[ralph222]

Dear Community
I am seeking advice and maybe practical tips, as i am starting to use Kodi - mainly for music.

What I whant to do (and use Kodi for) is to sit on my sofa and browse through my media, mainly music, and maybe play internet radio. I do NOT have a TV or a computer screen in my livingroom permanently. My music files are on a NAS. So, I was considering running Kodi on a tablet and stream the music with bluetooth to the Hifi system. An alternative option would be to instal Kodi on a Rasberry Pi (without a screen) and run it via Web interface. I need to add, I am not a very skillable regarding computers...so everything takes it time. 

Before purchasing some required hardware (i.e. bluetoothadapter for the hifi or rasberry pi) I was doing some testruns. I installed Kodi on a 7' Fire. I was able to add the network source from the NAS. I paired small bluetooth speakers. If I am playing music (either from my NAS or from an internet radio station) in Kodi, the stream stalls very often....If I am playing music from the net using youtube (outside Kodi) oder VLC (for my NAS files) it does not cause any problems.
I repeated the test with an 8' Asus Zenpad. Same result - actually worse, Kodi often does not even respond any more.

Is this unstable behaviour something that can be handled by some advanced settings in Kodi, or is Kodi just not the right software for my purpose? I also simulated the second option i am considering: (local comuter attached via wires to hifi and Lan) with remote access to Kodi via web interface on an tablet. Until now, not very encouraging. Using the Kore remote does not what i want, as I do not have a screen in the living room. I tried Chorus and Hax and access the webinterface from the tablet, but the main problem is, that I cannot control the volume. In Hax I didn't find any volume control and in Chorus it is with the touch display eiter on or off...mhhh.

Any hint's would be appreciated...
Thanks
Ralph

[DaveBlake]

I use Kodi for listening to all my music, which is on A NAS drive,  and always listen with TV off, so I pretty much do what you want to do.

My suggestion would be to buy a RPi in a Flirc case (for cooling), and install LibreElec (Kodi with a minimal OS) on it. It could be easiest to have a screen, keyboard and mouse connected while installing and setting things up.  Then after that control Kodi using either a remote app such as Kore or Yatse on an Android tablet (or old phone) or the Apple equivalent if you are into that, or via the web interface Chorus. Yatse gives the most music library browsing and filtering flexibility, but I had a play with all of them to see which suited me.

No idea about Fire stick issues, Kodi runs on many platforms, some (because of OS limitations) are more stable than others. But I notice that while users can have driver issues trying to get Kodi running on old Windows devices they had laying around, or other battles on the many flavours of Android, with LibreElec on RPi it is easy. So don't be put off by your test runs, get a RPi and enjoy

Of course good sound quality will still depend on the rest of your hifi system. I have an AR DAC (into bespoke amp and Magneplanar speakers), Kodi  supplies gapless playback.

[ralph222]

thanks for the useful input! That would put me into my option 2, having a local computer somewhere...I'll try Yatse and maybe some webinterfaces...
Ideally, i would still like to run Kodi on a tablet. Data comes in via Wifi and sound goes out via Bluetooth. I just don't understand why that works for Youtube and VLC but not in a stable manner for Kodi....
I'll guess I need to dig deeper.

[whitebelly]

Ideally, i would still like to run Kodi on a tablet. Data comes in via Wifi and sound goes out via Bluetooth. I just don't understand why that works for Youtube and VLC but not in a stable manner for Kodi....
 

 Best to run KODI on the device that is connected to your video/sound system. That is where it's meant to be. KODI on tablet is for watching on tablet. Bluetooth for music listening is not generally the best choice for good sound quality.

KODI music playback is nice because it has gapless and good library features. Another option would be PLEX and Chromecast Audio, which is a great remote music setup but with the painful flaw of not playing gapless (unless you use certain apps such as Hifi-Cast).

[DaveBlake]

Have a happy life: use the tablet just for the remote control, put Kodi on a Pi wired to your network (fast NAS access) and to your hifi system (quality sound).

[ralph222]

Thanks again for all the useful replies.
I will consider really now the RPi wired to the lan and audiosystem.
As I do not even have a computer screen at home (only a projector for rare viewing) , I might want to use the 7' touchdisplay from Rasberry in addition to remote access. I fear that rules out LibreElec as OS (apparently LE is not supporting the screen + HDMI output at different resolution)....

[MikeKL]

Another thought/idea...Install kore remote app on your Asus Zenpad (or possibly as well on your mobile if it uses android or ios as operating system) to remotely control Libreelec (Kodi) installed and running on an rpi
(Rather than running kodi on tablet during audio playback, freeing your tablet for more general use in addition to remotely controlling what is being played from NAS and addons via kodi running on an rpi)

I am not personaly aware of quaility of audio perfomance from rpis audio out jack compared to audio out via HDMI  (I use HDMI connections to pass Audio to Home Theater Reciver and Video to Flatscreen TV etc)

[lenx2]

I also tried using Kodi in this way with an RPi. as I was already using it for my HTPC.
To be honest I switched away from Kodi to use Rune Audio instead.  This is  designed as a headless media server to be controlled with your tablet or phone so for me was ideal. 
In terms of sound quality most people who use RPi for music will purchase a PiHat DAC board e.g. i bought the PiDac+ for about £20.  These have L+R audio jacks for output.

Rune Audio is basically MPD with a nice skin over the top, the focus is on sound quality.  It's a free download.  For just playing music I decided this was better as you don't need the extra Kodi features when used for this.   Setup was easy as support for most of the popular dac boards is built in.

[docwra]

I actually wrote a complete guide on this already



https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=317811

[htpcero]

Similar to other recommendations: for a headless music-only Kodi,  raspberry pi is just great. I use a raspberry pi 3 with a HiFiberry Digi Pro card. Connected optically to Kef LS50W speakers.  The sound quality is unbelievably good. The media (flacs in CD and HD audio quality) is stored in an NFS share in my home network. As others said it is better to use the wired eth port instead of wireless adapters. In my case I connect the wired eth port to a good wireless bridge. This setup can stream 192khz/24bit flacs/albums from the nfs share with no issues. I use OSMC as a distro. It's a bit more involved than openelec but you get a mostly full debian OS to run other things besides Kodi, e.g. home automation stuff.

To manage it (browse the library) I use an android app from my phone, or kodi's excellent web interface (chorus2) from a pc/laptop, when connected to the home network (I.e. not on work vpn).

[WildPhydeaux]

With Kodi on a device in your equipment stand, direct connected to your sound system you have a much better sonic experience than a Bluetooth connection to wireless speakers, assuming you're not feeding it low quality lossy music files.

If your music is stored on a NAS, you could install a UPNP server on it such as MinimServer or similar (your NAS may already have an acceptable UPNP app as part of its core options).

Enable UPNP on Kodi and install a UPNP client (control point) such as BubbleUpNP on you tablet. Set Kodi to be the end point and Robert is your dad's brother...

Yeah, this takes a bit of configuring but it's not complex once you wrap your brain around it. And BubbleUpN is a pretty sweet and configurable interface on a tablet. But there are lots of alternatives to choose from also and the majority are free or low dollar Play store purchases.

But if you just want to queue up some music to play, using Kore works fine. You don't need to bother with its "remote control" screen as you can manage playback, queuing etc from the music library page. Yatse gives a few more options but neither are as flexible and focused as a UPNP client for music like BubbleUpN.

Cheers,
RLW