[NonStopGuru]

Hi all,
I am trying to set up a Raspberry Pi 2 as "headless" player for a large collection of music (music only, about 4500 albums) stored on a Windows server. The Pi has an IQAudio Dac+. I have set up Raspbian, support for the DAC+ and Kodi. Using normal keyboard, mouse and HDMI attached monitor everything works using the CIFS mounted share.
Now for the problems: I need to remote control the solution because the final installation (office environment) will likely not have a directly connected keyboard, mouse or monitor.
Here is what I tried:
- iPhone remote controls. The "Official Kodi Remote Control App" works - but speed is unacceptable. On a local WLAN opening the track list of an album takes more than 60 seconds using the file browser. Opening a subdirectory typically takes several minutes. This is not acceptable. The "Now playing" display changes every 3 seconds from "Playing nothing" to the correct title and back. Sybu is even slower. Functionality might be sufficient for my purpose, but speed is no fun.
- Web interface. Functionality of the standard Web interface is not usable for me. It simply shows all 4500 albums on one big page without any hierarchy. It takes minutes to load - this is not usable.
- XRDP. This does not work with Kodi. I can control the Pi from this (and even start Kodi) but the Kodi screen will only show up on the HDMI connected monitor. This might even be acceptable (in the worst case I could afford another monitor just for Kodi), but the RDP keyboard and mouse do not control Kodi.
- Synergy. I could not get that to work with Kodi. I started the Synergy client in the same session where I started Kodi, but although Synergy switches over, the remote keyboard and mouse do not control Kodi.
Now I am slowly running out of ideas. I have also tried Clementine as an alternative. I can at least control this through XRDP, but this has other shortcomings.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Kind regards
Werner

[whitebelly]

Have you tried the Chorus web interface?

I know some android remote apps have the option to load the thumbnails locally so the load time is reduce significantly after initial use.

Another route to take may be to set up a UPNP server on the windows server, then use whatever interface you like (many apps out there) to push the music to the Pi.

Might OpenELEC work better?

If you don't find a solution, maybe try Volumio, which is tailored for headless music.

[Milhouse]

- iPhone remote controls. The "Official Kodi Remote Control App" works - but speed is unacceptable. On a local WLAN opening the track list of an album takes more than 60 seconds using the file browser. Opening a subdirectory typically takes several minutes. This is not acceptable. The "Now playing" display changes every 3 seconds from "Playing nothing" to the correct title and back. Sybu is even slower. Functionality might be sufficient for my purpose, but speed is no fun.

You might want to post your concerns in the iOS app support forum.

You mention you are using the "file browser" (I'm not familiar with the iOS remote app, so this could just be terminology) but have you scraped your music to create your Music media library? I'd expect opening an album listing in the Music library to be very fast. But if you are browsing the file system in the app then maybe the app is doing something far less efficient (although to be honest, assuming you have your files organised in the traditional artist/album structure, the JSON file navigation call used to obtain the file listing for an album should be sub-second, even on a Pi).

So I'd recommend talking to the iOS app developers - either they're doing something crazy inefficient (like walking the entire file system), or maybe it's a configuration issue with your system. If you haven't yet scraped your music, then you should get a much better user experience by creating a Music library and accessing that via the app.