Music Server To Only Play FLAC Stored On Portable HDD

Ras Pi4 sounds better. Just load Volumio unless you REALLY care about artwork.
If you go piCore/Orange Squeeze you can easily customize it to local files only. I use folders and genre.

No one makes a stripped down player outside of PMP’s. You would have to transfer to micro SD cards.
That would look pretty dopey on a big rig but if it floats your boat....

Thanks for the response. I’ll look at the Raspberry Pi in due time. I have read about it earlier but didn’t give it a serious thought as I wasn’t sure about the implementation. I guess I’ll just give it a try sometime.

A music server that needs to make the music available to other streaming devices (renderers) on your network? Or a device that outputs digital or analog audio directly to a single audio system?

The latter, a device to output digital audio (FLAC, ALAC) to a dedicated DAC in a single audio system.

A Pro-ject Stream Box Ultra S2 is built on a RPi, but with power supplies optimized. I’ve got a 128 Gb flash memory stick attached & it is now a music server.

FWIW, it sounds pretty good. Definitely better than a PC (without an Etherregen or other USB decrapifier device attached)

@ryder in that case I think most devices will have at least some "bells and whistles" because it presents a better value proposition to customers.

There are many products that will let you attach a portable hard disk to the USB input, and then output digital to a downstream DAC. Some models you might look at, in addition to the various Raspberry Pi-based ones:

• Lumin U1 or U1 Mini
• Auralic ALTAIR G1 or ARIES G1
• Bryston BDP-3
• BlueSound NODE 2i
  
• Volumio Primo HI-FI
• Matrix Audio element M