Slashdot Mirror
Build a Multi-Output MP3 Server?
z80 asks: "I'm rebuilding my house and I am thinking about fitting speakers in every room of the house and pulling some massive amount of cables in the walls. I also want to control and send the output to each set of speakers from the same source, and was thinking that a PC, with 4-6 soundcards, would do the trick, and there are of course a couple of questions I have. What kind of hardware would be required to be able to stream up to six different MP3's through six soundcards at the same time ? Can it even be done? What kind of software can be used to do it? Which OS? How can it be remotely controlled? With respect to the last question, I'm thinking about mounting a couple of flat displays around the house connected to old PC's that run some sort of connection (VNC maybe) to the mp3 server." This is a topic Ask Slashdot tackled three years ago. Now, with applications like Ardour showing off the power of Open Source frameworks like JACK, it seems like building such a machine might not be as hard as it once was. For those of you who have managed to build something like this, what did you do and what hurdles did you have to navigate before things were working? How would you set up a machine to run independent audio to 4 or more rooms?
The best place for questions like this is the AV Science Forum. Lots of people doing all sorts of home-theater/home-audio projects. Look in the "Home Theater Computers" section.
There are several options for what you're looking to do these days. My brother is doing a similar thing, but he's using 802.11b for control (through Girder) and PocketPCs for remotes!
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/
you could network tablet PC's to it and use wireless speakers, that would work
Hahaha you asked 'Which OS?' on /. I guess you weren't looking for an unbiased opinion :P
I got a +5, Troll
Why buy six soundcards when you could buy one soundcard, six transistors, and a handful of wires to connect to the parallel port? Synchronizing six sound cards would be a nightmare, but turning on and off different outputs for one sound source is rather easy.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Get an M-Audio Delta 410.
It has 4 inputs, and 10 outputs.
Common sense is not so common.
I thought it would be great to have multiple outputs on soundcards. Why have 4-5 cards when you can easily have a pigtail with RCA connectors (or 1/8 connectors). It should be possible and would solve those issues. Imagine playing a DVD on your TV while someone else listens to MP3's
:)
Software wise, it shouldn't be harder than controling multiple NIC's. Soundcards could be seen as "streams" and you could send the audio to any/all. Heck you could even have some kind of multicast to remind everyone of special events (blue light special? err.. dinner is ready).
Unfortunately, the company I contacted couldn't care less about my idea.... Or maybe they simply took it and are working on it now?
-- Leeeter than leet
One of the side effects of not having commercial drivers and applications that use the features is that you can usually get at least two channels off of a 5.1 soundcard. The front pair of speakers and the rear pair of speakers are generally treated as seperate DSPs by the audio driver. Look around for audio drivers that treat the cards this way, and when you find one get 3 cards for a total of 6 outputs. (You're looking for a card thats supported in linux, but not too-well supported. Don't forget to check alsa's list of cards)
After that, just figure out how you're going to get the controls to work.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
what did you do and what hurdles did you have to navigate before things were working?
My Wife.
Why not just have one fileserver and put a flat-panel box with a basic sound card (hacked i-opener, anyone?) in each room? Or did you want the same music playing in each room in sync?
--
It seems to me it would be far simpler just to have a Pentuim-class machine in each room (you can get them quite small for embedded applications). If you're going to have a display in each room anyways, why not just have that box play the actual mp3s? (One sound card in each machine, far less hassle than 6 in one.
Instead of running speaker and control wire back and forth for every room, each room would be its own stand-alone player. Then you could simply link each to a central fileserver that has all the mp3s on an NFS share. Presumably you'd want to run Cat5 to each room anyways. Just seems like a far more prudent plan to me.
You could use ATI Remote Wonders (or, perhaps, a similar kind of X10 remote).
These are RF remotes and 16 of them can be configured to use different channels. They use USB dongle for reception - same dongle can serve multiple remotes if needed (just don't transmit simultaneously).
Linux driver can be found at GATOS website
If you're going the "old PCs" route for control, forget about distributing the audio. Too much work. Just run a network cable to every room (or go wireless) and use old PC's as clients/players of shared files stored on a central server.
This would work TODAY - you wouldn't have to do any customization of software or hardware.
AudioPCI cards are cheap but great sound for the bucks.
In my mind the only downfall is the noise from a PC unless you go to lengths to silence them, eg put into closets.
While the idea of using several soundcards and OSS is quite sound, this is a problem which has already been solved by professional audio installers several times over, with equipment custom-tailored for this exact purpose. IMHO, you should get a professional consultation from a home theatre/automation business. The difficulty is not the soundcards or even the software, it's integrating functional control panels (with displays) into each room that will prove to be the most difficult. While you certainly *can* do this with off-the-shelf parts, the pros will always do this sort of thing better.
Good luck!
What about universal plug and play?
