
Ask HN: Play music remotely for my Dad - curiousfiddler
Hi all,<p>I wanted to get some ideas from you all on the best way to do this. My dad is suffering from Parkinson&#x27;s disease and lives in a different country (I live in San Francisco currently). He absolutely loves music. However, his caregivers are unaware of his music taste and in fact also don&#x27;t have a good music collection or access to Spotify etc to play music that my Dad will enjoy. I have seen music soothes him while he sleeps and I wish I could play a good playlist for him from here. Can you think of a good solution?<p>Thanks in advance!
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cauterized
Why not get him a tiny cheap media center PC or chromebook or such? You could
probably even do this with a Raspberry Pi. Hook it up to a nice set of PC
speakers. Set up remote access to it for yourself.

Then you can either download a selection of music to it or set it up to play
from a streaming service just as you would on your own PC. If your dad wants
to turn it on or off (or the caretakers need to), he can use the volume/power
knob on the speakers.

Or if he likes a popular genre of music (classical? Classic rock?), maybe just
get him an FM radio?

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linux-modder
Are either of you familar with kodi or remote access /streaming via ssh ? If
so one simple option would be to setup a ssh tunnel thru to a music store on
your network and have him connect to it via key (preferred) or passphrase (
less preferred for security but doable). that way you would be able to update
and / or curate playlists and or even allow him to remotely access a pandora
/spotify account form your network / IP and not be technically voilating ToS.

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dyeje
Considering there's no one technical on the other end to set stuff up, your
best bet might just be to mail him a simple stereo and weekly mixed CDs.

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kejaed
Can you load up a cheap tablet with songs and send that to the caretakers to
press play?

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gt2
not sure if it still is the case, but last time I checked logging into Spotify
from a second account begins to control the other logged in account, complete
with stopping and starting play.

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lwithers
This is still the case. If you login to the same Spotify account on multiple
devices, you can choose which device to play on, even if you're not on the
same network.

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user7878
Remote access like team viewer etc

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qwertyuiop924
Sounds like a job for Icecast to me.

