Ordered a pi. I have external hdd’s I can use. I could do with slightly more storage though and I noticed the pi 4 has usb 3- what would be a good external hdd to get?
WD My Passport Ultra are good
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Check HUKD, WD regularly have a very specific size with a big discount. It’ll be 12tb one week and 8tb the next, often cheaper than the next size up.
Edit: sometimes on the WD site, other times on Amazon.
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Set the pi up using picoreplayer. Really easy to set up and runs great. Much quicker than the last pi I owned. Took no time at all to scan the full library.
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Good grief. Reading all this, I really don’t understand why people complain about the complexity / inflexibility of vinyl replay. At least you don’t need a PhD in Computer Science to listen to music !
I have come to realise that in terms of SQ / hour of grief or SQ / £, CD owns it hands down.
It’s not a binary either/or, is it? Both can be easy, both can be hard.
Maybe, maybe not. An MSc. in hyperbole helps though.
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I hear so much recently that Pi this, Pi that, (OK, so it’s mainly Adam @AmDismal), is a ‘simple’ high performance, low cost solution.
Is there really a genuine ‘plug and play’, no Linux / computer knowledge needed implementation of Pi as a half decent Streamer / DAC available (as in commercial streamer or DAC simplicity) ?
Asking for a friend, like.
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You have to be able to follow some simple instructions to set it up. It’s certainly possible for a computer/Linux novice to do this, and there’s plenty of online help. But I wouldn’t get one for my dad.
Any specific reason why you want a Pi?
Plenty of plug and play solutions that aren’t a Pi.
Come to think of it, you had a Dragonfly Cobalt plugged into a laptop. Simple, high performance.
Was there something wrong with that?
I had to use the Pi imager to copy the picore player image on to the SD card, and log into my router to reserve an IP address for it, but that was about as complicated as it got. Everything else was done via web interface.
I quite liked all the Linux tinkering when I did it ~10 years ago, but I didn’t know what I was doing and essentially that’s what eventually broke it 
I bought an album from bandcamp on my mac and dragged the files across to the pi. Automatic rescan and I was listening in minutes. Exactly what I was after.
No, none at all. I have a plug and play set up.
Just idle curiosity as to why Pi’s are often suggested as the plug and play answer to all sorts of ills, when they seem to be quite distant from plug and play, is all.
Edit: and a genuine interest in how plug and play Pi’s had actually become.
Cheap and flexible.
I’ll risk a turntable analogy. The Pi setup is analogous to having to fit a cart to an otherwise turnkey solution. The alternative is limiting yourself exclusively to stuff supplied ready to go from the box. Under the circumstances, you’d fit the cart, yes?
Also worth noting that fitting the cart has a lot more scope for expensive mistakes than following a set of (usually pretty clear) instructions for kicking a Pi into life.
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Nothing is ever really plug and play. Many people won’t know how to connect the cables on a system compared to an old Technics midi system. There is a level of fuss that people are willing to accept.
If you want a Pi based system there are many online guides that provide clear instructions on how to set it up, and you can end up with a system that is functionally very flexible, provides perfect replay into a USB DAC and costs pocket money. For just a few quid you can buy an SD card fully configured, you just plug it in and, err, play.
Most of the one box streaming systems use bespoke software that is inflexible and simply not as good as the open source solutions that are available for free with the Pi; they also cost 10-100+ times the amount of a Pi, and are provably no better sonically.
The only real benefit I can think of to a non-Pi solution is that you have someone at the end of a phone to help if it goes wrong. And you don’t have to think, which of course is hard for some people.
Support forums for Pis and the like are often brilliant. I used one for a Ubiquiti router and got sent a step by step guide for nothing and that’s semi-pro kit
my auralic aries mini is about as plug and play as you can get - if you can plug something into a network, use a browser and move stuff to a network share, then that is it.
You can use BubbleUPNP to control playback.
Bit more expensive than a Pi though?
at least it works. I have been on the receiving of so many calls when a Pi goes wrong, I refuse to be involved with em.
At that price it bloody well should work 