It's a LibreELEC build just for playing FLAC files through an old amplifier and speakers or headphones. I know in this day and age there is easier ways to do this but I love this. It is an old Pentium G3460 on an old Gigabyte motherboard with 16Gb ram. I have a 512Gb SSD connected to it and that will fill up fast but for now it is great. Silent and not very power hungry. I can't hear it when it's on really and definitely not if there is music playing. There is only one fan in the case and the cpu fan.
It has an Asus Xonar Essence STX II sound card in it and the output of that goes into the Pioneer A400, which goes to an equally old pair of JBL speakers. When I got my first job many moons ago, I made sure to focus on getting a semi decent hifi system going. So the speakers, amp and turntable are all 25+ years old.
I control it with my phone. Just sit on the couch and open the Kore app and that's it. I had awful trouble trying to get the app to work before but I bought an Intel PCI-e wifi card which came today and which works perfectly by the way, and all the previous problems disappeared, stupid usb wifi dongles:)
I only have a few albums on it yet just to make sure it works but to copy music onto it I just use Dolphin on my laptop. I had to edit some files and setup an autostart script to load the correct alsa settings but it is easy enough to do.
The best thing is that it is so quick, like 10-15 seconds to boot. Unbelievable, so responsive too!
I think the case itself is too big and bulky, I'd have preferred a smaller one like the size of the amp. There doesn't seem to be any demand these days for HTPC cases. I had looked at other ones but I couldn't get any anywhere. Jonsbo do one and Fractal do an even better one, the Node 202 but nowhere to be found now. I did buy an old amp before to use with a Raspberry Pi but I hated that. I bought a screen for the front of the amp, I was going to stick it on and have touch control but i hated how slow and ugly the screen was. I think as soon as I saw there was a remote control app that idea went out the window. I could always look for an amp to gut and see about putting it in a smaller box but for now it is perfect.
This has been wrecking my head for ages now so just wanted to celebrate a little and say thanks again to the devs for making such an amazing distro.
