Xpenology is an incredible project allowing to turn an old computer into a “Synology” NAS in order to test it. I say “test” because the legality around the project is unclear: while synology publishes its source code (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/), not everything is considered as “open”, and officials at Synology considers that it goes against their copyright… (see, in French).
I currently test it on an old netbook, and beside the obvious disk space limitation (one small hard drive on it), it works perfectly.
One aspect that I struggled to get right was to be able to play music locally, through an USB sound card connected to the netbook. There used to be a whole list of user reported compatible USB devices, but sadly it is now down and can only be accessed through archive.org.
Based on that list, I tried first with a Creative X-Fi Go, and then a Creative X-Fi HD, but to my dismay it was not working at all. The “official” (from Synology) documentation is rather poor, they just tell you to plug the device, and then it should be magically appearing in “Audio Station”.
To achieve this wizardry, you need to modify the following settings (i.e. grant to your user the rights for “USB/DLNA renderer”):
Quite simple isn’t it? Well it took me a few months of random attempts to find out…
It currently play with the Creative X-Fi HD, I will report later on the other devices that I may test.
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