An awful CD-based interface for a current model modern solenoid player piano system is causing me fits! While I've been careful not to exceed limits stated in the manual, the thing simply cannot deal with my huge library of music. Twice now it has suffered a partition failure in a proprietary chip requiring full replacement as the chip is not socketed and for some reason cannot be "reset."

The only route I find is to use a Raspberry Pi with a high-quality audio h.a.t. My wireless mesh system already includes a node attached to the piano--it provides two LAN connections one of which is used for the instrument.

One big snag is the fact that I'm seeming forced to use an adapter sold by the maker of the player that works only with analog audio and "analog MIDI encoding" which is essentially an .OGG (compressed audio) or .WAV track; the graph of which quite resembles a very spiky yet consistent sine wave with very little variation in either amplitude or frequency.

Files with audio accompaniment MUST be encoded in that manner but previously it played true .MIDI files for solo piano pieces of which I have thousands some many of which last 20+ minutes. A 100kb MIDI becomes a 50+mb .OGG.

I have a program that converts MIDI into "analog midi" so I can pre-convert everything stored in the S/S USB drive connected to the Raspberry Pi but I consider that an inelegant solution as I also work with MIDI files and the conversion process is multi-step and tedious. I've asked the maker of that free software tool if he can provide (for a fee) some sort of compiled plug-in for me to use in the Raspberry Pi with my programming to produce a temporary .wav file driving the sound card DAC. I rather doubt because of legal issues because all of the producers of accompanied player piano music use a similar yet still proprietary method for encoding MIDI.

Since I ordinarily want to control the system using the iPad purchased just for the purpose (the interface was only slightly better than the remote control and whopping 6 character scrolling display).

In that vein is my best bet to simply install an app in the iPad to operate the Raspberry Pi as a remote desktop? I have a "toy" robot using a Raspberry Pi brain and it uses some sort of free version of VNC Viewer for the same purpose.

Am I likely to encounter Apple-to-anything else compatibility problems that prevented me from ever using their products until that iPad? No way do I have the time and likely funds required to write even the simplest of program for an iPad.

Am not asking for specifics--just suggestions of the route to take from those who had done similar.