows and will also not do a update whether you want it too or not and will be happy running for ages.

 

I'm pretty new too network streamers and things of the like, ideally my budget is under $400 and I'm happy to tinker and diy and build something rather than buy a out of the box solution running the companies software that you will have to put up with if you don't like or it doesn't work how you'd like.

[PCOWandre]

I like the Lenovo "Tiny" series for this job. Lots of them on fleabay for not much cash. I can't speak for a solution for Spotify, but mpd does an excellent job of reliably playing music while getting the hell out of the way. 

[Jackybrown]

How about Daphile? Linux, headless, spotify, mp3, flac, wav, seems checking all the boxes.
https://www.daphile.com/

[krebetman]

11 hours ago, Jackybrown said:

How about Daphile? Linux, headless, spotify, mp3, flac, wav, seems checking all the boxes.
https://www.daphile.com/

 

+1 for Daphile - still my digital playback platform after all these years.

[Snoopy8]

Suggest looking at

https://www.snakeoil-os.net/

And use Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite player with Spotify plugin.

 

SnakeOil is an audio optimised Linux system the delivers  excellent sound quality.

[Dan Gravell]

There are loads of examples of software or full OSes for this. In addition to the above...

 

- Volumio

- VortexBox

- Emby

- Plex

- Subsonic

- and lots more