I wonder how good Hifiberry in this case as there are other Audio specific alternatives for the PI.
What I'm looking for:
-Headless pi setup, no touch screen will be attached
-Local music storage and easy control from phone through wifi
-Bluetooth streaming from phones/tablets
This has nothing to do with the HiFiBerry sound card at all, but what software you run on the Pi. You might have a look at HiFiBerryOS (https://www.hifiberry.com/os), but other software could also be used for this.
John Long
As HiFiBerry team said, this is possible and there are various software solutions to achieve this. HiFiBerry OS is a nice out-of-the box that will give you everything you need. I am using this system on a Pi 3 connected to Beocreate amplifier in my secondary sound system.
But on my main sound system I use a full windowed Raspbian (now called Raspberry Pi OS). It's requires some work to be done with the configuration, but you have full control and more possibilities.
Another free alternatives are Volumio and Pi core player. What HiFiBerry OS lacks for me is the embedded Logitech Media Server. But as far as I know it will give all you require, provided you use Raspberry Pi 4 (bluetooth streaming not available on Pi 2, afaik; but airplay will work, on the other hand). There is a paid software, too.
My own experience is that when you have a big music library, it's better to go for Rasberry Pi 4. Although MPD should cope with a large library on Pi 3, the first scan will be painful and you might need to restart the overheated Pi several times. Volumio, LMS, Mopidy... they will break on large libraries and even if you succeed to index, the music system will be unresponsive, almost unusable.
On the other hand, all the above mentioned software is working very good on my Pi 4 (4 GB RAM) with my large library. Having tried many possible solutions, I chose the full Raspbian with MPD and LMS+squeezelite. And in fact this is the LMS+squeezelite solution that I use most often, because it is very powerful, comfortable.. and good looking.
I was using this tutorial to install LMS+squeezelite:
https://hagensieker.com/2018/06/12/302/
It is a bit outdated now, as squeezelite is bundled with Raspbian and can be installed easier with apt.
I also recommend the Material Skin plugin for LMS, it makes the control from phones and tablets very nice.
