[Leaplist] spreading music throughout the house via Linux

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 05:46:43PM -0400, Dan Cherry wrote:
> After several years of procrastination, I'm going to take another shot at 
> delivering music to several rooms (5 including porch and garage) using Linux.
> 
> Amarok is currently handling the files, and I've got a line out splitter going 
> to one other room (although the distance taints the signal, so not a good way 
> to go, in general).  There's wireless in the house, and cat5 would be a pain, 
> but not out of the question.
> 
> Powered computer speakers are acceptable quality in most of the rooms, but 
> buying a pc for each room would be pretty pricey and the size might be a show 
> stopper unless I use laptops or VERY small footprint boxes. 
> 
> I'd be interested in what others are doing to accomplish this.  Any 
> suggestions for a cost effective way to get there - both hardware and 
> software - would be welcome.

I've got both a Roku (http://www.roku.com/) SoundBridge and a SoundBridge
Radio. The SoundBridge has great sound using decent PC speakers. The Radio has
radio-like sound but also has a sleep timer and alarm. If I had to do it over,
I'd get a second SoundBridge. I already scripted a sleep timer (although you
had to go to a PC to use it) and a alarm would not be too difficult.

There are a lot of 802.11 media devices with prices all over the map. You can
start here: 

 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wireless+media&x=0&y=0

I selected the SoundBridge primarily because it was the only one that didn't
look like a something from a bad 1950's sci-fi movie. It looks nice most
anywhere and I am very pleased with the audio quality. And, it turns out that
it's fairly open. I've written a python module that encapsulates their Roku
Control Protocol (RCP) so anything you can do with the remote can be done in a
script.  Unfortunately, that does not include fine-grained track positioning,
fast forward or rewind, so...

Where you're going to having fun is synchronizing sound between clients, if
you're looking for the "Whole House Experience." There's big $$ solutions that
I'm not even thinking about trying
(http://www.sonos.com/products/how_sonos_works.htm). There's got to be ways,
but I haven't found them in my limited googling time. I suppose you could have
a script that controls starting each track in the playlist at the same time on
all clients so you'd be close but I doubt you'd be close enought if more than
one client was in hearing range.

If you don't care about synchronizing, the SoundBridge is easy to grab and take
with you to another room. You'll want powered speakers so if you cart them all
you'll want a basket to carry the 2-3 speakers, the unit and the power
adapters. I just set up one set of speakers upstairs and another downstairs so
the only thing that moves is the SoundBridge.

On the server side, I use mt-daapd (apt-get-able) aka Firefly Media server
(http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/) running on an NSLU2. Amarok sees and plays
from the server just fine as well. Since it's light enough to run on a teeny
ARM, I doubt you'd notice it running on any box that is always on. I've started
ripping tracks in FLAC format and mt-daap transcodes them to mp3 on-demand so I
get high-quality music archives that still play easily on most any client.

Another popular option is SlimServer... Oops.. looks like it's SqueezeCenter
now, and bought by Logitech:

 http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

When I got it originally, it was a time-limited demo then pay for a license.
Don't know if that's still the case, but I had problems with it hanging anyway.
That, plus FireFly using standard DAAP (aka iTunes) protocol means just about
anything can discover it and play media from it. When I was looking for what to
set up, a lot of people swore by slimserver. I just found mt-daapd easier to
get and keep running, GPL, a standard protocol, and it did what I want.

mwa
-- 
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net

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