wondering if someone could give me a few pointers on a project I'm working out. I haven't yet bought any of the equipment, just trying the ideas first to see if it will work.
I'm planning on creating a pi stereo system that will give me portability and an ability to see what music I have available. So far my set up will be as follows: Raspberry Pi Zero W with something like Volumio or Runeaudio flashed onto. I will use the built-in wifi to connect to my computer or phone and use this as a monitor to select my music etc. I'll solder a DAC onto the pi and from there plug a speaker into the system.
I have two questions. Firstly will I be able to put music onto a usb and use that as my music library? The plan is to have music spread across a bunch of different usb sticks, maybe each would be at least 16GB. Would this be too large a quantity of music for the pi to read each time (I'm thinking of when you get itunes to recognise an external library and it takes a while for it to sit there and read it all)?
My second question is, if the usb thing is no issue, will I be able to plug the usb directly into the pi? Would this drain too much power from the pi and cause issues? Would I have to plug it into a self powered usb hub?
I know there are some other projects out there fairly similar to this but I'm pretty new to the pi scene and indeed the computer programming world. I'm mainly looking for a stereo solution that is cheap, small and portable but am interested in this extra opportunity to learn about programming.
Thanks for any suggestions.