Hi Barry,
and welcome to the forum,
I have been using a RuneAudio player, "headless", on WiFi, for about 4 months. My WiFi is a little dodgy, so in my case using a USB flash drive to store Music is a little more reliable than a network shared directory, but both approaches work. I have some frequently played music stored on the USB drive, and the rest on the network.
At the time when I first set it up, I did not have any display at all during normal use, only during configuration, and this is how I intend to always use two of the players I am planning on installing.
First setup was not completely painless because my knowledge of Arch Linux is limited, but it was definitely worth the effort.
Btw, for the price of any IR remote on ebay ($5 and up), plus a 3-pin IR receiver, you can add some basic local control over play/pause/stop, skip, and volume up/down, so you do not have to drain a phone battery as much.
Pete