Take a look at the MediaServer 1.0 spec.
Some audio hardware vendors are starting to support this, and it seems to be gaining steam.
I was thinking of doing something like this to run sound to the bathroom and kitchen. I dont have room to put boxes in there, so I was thinking of some sort of homebrew controller hardware.
My half-baked idea included things along the line of running audio cable and [ethernet, serial, ??] to the location. Have a box with [play, pause, volume, next, previous, etc] controls sending commands down the [ethernet, serial, ??] line to a daemon on the server, which passes them along to the streamer. The control box would need some sort of logic to deal with sending the commands. Something like a Basic Stamp and code?
Is there anybody out there who *didn't* drop out of electrical engineering after a year because their stuff never worked (ahem, like I did...went to CS. Sometimes being interested in a field isn't enough. There comes a point when you actually have to be good!) have any actual engineering-based ideas or opinions re: the above-described audio controller idea? It seems plausable enough, but the devil is more than likely in the details.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Go to the Gibson site (www.gibson.com), the guys
who make guitars. Look for their MaGIC spec. They
basically use cat5 cable to distribute digital
music. Wire your house with cat5, use their
standard, and *poof* you're at the bleeding edge
of the technology curve for digital music.
How much distance can you run with your audio cables before you start to get significant loss of quality?
what about a beowulf cluster? (sorry. couldn't resist.)
I agree with the others, who have said, if you are going to include an LCD in some of the rooms, what's the problem with adding a very small PC? You could even do a wireless network, and have the terminals access the files.
As I don't really know of anyway in which you can get five soundcards, to all function seperately, and have independant players associated with each card. I think that having a large storage server, and then some small terminals controlling smaller areas of the house, will be easier, and less of a logistical nightmare.
I would say get a bunch of via epia mini-itx mainboards (newegg sells them with some pretty slick cases as well). Just run Cat5 to each room and viola! you have a multipurpose device, you could watch a DVD (or at least a visualization) with your music as well.
Besides, the EPIA boards are quite well supported under linux (and of course windows), heck you could even network boot them so you have diskless stations - now that would be killer. Absolutely no moving parts, you could just stick the board to back of the flat panel and mount it in the wall.
A computer with a ton of sound cards seems like a great project, but I can tell you right now it is much more prudent to be running cat5 to each station and having separate little boxes...
Bad idea. It's MP3... just put an MP3 player in the room and use network cable. You can buy an old Vectra (that would do this fine) for like $50. Or you can use dedicated audio widgets like the very open mp3elf.
Who are you kidding? you're on a linux site, you're just trolling for some karma/recognition.
I'll answer all of your questions, even though I know it's not the answers you want to hear:
My winamp uses up 2 percent of CPU on a dual 450 PIII with a memory footprint of 8 megs. That means you could have say, 50 different streams with my system. Or get 6 streams with about 100 Mhz chip (to be conservative). A low end PIII will do the job is your answer.
it can be remotely controlled via many things, IR ports, LCDs with touch screens, your cell phone, a wireless PDA... your imagination is the limit.
and the kicker: Windows NT/2k/XP can handle it. Just like any other of the current OSs would. You just launch as many winamps as you want, configure them to use a specific sound card, and voila.
*yawn*
shouldn't (now that we're in the 21st century and all) this be doable without 'pulling some massive amount of cables in the walls'?
Get a nice MOTU rackmount system and you can do a huge amount of inputs/outputs.
I'm an Engineering Student in Canada. I've got a final project in the works for my undergraduate degree (I know, I start early - nothing like the smell of freshly etched circuit boards in the summer).
:)
I'm building a wireless MP3 stereo that uses a host PC for a server (all the music has to be stored somewhere). The server uses a nifty little radio to stream the MP3 to a portable stereo unit that decodes the MP3 on the fly and has a little LCD display to show the name of the song and other relevant information.
The portable station will also be equipped to take commands from a Sony IR remote control. (like volume adjustment and playlist manipulation)
Geeks definately have more fun!
jgood(a)ualberta-DOT-ca
FM broadcast .. ok thats 2 words..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Most command-line MP3 players (mpg123, for example) have options to specify the sound device. This would allow you to control which room the music was sent to.
CPU-wise, decoding a bunch of MP3s should be no problem at all; mpg123 typically uses only 1-2% CPU on a modern machine. I don't think you'll run into PCI bandwidth limits either (guestimate 1.4 megabits per second per output).
You may need to create your own player front-end, to select songs/playlists for each room.
It's not currently set up for multiple soundcards, but GJukeBox is wonderful for a web based control of a PC based home audio system. I've converted most of my audio to high bit rate OGG and happily control music from anywhere on my home network. Converting it to support multiple sound cards should be fairly straightforward. One crude option would be to install multiple copies and then hack the play scripts to specify different audio devices to the underlying play programs. It also support streaming, if you want private audio streams going to local PCs.
