About 5 years ago, I had a Logitech Squeezebox. I sold it when Logitech quit making them because I thought there was a good chance it would stop working. After that I used Airplay to an AppleTV I was borrowing, but then my hard drive failed, I replaced it with an SSD, and my music folder was too big to fit, so it got moved to a NAS. Since then I've used DLNA to some cheap Amazon box (poor wifi, poor remote app on iPad) and Plex with a Roku 4 as the player. Plex is somewhat better, but seems to work better for movies. My main complaint is that I have to start the Plex app for it to work, which requires turning on the TV. I'd prefer the music be separate from the TV. I also tried to use a Raspberry Pi and various music related distros (Volumio and Roon) but I never could get anything to work reliably.
What are you guys using for this? Any suggestions for something that doesn't cost $1000 plus?
Stick to the RasPi, use a standard distro and try different software, you don't need more hardware. Maybe VLC or Kodi?
So you think that can be made to work? I'm never sure that "working" and "working reliably" are the same thing.
I did pay for the premium version of Max2Play with the mistaken idea that it would allow me to load the drivers for the v1 Wolfson DAC card, but that didn't work. But it does have the Squeezebox software, maybe I will try that again.
The non-grm option is Sonos. They sound good, work flawlessly, super easy to set up and use, but they're not cheap ($200 for the smallest speaker). The nice thing is that you can get a little bit now, and keep adding more and more speakers as time/need/funds require.
After a few hours of googling, I decided to stick with what I have going currently. I don't have the budget for Sonos (and I already have speakers that I like), and the using the Chromecast with music on a NAS is through DLNA, and I already have some hardware that will do that if I want.
Anyway, thanks guys!
