Home Audio Server

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Procrastinating real work, I documented my home audio server setup. I needed a cross-platform solution, and as a first step, I settled with MPD. The setup is only a few days old, and I may decide to change software eventually. But the current setup works under Gnome, Windows, Mac OS X and even on my Nokia 6233.

Home Audio Server

What may be missing is FM/DAB Radio and streaming of TV, but I’m not sure the little NSLU2 is up to it. We’ll see.

The writeup on how to do this is long, so I put it at a separate page:
http://josefsson.org/grisslan/audio.html

(This is a continuation of my series to document the devices that run my home, the first was the internet setup).

6 Replies to “Home Audio Server”

  1. Things will get messy if you need two players. That is why my choice was two Squeezebox 3. The downside of this is that you have a web interface to access the central server. But at least the to SB3 has a remote control each. There are other interfaces, but not quite as good as the mpd native clients on the operating systems I use.

  2. Actually, I do need a second player for the living room… A stationary display for the artist/track info would be nice.

    There seems to be some alternatives though:

    Squeezebox: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_squeezebox.html

    Pinnacle Soundbridge: http://tinyurl.com/yzj56f

    Terratec Noxon 2: http://www.my-noxon.net/sites/noxonflash/

    The Squeezebox seems to be about twice as expensive. The web sites for both the SoundBridge and Noxon are rather bad, but the devices seems pretty nice. All three appear to be available locally (Webhallen).

    Hm.

  3. I have mt-daapd running on my NSLU2 running Debian, which works good. Supported by Apple iTune and hardware like the Squeezbox, Rhythmbox etc.

    Thought I should mention it.

  4. I get very poor performances with mpd 🙁
    Actually, cpu goes to 95-96% and nothing is heard. It’s a default Debian installation, like yours, and you seem to get it working out of the box.
    Further, mplayer with flac goes very well, and madplay for mp3 does the job too. In your experience, can it be an mpd issue (0.13.1)?
    I’ll give a try to mt-daapd, but I’d like to use mpd…

    Thanks

  5. I haven’t used this setup in a while, but I didn’t have performance problems, at least not with mpd. mt-daapd was more efficient though, so try that.

    Btw, I have not over-clocked my NSLU.

    Since I wrote this article, I have bought both a Squeezebox and a Soundbridge. I like the soundbridge better. The web interface for squeezebox is rather slow, and a NSLU2 isn’t powerful enough to run the server. I kind of like the soundbridge human-interface better too. And it is cheaper…

    /Simon

  6. I own a native 266 slug.
    I read some guys with Gentoo had problems with mpd & libasound > 1.0.15. So, I decided to downgrade to etch (I was running lenny), and that did the trick. Don’t know if it’s an actual mpd-libasound2 issue, anyway. Now it just works 🙂