[originalsnuffy]

Remote Control of Audio to Wired Speaker System

I just moved into a home that has a Niles multi room speaker system installed. So far I have fed it music from my portable music player and from my HTPC using analog RCA inputs to the receiver which is an Onkyo Integra.

Now where I am looking for advice is how to best control the volume and music remotely. Here is what I have at my disposal....

Apple Ipod (older) but has wifi, iphone X, ipad (fairly recent)

Amazon Echo Dot (still in the boxes but it will turn up)

HTPC running windows 7 (I do have JRiver and Jriver software on the iphone)

Synology NAS

I would prefer to feed uncompressed music when possible. I have plenty of FLAC and higher res files at my disposal.

So I have a number of sources available, and ideally would like to be able to choose folders from the HTPC or the NAS from the iphone. Controlling volume would be cool also. The music zones are primarily the family room and the outside. Those zones are already wired up and do function but I can't control tings remotely.

What suggestions would you have? (I am willing to pick up more hardware if I can keep the cost down but I suspect there are many ways to get this done with what I have right now).

Thanks!

 

[AV_Integrated]

How many zones of stereo audio do you have? How many zones of surround sound?

There are a lot of multi-room audio devices out on the market, and many now offer source selection and volume control to any number of rooms from a phone app.

Source control is often through an app as well.

For your music, you may want to try something like Plex which has an app you can run on your phone to control the music selection from the computer. There is an extensive Plex thread in these forums for you to review, but really, it takes about half an hour to install and point at your music folders, where it auto-indexes everything so you can control playback.

Be aware, for Apple devices, you will need an Airplay device which supports audio. You can get as many as you want depending on how many zones you would like to feed at the same time. I think I use one Airport Express in my home to use for streaming from my phone to my system. But, I have another dozen+ audio sources tied in already as well.

The devil is in the details though...
For example:
I have 18 stereo audio zones in my home.
I have 4 sets of wireless headphones as well.
I also have 2 surround sound areas.

Now, I had to figure out how to get audio out to everything properly. That was five, 8 channel amplifiers to power 36 speakers in the home. Three 16x8 audio switchers. A couple of surround sound receivers. Put it all together and it is good to go. But, it is careful planning and a strong baseline.