Moode and Pi Zero W

[Leviathan]

I run a Pi Zero W with an I2S hat amp/dac quite happily.  It has no bother with FLAC locally or over wifi.  I have no experience of using USB on it though.
I find as long as you are not too ambitious with resampling, EQ and so on then a Zero is fine.

Thanks.
where do you store the FLAC files?

Mostly on a NAS and mounted to moOde, but I have some on the SD card.  I can't tell any difference between the two locations in terms of playback performance.

Thanks. 
and sorry to ask a really basic question, but is it fairly simple to store music on the micro sd or does the card need partitioning so that the Pi/op sys sees it as 2 drives?

[the_bertrum]

I run a Pi Zero W with an I2S hat amp/dac quite happily.  It has no bother with FLAC locally or over wifi.  I have no experience of using USB on it though.
I find as long as you are not too ambitious with resampling, EQ and so on then a Zero is fine.

Thanks.
where do you store the FLAC files?

Mostly on a NAS and mounted to moOde, but I have some on the SD card.  I can't tell any difference between the two locations in terms of playback performance.

Thanks. 
and sorry to ask a really basic question, but is it fairly simple to store music on the micro sd or does the card need partitioning so that the Pi/op sys sees it as 2 drives?

moOde makes it really simple.  A pre-defined share called "SDCARD" is part of the basic installation.  It is even available over SMB so you can copy files directly to it over the network.

[Leviathan]

I run a Pi Zero W with an I2S hat amp/dac quite happily.  It has no bother with FLAC locally or over wifi.  I have no experience of using USB on it though.
I find as long as you are not too ambitious with resampling, EQ and so on then a Zero is fine.

Thanks.
where do you store the FLAC files?

Mostly on a NAS and mounted to moOde, but I have some on the SD card.  I can't tell any difference between the two locations in terms of playback performance.

Thanks. 
and sorry to ask a really basic question, but is it fairly simple to store music on the micro sd or does the card need partitioning so that the Pi/op sys sees it as 2 drives?

moOde makes it really simple.  A pre-defined share called "SDCARD" is part of the basic installation.  It is even available over SMB so you can copy files directly to it over the network.

Thanks. That’s really helpful.
think what I’ll do is to remove my sd card from the Pi4 and then have a look at the card in windows explorer. I’ll then try copying a few FLAC files, put the card back in the Pi and update the library.
If I can get this sorted before ordering a new Pi and setting it up for the family member, then that would be great.
Thanks again.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Leviathan

It appears the Zero W is a good choice for your application.

Regarding music stored on the uSD card, it takes a long time to load up a bunch of  FLAC-encoded albums via SMB over WiFi (don't ask me how I know ).

If I'm going to do a lot of transfers I usually plug the card into my Linux laptop using the SD port or a USB/SD-adapter. The "SDCARD directory" can be found at /mnt/SDCARD on the second partition on the uSD card. The partition is labelled "rootfs" and it contains an ext4 filesystem. 

Easy to copy/edit with Linux as root user (and with MacOS, I assume) but not as easy with MS/Windows.

The fly in the ointment is that a fresh install of moOde will overwrite whatever music has been stored on the card.

Regards,
Kent