Network media player that doesn't require DLNA (or UPnP).

Which NAS?

Correct.

Incorrect.

Hide the zoneplayer away, it doesn't need to be visible.

I'm not sure of the relevance of this comment?

Sorry I didn't realize that all comments in this forum had to be entirely relevant. Please excuse my waffling

I'm just bemuzed as to why hi-fi companies don't just use standard protocol to access files and then just display the metadata as they please. Rather than join ridiculous alliances such as DLNA and have to live by some standard, pay for licensing (that'll inevitably be passed onto the consumer) all for something that increases the load on home networks and rarely works out of the box anyway.

You mean like Sonos does? Just pulls the files from a standard CIFS-compliant network share, rather than have the device push the audio to it. That's exactly the reason why I went for Sonos to be honest, no server-side software, no reliance on a NAS to support any particular flavour or protocol, beyond that which any (proper) NAS will have anyway.

Go on, buy Sonos, you know you want to.

Maybe because there is no "standard protocol", at least not that I know of. What other solution are you thinking of? All alternatives I can think of have severe limitations:
- SMB/CIFS? It's Windows-only, underdocumented and requires you to manually configure your sharing. Moreover, CIFS on Home Basic variants is incompatible with CIFS on Home Premium/Business flavours
- NFS? Horrid to setup, unsupported by Windows
- AFS? Equally unsupported by Windows
- HTTP? Good luck setting up your own webserver

Besides, would you really want each of your media players to build their own media database? What if you have a network player in each of your bedrooms, do you want each of them to scan the entire network for files? How often should they scan? Every day? Every hour? How much internal storage would each player need to maintain all metadata (+ searchable indexes) for even a few thousand files?

DLNA itself is royalty-free, although the certification probably isn't. But that's not likely to be a problem, as the most-used DLNA server only got certified two months ago (TwonkyMedia server 6 -- all previous versions were not certified). And DLNA is not just a file access protocol. It's also a media database and control protocol.

Yes, you probably can build something manually that does DLNA better, faster, and more secure (I know, because I did) -- but if you can do that, then DLNA is not for you. It's for people that don't understand computers, networks and filesharing and don't want/need to understand. As it stands, DLNA is the closest you can get to plug&play: auto-setup, auto-indexing, auto-detection. The only thing missing is the automatic popcorn machine.

Thanks for the lesson (and your two pence worth), but this is really getting off topic now. Can anyone suggest any actual alternative hardware or is it literally just the sonos that'll do it?

Why not? This is exactly what Sonos does (although it doesn't scan the entire network, it scans the share (or shares) that you tell it to.

however often you want them to, I just do a manual rescan whenever I add something new.

Memory is cheap, Sonos has 256MB, which is enough for 65k tracks, dependant on just how much of the tag you fill in, that should be enough for most people, although there are some that complain about it.

Heh. You were the one asking the question

There are many players that can do what you want, but not from proper "hifi" vendors I think: Popcorn Hour, AC Ryan Fluxx, Western Digital TVHD, Dune HD, Asus O!Play, QNAP NMP. Some come with a built-in harddrive (so they act as NAS as well), some do not. But for all of them, I would advise to use a HiFi dac (CA dacmagic or the like) alongside.

You just need to make sure your NAS and mediaplayer both support Samba (SMB) and away you go.

 

 

I can second the Sonos recommendation - stick it through a separate DAC and it is capable of very good results indeed.  It does exactly what you need it to wrt not needing any server-side software, it can be hidden away if you don't like the look of it, it takes literally 5 minutes to set-up and it has an exceptional user interface......

Any netbook/pc + dac would do this too for you I guess. Many media players are in fact dedicated computers, which is partly good (it should work out of the box) and partly bad (it can only do what the makers put into it). But it depends also how you want to operate your system, and how you manage your music files and tags etc. Plus do you need a remote? Use tv as display? Wired ethernet from NAS > stereo? 

Apologies for necro-ing a year old thread with my first post to answer a user who's most likely inactive, but OP incase you're still lurking; the device you want is called an Audiotron. It was a network music player made by Turtle Beach from 2001-2004. It had ethernet TCP/IP connectivity, and could directly read windows shares. It was 1U, rack-mountable and had a sleek black finish that fit in well with other stereo components. It had both a CGI web interface and I believe a TCP/IP network control interface if you're handy with scripting or programming. It also has both RCA and TOSLink outputs.

Couple caveats: The library is created by scanning the shares upon device bootup (which also can take a while), and as the library is stored on the device, there is a hard limit to the number of songs that can be indexed. Depending on the complexity of the metadata, this limit is up to around 30,000 songs.

It can't do FLAC or iTunes songs I believe, but can do full bit-rate WAVs and up to 320 kbps MP3s.

And of course, the newest one you can find is 8 years old by now. As far as I know, the power supplies are solid, and the only moving part is the rotary selector knob, so if you can find a good one, it should last for a while.

I also believe it's a shame that these kind of devices have been dumbed down so much.

With all those caveats you'd be insane to buy one, just get a Sonos Connect, hide it if you don't like the look of it, stick it through your DAC if you don't think it sounds good enough and forget about it.

SMB is not windows only. Samba runs SMB servers on Unix machines.