Front end for a kitchen stereo
February 23, 2016 3:21 PM   Subscribe

My lovely friends have a boom box in the kitchen. They use it a lot and it is getting old and battered. They also have a powered 2.1 speaker set. What's a good, inexpensive, WiFi-connected tablet or the like with which they can stream audio to the speaker set?

The solution should be always on (power is not a problem) but a full-on computer would be too space-intensive. It should be radio-friendly (think tunein radio or Logitech Media Server - other solutions welcome), able to stream from a local NAS, and easy for kids and grown-ups to operate. Ideally a screen full of widgets that direct to pre-selected radio stations, NAS-available playlists and "More options... " could be created for one- or two-touch music: one touch for the source, another for volume. My Android tablet does a lot of this, yet volume control is not intuitive since it is hardware buttons and not a slider. Easily-cleaned would be nice since it's in a kitchen.

Thanks!
posted by jet_silver to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Do they have smartphones? Chromecast Audio would fit the bill perfectly if they have something to control it with already. It works with TuneIn and you can get VideoStream for NAS streaming. ANd it takes up basically zero space.
posted by GuyZero at 3:34 PM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'd personally go with something like a Rocki and control it with any phone or tablet. If they really need a screen, the Amazon Fire $50 tablets are really amazingly good for the price, and they can use the google app store with a little work. I bought two when they were $30 on Black Friday and meant to take off the ads, but they're just on the sleep screen, so who cares. The display is not HD, but for a media controller it should be fine.
posted by Huck500 at 3:37 PM on February 23, 2016


Best answer: We have Chromecast Audio (you would need a power source for both the Chromecast and the speakers, plus an audio-in jack), and you can stream audio from any Android device (I think iOS has Chromecast too).

We also have a little Sony bluetooth speaker that works with any bluetooth-enabled device, such as a smartphone or a tablet.

I actually kind of prefer the Sony bluetooth speaker.
posted by My Dad at 3:47 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Things may have changed since I last looked into this stuff (it's been a couple of years), but my impression is that the overlap between "able to stream from a local NAS" and "slick/easy to operate" is small to non-existent (especially when you add in "inexpensive" as a filter). The only people who have local fileservers and want to stream media from them are geeks (I include myself in this group, and I realize I'm overgeneralizing somewhat). And A/V products for geeks seem to be incomprehensible to non-geeks, or even to geeks who aren't A/V geeks. I eventually gave up on streaming from my NAS for the devices that my whole family uses (I still do it for some stuff myself). I use AppleTVs and Airport Expresses, and people just Airplay from their phones, iPads, or computers.
posted by primethyme at 4:10 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: You can add a volume widget to the Android home screen by adding a third party app.

If everyone in the family has a phone, a Bluetooth adaptor might be the best option, as it would be tailored to each user's taste.

The Amazon Echo is likely more than you want to spend, but mine has been really popular in the kitchen because of the voice control. I don't know about Siri about I know the android voice control for music is generally pretty awful. Being able to be hands deep in a cooking project and control music, set timers, and look up stuff is nice.
posted by Candleman at 4:26 PM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Things may have changed since I last looked into this stuff (it's been a couple of years), but my impression is that the overlap between "able to stream from a local NAS" and "slick/easy to operate" is small to non-existent (especially when you add in "inexpensive" as a filter).
Surprisingly and fortunately this has changed! I recently ran into the same problem, wanting to play music from our file server/NAS in the office, on the nice speakers in our living room. I did some digging and found this nice piece of software called volumio, which turns a Raspberry Pi 2 or other small computer into a lightweight jukebox thing. If you want the jukebox to be wireless, you'll need a little usb wifi dongle, but no big deal. We tried it first with an original Raspberry Pi, but that was a bit too slow and crashed. The Pi 2 has been basically fine. I think I needed to power-cycle it once when our network had some issues.

Volumio exposes a nice web interface to any device on our local network, and it's mobile friendly. You can also use any mpd client you want if you want a more configurable interface, but the provided web client is totally fine for me. You can also stream music to it by Airplay from Apple devices (or other things that support that protocol, if there are any...). It's worked quite well for our house.
posted by dust_hypothesis at 4:46 PM on February 23, 2016


I would eliminate the speaker set entirely and set up a Grace Radio. This is a single unit that contains everything. No concern about a source streaming to a speaker, a dongle, etc.
posted by megatherium at 6:08 PM on February 23, 2016


Response by poster: Thanks to the hive mind. I had never heard of the Chromecast Audio. Tonight I ordered one for them, since they all have smartphones and will use the hell out of that. Nothing stops them from playing CDs on the boombox should that be their wish, yet they have a lot of NAS and can reach those with the Chromecast.

Brilliant!
posted by jet_silver at 9:30 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


If they already have a NAS, I'd very strongly suggest putting one of the media server systems on it. These things stream music from the NAS to the Chromecast device, and allow the use of the phones as a remote control. The nice bit is your phone isn't streaming the music. After you do the setup, you can use the phone/tablet for something else, such as make a phone call, without messing with the playback. Of course, you can still control the music stream from the phone whenever you want to, but the phone doesn't have to even be on once the music starts.

We use Plex with Android (and Windows devices). Once set-up, it is brainlessly easy to use with the Chromecast devices. It does come in iOS and Mac flavours too. Kodi (nee XBMC) gets a lot of love on the web too.
posted by bonehead at 10:02 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm in between permanent systems at the moment, but I've found an old smartphone (a Galaxy 2) with no sim in it to be a good companion to bluetooth speakers as a Spotify/streaming radio source. Ir was effectively free - retrieved from the clutter archive - and it doesn't do anything else. If I knew of a decent Android media streamer that could handle large NAS collections, it'd probably be good enough, but nothing's really worked for me so far.

Volumio looks interesting. Good thread.
posted by Devonian at 3:22 AM on February 24, 2016


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