An aquantance of mine has a CD collection and wants to rip it. They don’t want to stream it over a server but rather store it, say, on a hard drive connected directly to their speakers/receiver.
While they **don’t want to stream ** it wirelessly to/from their phone, they do want to control selection/playback.
Kind of like a remote controlled jukebox or, well, a really big CD player.
I am thinking there’s probably some raspberry pi project to play on-device music library that has a remote control library plug-in over LAN. I’d also like there to be a backup option, like a Pi GUI so they could see their library on the TV.
I’m envisioning an interface similar to the retro game players or kodi.
Does this exist?
As someone else has said, whether they’re playing from the device or not it’s a server.
With that said, I’m a fan of Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite (the player part).
Install both on a pi or something, add a HDD (I bought a usb plug and power cable for £15 on Amazon) and then rip and transfer it to the HDD.
Then you can play it through any old speakers you connect. If you use a pi you can get a hat for it that will make audio quality good.
There’s even an app for it called Squeezer on F-droid which allows control from your phone.
It’s old but it works, use the Material Theme to make it look nice.
Bonus is that you can install Squeezelite on a bunch more Pis and dot them around the house and play the same library on those at a later date
To add to this, there’s even the capacity to add usb dacs if the underlying distribution supports it. Picoreplayer was my introduction to these tools and I’m pretty sure it’s my final destination. Can’t recommend it enough if they have the time and curiosity to get it set up.
I would also add that if the person OP is asking on behalf of is not so inclined to get into the technical parts and okay with possibly throwing money at the project, volumio is there. I tried this first and appreciated it for what it was, but I wanted features behind the pay wall which are readily available for free with pCP.