Alternative to ipad

[admin_exported]

My friend was round for dinner last night and he brought his works iPad with him for me to have a play with. Ver good it was too but notsure its worth the money. But......

What I would like to do is have a similar device that I can use as a remote to listen to the music I have stored on my external hard drive and use to control spotify. All wirelessly of course.

I would like the device to be wall mountable so that it is a bit like one of those touch screen jukeboxs you have in pubs. This isnt imperative as Im sure there will be some way around a device that doesnt have its own mount. I wouldnt like the mount to be permanent either incase I want to be lazy and lie on the couch while listening.

I only need one zone of music but I suppose it wouldnt hurt if it was expandable.

Oh and I would want it to hook up to my existing kit, so no need for any built in amps etc.

Any recommendations will be greatly received. I have a budget of 'as cheap as possible'.

 

[professorhat]

How do you currently listen to music on the external hard drive?

 

[Anonymous]

I connect the external hdd to my laptop via USB. I have a USB soundcard which takes sound from the laptop to amp. Im happy with this tbh but would prefer a sleeker option.

I know very little about wireless and networks so can really do with a nudge in the right direction. There seems to be so many options.

 

[professorhat]

Mmm, I had a feeling it must be something like this, which means that, unless you're using iTunes, an iPad wouldn't have been able to control your music, and even then, the PC would need to be switched on. And you wouldn't get remote Spotify.

What you need first is a way of playing music outside of the PC. The only thing I can think of is Sonos (which could also stream Spotify), but then, if you wanted to control remotely, you're looking at getting the Sonos Controller (£279), or an iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad + the free app installed there.

 

[Anonymous]

Ill be getting an iphone in april so Ill look into it Sonos and how it works. Probably going to be quite expensive from what I can see.

Is there a NAS device which has a good remote that does spotifyy?

 

[professorhat]

Well, a NAS is essentially just a hard drive (or lots of hard drives combined together) which sit on the network - it stands for Network Attached Storage. So although you can store music files on one (or any other types of files you choose to), it's not really designed as something to play music from. For something to have a remote, what you need is a media player which also has a load of storage attached. I'm not really that knowledable on these - the old Apple TV had a remote which would be compatible with your new iPhone when you get it, but it wouldn't give you Spotify. It's been discontinued, but you can still pick them up new (Amazon still have them listed), but it only has a 160 GB disk, so depends how much music you own and again, it is quite dependent on you using iTunes.

 

[audioaffair]

I'm still toying with the idea of buying one of these - showing photos to friends easily without lugging a laptop across the room is useful and just as essentially a massive touchscreen remote control for a multi room system.