NAS drive for lossless audio playback only on PC and Chromecast Audio

NAS drive for lossless audio playback only

I have about 12000 songs stored mostly in WMA lossless format on a 1TB WD (external) USB mypassport drive. (More recently I have been ripping music to FLAC format because I realise that WMA lossless is not supported by many 3rd parties – so all my music will end up as FLAC).
I backup the WD drive to an identical mypasssport drive after adding new music.
All my non-music (work/document) files are backed up to Dropbox, a service I appreciate and will retain.
I use Foobar2000 for my music player on my PC – I don’t use my phone or tablet for music.
I rely heavily on my Foobar playlists, which are very often sorted or selected by a 1-5 rating that I have set up for individual tracks. As far as I know those ratings are stored within the audio files I have ripped to (i.e. they are not maintained separately in the library).
Historically, I usually played music via an external Creative Soundblaster card which was connected both to a simple Logitech PC sound system and to a Sennheiser wireless headphones system. Other than that, I would listen to CDs on stereo systems in the bedroom or in the living room.
With my CD player having broken I am looking to add Audio Chromecast to all my 3 stereo systems, and to stream music to them from a NAS (whilst no doubt retaining my current PC setup too).
I can’t see any likelihood that I will want to stream video based on current viewing habits.
I am happy to back up the NAS drive to an external USB drive at regular intervals and keep outside the house.
I see that there is now a DS120J and a DS220J about to be released, with the DS120J being really cheap.
So:
A) Is there any reason, if I am interested in playing music in two different locations in the house simultaneously (me, my partner) lossless to a hifi system via Chromecast, why I shoulld not opt for one of these bottom-end single-bay drives?
B) What would be an appropriate app for our android phones to control playback?

Yes, DS120j and DS220j is all you need for music streaming. I have just run a FLAC audio test streaming from a Synology to a Google Home speaker using my iPhone DS Audio app to cast it. It works perfectly fine. The audio file format compatibility is the same on a Chromecast Audio as it is on any of the google speakers. If you do happen to have some other file formats, your Synology will automatically convert the file on the fly to a compatible format.

I have added full file compatibility specs bellow.

Chromecast Audio, Google Home Mini Google Home Mini (1st/2nd gen), Google Home, Google Home Max, Google Nest Hub, Google Nest Hub Max Audio specifications

Supported Audio Formats (the same compatibility applies to all models):

  • HE-AAC
  • LC-AAC
  • MP3
  • Vorbis
  • WAV (LPCM)
  • Opus
  • FLAC with support for high-resolution streams (24-bit/96 KHz)

 

DS audio (for mobile)

  • Supported audio formats: AAC, AIF, AIFF, APE, Apple Lossless (ALAC), FLAC, M4A, M4B, MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WMA PRO, WMA VBR, and DSD
  • Supported audio formats for mobile devices:
    • Android: AAC, FLAC, non-alac M4A, M4B, MP3, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis
    • iOS: AAC, AIFF, APE, Apple Lossless (ALAC), M4A, M4B, MP3, and WAV
  • Streams music to Airplay-compatible devices (only available on iOS devices) and Chromecast

Audio Station

  • Supported audio formats for browsers (original formats): M4A, M4B, MP3, WAV, and FLAC (IE does not support WAV and FLAC)
  • Supported audio formats for browsers (transcoded streaming): AIFF, APE, Apple Lossless, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WMA PRO, WMA VBR, and DSD
  • Supported audio formats for Bluetooth speakers and AirPlay speakers: AIFF, APE, Apple Lossless, FLAC, M4A, M4B, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMA PRO, WMA VBR, and DSD (Native DSD is not supported)
  • Supports DSD over PCM (DoP)
  • Supported playlist formats: M3U, PLS, and WPL
  • Supports gapless playback when streaming to a web browser (original files only) and AirPlay speakers
  • Supports transcoding FLAC/APE, ALAC/AAC, OGG, and AIFF formats for DLNA players. Other supported audio formats for DLNA players depend on the player
  • Supports Amazon Alexa service
    • Voice commands to play songs by a specific artist, an album, or a playlist and to check the currently playing music
    • Voice commands to control the player to start, stop, shuffle, loop, etc (See detailed commands here)

 






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