Why use a renderer and not steam it via samba/ciffs?
What’s the main advantage please?
I use my FreeNAS to store the music, the Pi running MoOde streams via samba.
No rendering in the chain, so this has me curious.
There is no rendering done, the music is stored on the "Daphile" Box in FLAC, it can automatically rip when I insert a CD, it shares across the network as SMB/CIFS/DNLA etc, and it has Logitech Media Server running that has lots of plugins available like Spotty for Spotify, also Tidal, BBC Iplayer, radio players etc.
Logitech Media Server is amazing, once you have used it and got your head around it you won't go back. I've been using it since 2007/8.
Also the Daphile box allows me to plug my Chord Qute EX dac directly in to it.
There are 100s of Android Apps/iOS apps for LMS, I use one called Squeeze Ctrl
By running LMS it keeps everything centralised, I can just plug a pi in with a Picoreplayer image on it anywhere in my home and it will pick it up, you can sync between players as well for multiroom audio, or send what you are listening to another player and it shuts that one down.
For example if I have the HiFI on and want to listen to it in bed instead I hit send to bedroom.