Playing Music from a NAS on various devices
Just spent an hour or two trying to work out how and if it's possible to play music that is sitting on a home NAS with Google play, Chromebook, Android and IOS (running on an iPod Touch ). It's surprisingly difficult. 

- Google Play Offline mode seems to assume no network, but of course you need wifi to access the NAS. Apart from this, there doesn't seem to be any way of playing local files.

- Chromium OS can mount the NAS as a directory if you fiddle around in Linux. You can then play the folder in Banshee, VLC, Clementine or such like. IMHO, all these music players are fairly unpleasant but they do more or less work. Whether you can do this on a Chromebook is unknown to me at the moment. You're not really supposed to be hacking about in the underlying Linux OS.

- I can't find any easy way to do this in Android (v4.0). It may require an SMB app for mounting the NAS drive along with a Music Player App that understands plain old folders.

- IOS seems to be the same as Android. There's no easy way to do this directly but it might be possible via 3rd party apps. Apple seems to want you to use various Apple technologies all playing nicely together.

This is all puzzling. Having a shared home NAS drive that is running 24/7 seems a sensible thing to do. What's not clear is if this should be a dumb drive with all the media handling happening in the connected device. Or if it should be a media server and the connected device should be fairly dumb.

Google's approach seems to be that bandwidth is free and huge, or at least it will be soon. And therefore you really should just let them run the servers. The catch is the need to upload all the media and the limit of 20k files. Now I've got all this content locally already, so why should I need to upload it?

Now if we're talking about a Netbook running Windows (XP, 7, whatever), this game is obviously trivial. Just assign the NAS a drive letter and then use your favourite media player too play the files. Job done. I imagine doing this on OSX on a Macbook is equally trivial. IMHO tablets and Chromebooks ought to be equally trivial. Low powered phones and iPods, I'm not so sure about.