owntone-server VS mpd

There are a few dockers that seem to be able to do what you want. Some can stream local audio to airplay devices what might work with a bit of scripting for your white noise and others might work as a Chromecast to Airplay bridge https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect https://github.com/1activegeek/docker-airconnect

Check out OwnTone former daap, https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server it simply browses the dir, can play playlists but will do just folder(s) play too. As a bonus it can airplay/cast.

The thread here [Pi forum] is long (70+ pages so far) and the documentation is here [Github]

A possible solution, especially if you have something like a Raspberry Pi: Owntone

Check it out; https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server

Check out Owntone, it supports MPD. https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/

I set this up after stumbling on it - https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server and it solves a lot of my issues.

I use mpd with various clients, mostly also from terminal. mpd support would be great - and actually the only reason for me to try it out.

https://www.musicpd.org/

No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song.

https://www.musicpd.org/

Last week I released v1.0.0 of MphpD - a fully-featured, dependency-free PHP library for the Music Player Daemon. It's my first take on a library so feedback and suggestions is very much welcome and appreciated.

mpd server + mpd clients? https://www.musicpd.org/

Eventually I'd like to continue with the other frontends I have planned, starting with festivald which will be a music daemon, similar to mpd.

It's not written in Java, but if you want to look at some source code and/or protocols to see how it's already been done, look at mpd (https://www.musicpd.org/). IIRC, it actually uses TCP.

Well, it’s a slightly odd use case in that normally the server would just be the server and not also the player, but given the kit you’ve got it makes sense. Probably what you want is MPD plus one of the MPD web clients.