TOPIC: Best way to store & stream audio to SHD?

Assuming that optimal sound quality is the goal, what in your view is the best method of storing and then getting music wirelessly to the SHD?

Many thanks in advance.

I have my music on a PC as flac files. The PC is situated in an adjacent room so the noise of the fan doesn't intrude. The SHD is connected to the network wirelessly. As you probably know, the SHD comes with Volumio and using that you will get bit perfect streaming. I don't find the Volumio interface that inspiring so use LMS addins on top of Volumio and I then have the pick of LMS players on my laptop/phone/tablet.

Many thanks Ed.
I'm struggling to get the wireless & volumio going and it seems a few others are too.
I'm evaluating a friends SHD studio and was planning to get an SHD power, and then part with my logitech transporter.
I'm just wanting the best sounding, simplest and most stable approach.
Cheers for your input.

I too am brand new to the SHD (got mine yesterday) and I too am having wifi connection issues. Apparently a static IP may help (who knows as I haven't gotten to that yet). What I can tell you is that my Moode streamer that is on a Raspberry Pi4 (4gb version) streams music from a connected SSD hard drive to the SHD via USB flawlessly. It never drops its connection and is therefore rock solid. It is fanless and uses a flirc case that acts as a heat sink so effectively silent and sits right behind my SHD. Until I can get my SHD reliably staying connected to the wifi this is how I am going to use it. Moode sounds great by the way, even though it is counter intuitive to have another streamer in the system. Others recommend a NAS with connected hard drive. This is fine if you are wired via LAN but until wifi gets reliable this would not be a very stable way to go via wireless. It would be so annoying to not be able to call up music of the NAS at any moment due to connection issues.

Anyway, my thoughts and initial approach. The SHD sounds great by the way. I haven't even gotten to Dirac yet!

In my setup I originally streamed from my NAS over LAN connection which was fine. Then I purchased 512GB SD card, re-flashed the miniDSP version of Volumio on it and replaced the original SD card inside the SHD. After Volumio booted up, it created "Internal Storage" folder using all the available space left on the SD card. Since the Internal Storage folder is shared via SMB, I am using my computer to sync all my music (flac) files to the SHD and using the Volumio interface as a player. In my opinion the sound quality is excellent in this setup since I am not introducing any additional hardware, cables, power supplies etc. to the SHD.
Hope that helps...

Sounds great. Thank you for that.

Hi there

Sounds like a very bad idea!!! SD cards fail quite often. If you only have 500 GB of music and you have a secure backup, go ahead. I prefer lms as music server on a dedicated raspi 4 server. It allows synchronization all over the flat and is reliable. Raspian is a fully featured linux and allows automatic backups.Volumio uses a completely outdated linux distro without support for security. I wouldn't use it for anything more than hosting squeezelite. If I could, I would abandon it completely.

Greets
Chris

Of course I don't recommend SD card as your main storage for your music. I simply sync music from my server to the SD card every time I add new songs. If the SD card fails for some reason, all my files are safe on my server.

Hi Tomas,

I simply wouldn't use SD cards since they are too expensive and prone to fail. Use anything else but no cards!! For music, speed of a physical storage is not important so any harddisk is good enough and cheaper. You get 4 Tb of disks space below 100€, no ssd is necessary.

Greets
Christian

I hardwire (ethernet). Dropouts and connection issues resolved.

I already had an Raspberry Pi 4 - 4GB with 7“ LCD running piCoreplayer with LMS Server and squeezelite player on it. It is connected via USB to an WD Element Desktop, 8 TB HDD. Setup is possible without any Linux knowledge. WhenI got my SHD I made squeezelite running on it, (thanks to chrissy) connected it to the LMS server and my active Speakers.
With the picoreplayer still running and synchronized to the squeezelite player on SHD, it shows the covers on the LCD.