Spent a good part of today (on and off) trying to figure music streaming devices.
Right now, I have a Sonos Play 1 and a Sonos Connect (The thing which links to your hifi).
It’s the old ones from 10 years ago - So, only use the S1 controller.
I can’t play stuff from a phone/bluetooth but thats not the end of the world.
I use it for the radio and I play my MP3s off of my NAS drive.
It works okay. Kinda. But I might be over it.
It sometimes just doesn’t like the Synology NAS and I have to add songs 2-3 times for it to get the NAS to wake up…and there are issues with my Netgear Nighthawk router because Sonos just won’t natively support it (for some reason).
These are both manageable but would be nicer to lose.
I think the issue I am having though, is that Sonos has a 65k song limit and my music collection is just under 85k.
Without editing, it won’t index my music. And I don’t want to edit.
I’ll get a 30% discount if I upgrade my Sonos kit with them - but I think the router issue will remain and so will the 65k library limit.
Does anyone here use Amazon Alexa/Dot things or Google Nest?
Any good? Are there options to connect to an existing stereo? Is there a library limit to song number? Can I create playlists?
Don’t have a smart device enabled, but what I used to do was put a 3.5mm cable going from the speakers to a small plug-in Bluetooth audio receiver and connect everything to speakers that way - phone, laptop, etc. Swapped that for a decent 5.1 soundbar which connects to everything via BT, HDMI, optical, etc., but again, probably too simplistic for what you’re asking about.
Yeah, it needs the network capability and the playlist ability. Your setup wouldn’t tick a lot of boxes…
Sonos seems to be perfect aside from the upper limit on music.
There might be a way to use my NAS as a DNLA server so I’m not reliant on the Sonos structure (and therefore song limit) but I have a feeling that will do away with the playlist side of things…
I’m wondering whether you can leave the Sonos in situ, but use the NAS as the music library/streamer instead. So you would enqueue on the NAS and the Sonos would just play it. There are some music library apps for Synology you can download iirc (Plex/Kodi?), maybe that’s an avenue to try @Londonskater
On my Sonos, I have it connected via line-in from my Android TV. It then broadcasts the line-in to other rooms. So everything is controlled by what the android TV outputs.
You could make a raspberry Pi little controller or something with touchscreen just for music. Line out to Sonos, wallop.,
Did the same when I bought a new PC a year ago from a German supplier. Thought I’d ordered a slimline English keyboard with laptop style keys, only to receive some chunky, bucktoothed and inbred piece of shit with a German layout, which was soon upgraded.
Just got a shiny new MBP (13 inch, all the 14s are sold out booo) with an M1 chip and I’m having a nightmare configuring an environment with it. Basic stuff is fine (Go, Python etc) but I can barely seem to install anything in Docker, and some tools I use every day don’t even support arm64 yet. Grr
Ok moving on from my stupid plan to ship my desktop pc overseas, thinking of buying a second hand laptop to take with me and selling it again upon return. Any suggestions as to what to look for? Needs to be able to handle decent use of premiere / after effects, and have a good chance of being bought for a similar price. Plenty of “gaming laptop” options on ebay but I don’t want to get stuck with something I can’t offload so not sure if they’re reasonable prices.
You could order something brand new (online) to be delivered to wherever you are staying. With online purchasing law (if memory serves) you have 2 weeks to return it if you change your mind. Then you get a banging computer for 2 weeks to knock out whatever you need and send it back legally. Then do it again (with overlap) if you need more time.
As someone who has worked in web mail order you would be a fucking nightmare customer, so please don’t do it to a small company. Maybe Amazon or Dell or something it would be ok. But it must be ordered ONLINE. Picking up an order in person also counts, but as long as you placed the order online and you are in the EU it should be fine.
I’ve found an old hard drive and want to see what’s on it. I don’t have a tower to plug it into, just a laptop. Is it possible to buy the right cables and connect it to the laptop and browse it as an external hard drive and see what’s on there?
Serial ATA connection, right? SATA.
Should be possible with an SATA to USB cable but you got to power it, too. Not 100% on that side.
Maybe the USB will power it, too.
Get one of these. I’ve got one works a treat. You’ll need a standard DC power cord to power a SATA drive which this doesn’t come with, you’ve prob got one lying around though
