Local hard drive remote access

[Miss Sissy Princess]

I can afford a Pi 4; that's what my home system uses.

I didn't mean to imply otherwise.  But the cost differential is a major obstacle for some people, and I did not want to appear insensitive to that in my reply.

I use an external Android mdp client to control it, as the moOde GUI isn't very good on a small screen, and there is absolutely no difference to moOde's responsiveness between the Pi 4 and Pi Zero when controlling it this way.

The smallest screen I regularly control mine with is my 12.9" iPad and I'm often running it from a 5K 27" display.  That's a fair bit of data to move across the network for the 600 pixel album covers as I scroll through my library.  It's worth it for the tack-sharp album covers.

Using the larger Pi (an earlier version of this portable used a Pi 3 I had lying around) is just a lot less portable, and simply requires too much lego.

Very nice, clever build.  

My moOde server lives on a shelf in my 19 inch audio rack, connected to a 500GB external USB 3.0 SSD that sits next to it.  That drives my Emotiva Stealth DC-1 DAC (on a lower rack shelf) via USB.  So portability was never a consideration.  I sync that over the network (hardwired gigabit Ethernet, of course) with the music library folder on my iMac Pro, manually triggering the process whenever I've added a batch of music or edited tags.  It's nice in that I can make massive changes and the syncing process remains relatively quick, as does the library and cover art thumbnail generation once it's done.