Ogg playback seems to be fairly trivial in terms of CPU utilization on a modern PC. I would assume a stock P3 or P4 would happily handle six concurrent streams.
A small company named transistor specializes in this sort of thing. You can easily have music in every room without completely blowing your budget.
I beg to differ. The day you will be able to step back and look at your post objectively, you're going to break down in tears...
or does anyone else find it strange that sometimes Slashdot editors remember a story being posted 3 years ago, yet other times post the same story twice (or more) in a single day!?!?
You could always run 6 copies of winamp, each instance outputting to one of the 6 soundcards... It's a little hard to manage I guess.. but .. heh heh.. cheapo.
just tell the directsound driver on each one to use a different device explicitly in the dsound output plugin properties of winamp 2.91.
you'll also need to make sure the option is enabled in the config to allow multiple winamp instances.
The Ethernut is more for a doityourselfer, the Slimp3 is existing product. They operate over ethernet which is not quite within scope for the abovementioned project, but might meet the same goals.
I haven't gotten around to either of these yet, but the Slimp3 in particular sounds quite cool.
-jbn
I have been debating doing something like this for some time, however I was thinking about buying a few 800 Mhz wireless transmitters and then speakers/headphones. You won't get the best quality sound out of something like this if you are fussy about sound, but for home use it works great, especially the headphones. I can wonder around the house freely and still hear my MP3s.
Unfortunately this means I still have to get back to the computer to skip the songs I hate. Any suggestions how I can handle this problem?
Are you doing this just for the cool factor? Why not just buy an iPod and clip it to your belt?
http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/audiotron /producthome.asp
Wire them up with ethernet. Then use a central file server running Samba to store all the MP3's, and each ATron will be able to play off of the file server.
read this post on Slashdot
You can setup old PC's all over the house to listen to streamed MP3's from a
central server in one room that will feed as many pc's as you want.
I use recycled pc's that I rescue from trash piles and it's great!
Basicly I'm in it for the cat5 wire costs. Everything else was free from a trash pile..
No kidding..
I made a an XMMS console remote and ran it from my zaurus over wifi. I know use a dedicated MP3 server that mounts my music over samba and lives inside my stereo.
The script could easily be adapted for use in almost any control environment. Up/down+enter for easy use on the Zaurus w/out typing.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Yeah, you may be able to hack something together with a single PC and multiple sound cards in a few months of Sundays. But you could also just buy, off-the-shelf, as many of these dandy little things as you need. A single server can service as many of them as you'd care to stack up. They would be easy to add on as you require them, without having to run any speaker cable at all--a wireless bridge or a single CAT5 run works peachy. DHCP enabled, supports multiple server OSs (mine is off my Debian box but they have Windows or Mac installers as well), wireless remote, Web, or command line interfaces all supported.
I've only got one, but it works awesome and if I ever decide I want to put a different sound system into another room, I can just buy another module and hook it up to the same server--instant access to all the MP3s and playlists that I've already created. The sound quality is great and it take hardly any resources, either server-side or network. I highly recommend it.
No relation to Happy Monkey
So by the time you have the requisite NIC, your video card (PCI or AGP), you are left with 3-5 slots left for audio cards.
Then you have issues with the bus bandwidth and that many audio cards.
People have mentioned using 3 card and use the front/rear outputs for different streams, but the cards don't work that way (or at least not without at LOT of driver coding, and no way you can easily get your audio player to recognise this)
There are several solutions to this:
Good Luck
RoundTop
I also want to control and send the output to each set of speakers from the same source, and was thinking that a PC, with 4-6 soundcards, would do the trick,...
Far too complex.
A PC, with a good sound card output, driving a regular stereo component. Let the dedicated stereo unit drive the multiple speakers.
Seriously, they call it Bob. It's the ZR8630AV - and he's got a sister named Glory - the ZR4630.
Glory is a 4-source, 6-output, 30 watts per channel audio distribution center. Check out http://www.nilesaudio.com/products/zr4630.html for more information.
We use these a lot where I work now, and they're slicker than snot.
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
I wanted to do something similar, but the other direction.
I wanted to have mics around the house in lots of the rooms. I want to be able to walk into the bedrom and say "lights on" and have the computer turn the lights in that room on - I don't wanna have to say "master bedroom lights on".
I really am not sure how this would be done. I'm guessing there would need to be some sort of intermediate box that would pass the audio through, and at the same time be able to indicate to the computer which input it received a signal (or the strongest signal) on.
I see lots of comments saying if you're going to use a display in each room, why not put relatively a low powered PC in each room, and mount the mp3's from a central fileserver and play them on each machine.
