I think this is the most exciting part of the hobby now. The developments in streaming digital music. Making it better quality, easier to use, low price, and just wicked cool.
Not too long ago the cool thing was to have remove control over the digital trasnsport. Then it was cool to have networked display of the song choices in our hands, within old fart eyesight range. Then it was cool to reduce jitter with asynch USB, then came high rez files, then came smart phones with many sophisticated apps competing against each other to control all hardware players. Now the latest is music streaming services offering full resolution music with complete catalog. We want to stream that silently, inexpensively, without jitter and without geekout, to a USB DAC using our smart phone to control it with a colorful, beautiful screen with fast response. Right?
While wandering off of the Windows reservation used to mean walking the linux plank, or relying on a friend to do everything for you, there are now fully baked software solutions that are as easy as Windows to setup and use - so they say...
One that appeals to me is
Volumio software, running on a
Cubox device. Volumio is free dedicated high end audio streaming player with many smartphone control apps. Cubox is cheap silent tiny headless SOC with i/o ports.
But, but, but, ewwwww, it's not Windows, I need cartoon screen or I get assceeeeeeeerd! How to do it:
http://volumio.org/get-started/Doesn't seem too difficult for me, and I'm almost 50!
Of course I've never tried it myself, but I can assure you that is it will be very easy and you will love it. If you try it I promise I will watch (and laugh if necessary.)
Not relevant to you, Carl, but semi-relevant to the topic, Russ White who developed the Buffalo DAC posted about using an older version of RaspberryPi, a cheap tiny silent general purpose embedded computer to stream music via I2S directly to Buffalo (no USB) with excellent sound quality. This is still a bit of diy and figure out how to make it go, but interesting high end audio digital transport solution for $50.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/twisted-pear/250583-building-open-embedded-audio-applicance.htmlThe last posts in that thread suggest that Twisted Pear is developing a new USB>I2S board of their own to replace their old USB input for Buffalo that is woefully obsolete now.
OK, I just arrived back from fantasyland, and finally ready to address your question directly. No linux, no risk, no effort, just plug and play. If you want to use Windows, you need a more powerful computer than these embedded smartphone SOCs. This mobo is more than enough to do anything music related except convolution:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157495It has DC input from wall wart or battery, so totally silent. Just add memory and a box. CPU and heat sink already installed. It is a Celeron (Atom) quad core, more than enough to run Win and stream audio. It will run DSP within JRiver. Also look for finished systems with J1900 board.
The noise you are hearing might clear up with your new USB>I2S card, making the toshiba laptop useable.