ASUSTOR Data Master 4.2 (ADM OS): App Central

SoundsGood

Another program developed by ASUSTOR is SoundsGood. It’s a music player which lets you listen to your music collection via a web browser.

As you’d expect, installing SoundsGood is straightforward. One thing I expect from any Linux-based package manager is to handle a program’s dependencies for me.

As the image above shows, App Central tells me I need to install Python and FFMpeg before installing SoundsGood. That’s actually not the case. If I click the Install button, App Central installs FFmpeg and Python automatically. The wording in the dialog box is just somewhat misleading.

Here’s an image of SoundsGood in action.

The software supports playlists, and browsing by artist, album or folder. There’s the ability to import lyrics as well as support for LyricWikia, an online wiki-based lyrics database and encyclopedia. What’s good is that you can turn the software into a local music player by connecting the NAS to speakers via HDMI, USB, or audio jack.

Unfortunately, there’s an elephant in the room. SoundsGood bizarrely forces auto fade-in/out on each track. This ruins my listening experience. It’s a shame as in many other respects, SoundsGood is a good music player.

What other music options for my NAS are available?

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a hugely popular media system. It’s free and open source software.

There’s a package for Jellyfin (the software is developed by the Jellyfin Team). As the image below shows Jellyfin runs in a Docker container.

While Jellyfin is great software, it unfortunately doesn’t support gapless playback. At least it doesn’t impose fading on tracks. I also explored Plex Media Server but also ran into the same issue.

Hi-Res Player

I’ve finally settled on Hi-Res Player, a music player which is integrated with the MPD Rompr UI. Out of the music players I’ve experimented with using the NAS device this is the best for my collection. While its interface is reasonable (somewhat cluttered and clunky), what makes it stand out is that it supports gapless playback and high performance DSD transcoding.

I can’t say Hi-Res Player is the best music player for my NAS device as there are others still to try. But it has the essential functionality I need.

Next page: Page 4 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Photo Gallery 3
Page 3 – Music software
Page 4 – Summary

All articles in this series: