I've been using something Kodi-based for music since the days when you needed to use a doctored James Bond savegame to convince it onto an original XBox. After the XBox became too old to justify, I went through a couple of little black boxes, and I've currently got a Vero 4K which has been doing all my media stuff for the last couple of years with relatively few complaints.

It's tiny, not too expensive, and for storage I've just got an external USB hard drive which is slowly filling up. Never quite got round to getting an assbox. Or Spotify, for that matter. I can usually convince it to stream stuff from YouTube though, unless the plugin's broken (which happens annoyingly often).

It's connected to the TV, but I've also got it and my record player into a wee mixer, which outputs to my hi-fi in the living room and an old ghetto blaster in the kitchen. I use Yatse remote on my tablet/phone to control it. Multi-room audio for a fraction of the cost of anything Sonos, only downside (if it is a downside) is I'm the only one who knows how it all works (when it works).

I remember those days, soft mods and hard mods (yj).
Probably got a modded Xbox in an attic at my parents.

I'm using Kodi/Coreelec on a few 4K Android TV boxes around the house that can be modded (stick a microSD card in) to run Coreelec (branch of Libreelec for Amlogic SOCs). Had my TV watching and general media stuff going through those for a while.

Kodi may well be the answer for me. But for some reason feel there's probably a better audio-specific option around, probably not as well established and stable as Kodi though.

I used Rune for a bit for music only shenanigans, that was ok, no idea about remote control support though. 

Ah yes, I think Rune and Volumio were branches of each other at one point.
 

I'm using AnyDesk for the front end. It's on all the PCs in the house, laptop or desktop. VNC would have been fine as well. 

I think the main problem my wife has is that she is used to "a box that does the music" and when you turn it on you choose the music "on the box" not from some remote location. That's been the model for ever, from record players, tape decks, CD players, mp3 players, ipods, everything. The little PC is on 24x7 but she can't seem to get the hang of turning on the amplifier and then using her laptop to pick music. 

Ideally, I would have a dedicated tablet or whatever just to control the music PC, so that it's physically all in one place. But that's when it starts to get complicated. You have to pair up a screen and computer and a media player that work well without a mouse or keyboard. That might be achievable, but then I want to control Spotify as well (and get at online radio stations). If I could find an all-in-one screen, keyboard, touchpad of a reasonable size, quality and price, I would be happy. I have seen one on AliExpress a while back but it had the look and build quality of Matel toys and users reported it had the speed, accuracy and reliability of Amstrad from the 80s. I also thought about using a tablet as a display with something like Twomon, having the virtual keyboard and touchpad up (Windows in tablet mode is just a mess). I may still try this but it would take a decent sized tablet.

The Raspberry Pi DAC is probably essential. Output from the headphone sockets is OK but inclined to sound transistor radio-ish if you feed it to a worthwhile sound system. HDMI is probably better, but then you're mucking around with an odd audio out unless your amp (or whatever the target is) has an HDMI input. I'm told that the big problem with the Pi is the USB power, which is supposedly noisy and not designed for audio. then again, others disagree. So...

Bloody lockdown. 25 replies since I started typing mine.

Ah yes, the USB power/noise issue was possibly why I ditched my last Pi/DACHat setup. Think I ended up using a ground loop isolator and it still wasn't great so went for a Chromecast Audio for that application.

Feel like I want something to physically go and use, select. Like putting on a CD or record. Maybe that's all just wishful thinking and I'll quickly get bored of getting off my backside to change the music and just want to use my phone anyway.

I stuck musicbee on MrsD's pc and pointed it at our web +file server (her old pc running Ubuntu) months ago, I don't think she's ever used it even though she has 'decent' (as in non-audiophile decent) 2.1 speakers she only ever plays cd's on our shit sony boombox..