Hi, all..
I've been trying for many, MANY hours and days to setup my Rpi3 as a headless audio player in a loft stereo where there is no monitor or television or wired ethernet available. I'd like to be able to control it via a web interface using a Win 7 laptop and/or android tablet and play files physically attached to the RPi3 via a 128g USB thumbdrive. I've tried the following OS's so far.. OSMC, OpenElec, Rune, Raspbian, and Volumio. For reasons I won't list here for fear of boring you to death, I HAVE to use WEP encryption and MAC filtering on my network; WPA or WPA2 isn't an option.
Successes so far.. OSMC and OpenElec have both allowed me to play files easily and reliably, but only when attached to a monitor and controlled locally w/ an attached USB keyboard or mouse or my TV's CEC remote. I've successfully connected both systems to the WIFi network and assigned a static IP to the RPi3. I can also control them via the remote control emulation functions built into their web interfaces, but I still need the monitor. What I can not do is use it w/out the monitor because the web interface doesn't show the files on the attached USB thumbdrive. That, or I'm too stupid to figure out how to make it do that. That's entirely possible.
Volumio never booted for me; don't know why, and I gave up on that quickly.
Raspbian won't let me connect via anything other than WPA or WPA2, so that's out.
Which led me to discover Rune. Looks great.. simple, geared solely to audio (YAY!.. I have no need for video at all in my intended application) and potentially better sound quality because it's based on Arch.. (I think..?).
Some problems, though. No mouse cursor, so it was EXTREMELY difficult to get it connected to my wifi, but I did manage to do it once. I was never able to play anything with it, even controlled locally. I couldn't find a way to tab or mouse down to the "Library" button on the bottom left, and there was nothing listed for the player to play. The web interface never worked either. I tried connecting the RPi3 to my router via a cable, but I don't have a monitor (the only HDMI monitor I have is a 46" TV mounted on the wall on another floor on the other end of my house from the router) and I couldn't connect to it via the web interface.
Dlink DI624 router, static IP assigned to RPi3, WEP encryption.
RPi3 w/ Rune 0.4 beta
Win 7 Laptop
Sandisk 128g thumbdrive
Cambridge Audio Dacmagic XS USB dac (works great w/ the RPi3).
I was poking around another player's site (pimusicbox) and in their documentation they mentioned that it was tricky to get playback of files on attached drives (rather than network drives) w/out doing a lot of manual editing of config files. Is that true for Rune too?
Can anyone help me accomplish my goal of a web-interface controlled headless player that will show an attached drive via the interface?
Thanks SO much for any help. I'd really like to use Rune.
Best..
Barry
you should go step by step 
