[seldomseenkid]

Hi all, interested to hear from anyone who's done this.

Requirements:
- play home music library on iPhone
- iPhone anywhere, not just home network
- lossless - no transcoding
- iTunes library on a Mac, although interested in other Mac-based experience
- music browser in the app, ie. not just generic remote file access

Obviously this requires a decent internet connection at both ends and an always-on machine.

Options I know about already:
- Audio Station on Synology NAS plus DS Audio app. Not Mac-based, obviously.
- Probably Plex, possibly requiring subscription
- Probably Kodi, somehow
- There used to be an app called Stream To Me, but it wasn't lossless

 

[tomb]

I'm an Android user, so I can't help you much. However, given a choice, pursuit of file sharing across the network and simply using a music player on your phone might be the best choice.

I've used Plex for years. All of my library is available from a network file server. I can play Flac files seamlessly on my PCs and laptops just from the using the networked file system and Foobar or Music Bee (or Windows Media Player, for that matter). Plex seemed like the most straightforward way to do this over the phone. It works - and even remotely. I've actually used it while driving, for instance, but there are significant dropouts. Still, it was sort of amazing to think that I could access my home file server that way. If I stopped the car in a good spot, the dropouts even stopped. At work, where the network connection is quite fast, it's the same as listening to the radio - only it's my network file server at home.

However … people will tell you that if the files are Flac (lossless), Plex will simply play them without compression. Unfortunately, my ears say that's absolutely false. Comparing playing the Flac file with Plex vs. loading the actual Flac file on my phone and playing it with a separate media player (I use PowerAmp) is pointless. Plex is severely compressing and it's totally obvious.

 

[seldomseenkid]

Thanks for the reply. That's interesting about Plex, although I'm not all that surprised. You'd think there'd be an option to disable transcoding; they probably figure most people don't care.

Plex is great, but installing it *just* for this purpose might feel like overkill for a lot of people, and also it's a non-obvious solution. For context, unless I can find something that does this already, I'm thinking of writing an app to do it - provide remote access to an iTunes library, guarantee no transcoding (ie. no loss of sound quality), and be trivially easy to set up. We shall see.