MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

XO-1 as music front-end?

XO-1 as music front-end?

Latest mt-daapd transcodes. Sweet. No more ripping flac to mp3 just for stupid iTunes -- ndw 21 Dec 2008

Perfect; now that I have a new big disk, I can take our iTunes libraries, which have gotten sorta mixed up, and merge them into one big honkin networked library. mt-daapd Ubuntu quickstart worked fine.

But... how to access the songs from the living room? The roku soundbridge and stuff look nice, but I can't justify the cost. Likewise airport express.

It just hit me: my xo-1 has wifi and a headphone jack.

update: it works! I used mpd with output to icecast2. The documentation could use some diagrams, but once I got the picture, it was reasonably straightforward:

  • mpd indexes the music, takes commands over a network protocol from various clients such as pympd (linux) and theramin (mac), queues songs, and decodes and streams them

  • icecast takes streams and buffers and multiplexes them to multiple clients
  • mplayer on the XO-1 listens to the stream and plays it thru the headphone jack
  • powered speakers in the living room play the results

For bonus points: I'd like to control it from my sidekick (or g1). That should be just a matter of setting up a web-based mpd client and exposing it thru the firewall.


My related work:

Related work by others: