My new hacking project

[mapes]

As some of you may know(or not) I've been hacking around with music streaming around the my home. I've run an in home Linux box (Debian FTW) for years. My goals have been simple yet frustrating out of reach

Objective: Stream music stored from mp3 (maybe internet radio too) to whatever room I want.

Caveats:
Multiple points of audio output each able to be controlled separately or synced together.

Multiple points of control. Must be able to control it from the entertainment rack, from in house computers and maybe remotely

Low power use, low noise, a discrete embedded hardware player would be preferred over a PC

Ease of use, No wait times on boot up and very very importantly my wife needs to be able to use it as if it were as simple as a toaster.

Backend must be a linux box

Well I've tried numerous things. Including

Web based streamers like Jinzora and Ampache. These are web servers that catalog the music via ID3 tags and create a backend database and then allow the music catalog to be searched via a web frontend. These are ok although they require a PC. In fact I use Ampache to stream while I'm at work. It's pretty cool it has support for album art and lots of features.

GoVideo DVD player with a PCMCIA slot and a network card as the front end and Twonkeyvision UpnP server on my Linux box. Used the TV as a display deivce. Worked ok although had issues with umlauts in music titles. no album art support. It did do internet radio too. The DVD player started to not play DVD's reliably. Navigating millions of songs via a DVD remote not so fun.

PrisimIQ. A custom made media player it runs a custom server on the backend. Net thing is the player had mpeg 2 decoder in it.... Lot's of bad things with it. Generally a POS.

A stripped down laptop hooked up to server via a CIFS share.

None of those things fit all of my conditions. Well I went out and bought two more devices to try. Specifically the Logitech Squeezebox boom and the Duet. Basically they are hardware devices that plugin to your stereo (the boom has speakers) and they practically fit everything I want. Discrete embedded players, low noise, the server is Open Source and runs on Linux, Windows or OSX. You can control it from anywhere and it's like an appliance.

I remembered the product from a few years ago it was called the slimp3. Well it appears Logitech bought em. Another nice thing is the community support. folks have already hacked the heck outta this thing. One nice thing is my wife has an iPhone and someone sells an app that lets you control everything from the iPhone.... I've got the server up and I get the hardware on 12/2 I let you know what I get done over time.

Yeah hacking

[Duke{CLR}]

That all sounds like fun. Be sure to post hoe the new stuff works because some day I hope to do something similar in my home.

[DougBob]

hoe

Did you just call mapes a hoe

[Mobojo]

That sounds awesome! I definitely wanna hear how this comes out.

[mapes]

Update so far.

I got the Squeezecenter server up and running on my Debian Etch server. This is the backend server....It runs on windows, linux and OSX. Very easy install. It saw and cataloged my music library.

The first player unit I setup was the Boom. The Boom loooks like a very small boombox (i.e it has speakers). The Boom has an LED display and few controls on the front including a large pushable knob for selecting things and a small remote control that lays in a magnetic cradle on the Booms top. It also has an micro stereo aux in jack, coax and optical spdif out ports, a 10/100 net jack and stereo RCA outs. It supports 802.11b wifi (wished it was a or g). So I set it up to replace my alarm clock on my nightstand. The only thing I wish is that the display was bigger as I have astigmatism in both eyes and have to squint to see what time it is in the middle of the night.

The second player is the Duet. The Duet is a two part deal. The player unit is small and black about the size of a hub with a multi colored led in front to denote status(on off no net etc...) It has the same jacks and wifi support as the boom but has no display and no aux in. The second part of the duet is the remote. The remote is about the size of a large remote. it has two main features. The first is a high resolution color led screen that takes up a little less than half the remote. The other is an iPodesque wheel control.

So now I have everything on the network and the the server is running and has cataloged my music files (via IDv3 tags).

So in my family room I pickup the remote and I can make the Duet play music by genre,playlist, artist,album or random(customizable by genre, artist album etc..) With the same remote I can go to the main menu and select the bedroom player and synchronize the two players so they're playing the same thing or have it play something else. Very cool.

But, wait thats not all. The server has a tomcat webserver running if you connect to your server via port 9000 you get a web frontend. From the web you can completely control both players. You can also set alarms (for both players) for the alarm clock function (you can do this through the front end too on the boom).

And again thats not all. Besides streaming your own music you can setup internet radio stations and other services. I've only messed around with Pandora(it supports, Pandora, Rhapsody, Live365, Last FM and maybe a few more services. You have to go the the web front end and go to a control panel and setup a user account for that service(basic Pandora's free). Once that is hooked up then you can tune into that service on any device or multiple devices. The cool thing I found out about Pandora support is that it shows the album artwork either in the web front end or the Duet remote....Very cool. BTW it does this for your local music if you have the album artwork embedded into the IDv3 tag or in the album directory as a folder.jpg file.

So the next thing I'm gonna do is try to get ipengiun app off of the Apple app store and hook up my wifes iPhone to be able to control either player

Oh yeah I almost forget a really cool thing. The server has a Java applet that you can download to your computer and it emulates another player. Thats pretty neat. So lets say I throw a party and as usual all the smokers are in the Garage. I can hookup a laptop down there and have it run the java applet and either synchronize it to whats playing elsewhere or control it separately.

Over all I'm very impressed with the Logitech Squeezebox system and it looks like there are all types of hacks out there...like having the display on the Boom run a weather ticker or scroll BBC news.....

[mapes]

More of an update. I started configuring internet radio. Works like a charm. I did run into one problem and I didn't have to time to diag. Internet radio stations with asx time streams were not working. Need to look into that.

By the way some dude hacked up this..

Squeezebox audible caller ID - Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog

Bascially it's a ring detector, caller id and off hook detector. so when a call comes in the device pauses the music, audibly announces the caller id and when the call is over it unpauses...

pretty cool. I'll post some pics later

[Mobojo]

Wow, that is really really cool! So, you wanna come to my house and buy me one and hook it up? :P

[mapes]

Found a fix for my asx internet radio bug. Theres another service I can use to get the right URI ...So thats fixed..

[mapes]

Last night I installed the iPeng app for my wife's iPhone. All I can say is wow. What a neat app. So my wife can now select from our internal music, a list of favorite internet radio stations or a music service like Pandora and have it play out any player (or sync em) either the two native squeezeboxes or even the software emulated player called softsqueeze. I'm very impressed. Of couse my wife is never happy and the first thing outta her mouth after neat was "can I play it back on my iPhone. The answer is yes although it requires beta software and I don't want to go there just quite yet.