I'm considering my options for music playing around the house. I have much of my music digitised now and available from a file server that's on all the time. What I need is some simple 'clients' that can access the file server and play the music.
So, a Pi can do the 'mechanics' as it were, access the files and play them, *BUT* (and it's a big but) what do you do for a user interface?
I have getting on for ten thousand items arranged in a classified hierarchy, when deciding on what to play I tend to navigate down the hierarchy to the album I want, often I'm not looking for a particular name, rather I want to be prompted by what Isee in a particular genre.
So how can one do this with a Pi, or is some other sort of approach going to work better? It needs a display of some sort and a means of navigating, a remote (as in a TV type remote) would be nice, can one get them to interface to a Pi easily?
... and I'm pretty much against a mobile phone interface, it's too small for my (gently) fading eyesight and I don't get on well with on screen keyboards. I've actually just changed back from a smartphone to a feature phone with real buttons for this very reason.