I agree with the first part, but if you want mulit-room playback of the same music, it'd be a lot easier to just run an icecast (or whatever mp3 streamer you prefer) on the server, and stream to each of the "display" PC's. Probably simpler software-wise than a single PC with 6 soundcards, too.
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
The company I work for: Intellinet Controls sells multi-room audio systems. Our latest product, the RS3000, includes web based control (which is really nice with a wireless webpad), keypads in each room (and a remote), and can be easily intergrated with mp3 jukebox software (I use Globecom Jukebox) (we plan to provide it as a option for those who don't want to set their own up) I have a system installed in my house, and I think it is great (of course, since I wrote most of the software it does exactly what I want :-)
Kevin Seghetti: kts@tenetti.org, HTTP: www.tenetti.org GPG key: http://tenetti.org/phpwiki/index.php/KevinSeghett
Some flash new hardware subsidized by Microsoft!
You'll need a pretty decent box to stream 6 mp3's simultaneously through sound cards. Signal loss will be a factor going long distances.
In the future, you may want to stream more than just music to each room - video, perhaps? Internet "kiosk"? Security camera? Make sure your cabling is flexible enough to handle whatever you might want to send. Will a single computer be able to meet the demands of 6 video streams simultaneously? Maybe 1 server per floor would work better. How could wireless technology make your job easier?
Just some ideas...
I'll tell you how my old man did it. Hang on.. Four+ cables strung through the walls and walla.. instant audio/video throughout the entire house, garage, and patio. Amazing....
Moron.
Well, if you're going to go Linux, ALSA supports multiple sound cards pretty nicely, just tell XMMS (or whatever media player it will be) to use the different /dev/ devices (use devfsd). My first though was an implementation in Windows, Winamp also offers you the choice which soundcard you want to use, although one has to wonder about the IRQ hell of 6 of them in the same computer!
VNC wouldn't be such a good idea, because AFAIK it grabs the pointer so you'll probably end up with a situation where 2 or more people in different rooms wrestle for control of the pointer. A thin X display that connects to the server would work ok, although that would mean 6 computers in 6 different rooms, and when you already have that, it'd probably be wiser to have a "1 MP3-fileserver and 6 clients that draw MP3s across the ethernet" setup. Or you can just use SSH (or even telnet) to connect to the server and let them use mp3blaster, a text-based interface. Yeah, ugly, you can put it to the bottom of your list. But if the 6 clients need 6 "real" computers, it'll be so much waste - with SSH you can connect from a Palm Pilot, but then you'll need 802.11b for significant distances, and you can only get that from high end Palms..
But oh, depending on how long the VGA cable must be, you can always have 2 computers, each with 1xAGP, 2xPCI graphic cards and 3xPCI sound cards, and one of them as an NFS server for the other.. or even use the on-board sound. That should be easier to set-up, IMO.
Anyway, have a lot of fun, IMO you should document the process with lots of pics and put it up on a server, you can then wear the proud tag of "I've been slashdotted".
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
http://www.arrakis-systems.com/Consumer_Audio_Divi sion/index-consumer.html
This is a very slick (expensive) machine that does exactly what you need. Six independent outputs all with their own serial port for control. You can use IR, X-10, or a high end controller such as Crestron. This unit plays MP2 file format. You can either drop a CD in for autorip/CDDB lookup, or you can upload via USB.
We'll expect a play-by-play with images when you're done with this cool project ;-)
I have a setup whereby I run a linux file server with a "media" directory. All users have permission to read from this directory and upload to "incoming". My house is completely networked with 4 servers and a pc in all common areas and laptops for each person in the house. All systems are setup to mount the samba share upon login. Each users winamp, xmms, kazaa, etc, is setup to use the shares.
I have an old laptop with a decent sound card which outputs to my entertainment center where I can play mp3's on my home stereo from the "aux" input.
It's not the best setup, but it works and considering all the machines we have anyway, there wasn't any sense in *not* sharing everyone's favorite mp3's with everyone else. And the cost was minimal.
Of course it will work for any popular desktop OS, but currently, we're migrating everything but the box I use for web development (flash) to linux.
Jerry Fletcher,
Privacy Protection By:
http://www.cotse.net/servicedetails.html
The slimp3 is a good place to start. You can use one network share and send out synced or seperate streams. http://www.slimdevices.com/
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
One six minute Ogg file at 256 kB/sec takes up about 10MB of space, which translates to 10 hours of music per gigabyte. At about $1/gig, a 100 GB hard drive will cost around $100, and will hold 1000 hours of music, without having to rotate anything. Figure an average of 4 minutes a file, and you're looking at 15,000 songs, compared to 19 on a CD. A 50-pack of CDs costs $17, for 34 cents, and you'll need about 789 70-minute CDs, for a total cost of $268.26.
Since the CD option costs more per-song and is more inconvenient (since you have to change the CDs every 70 minutes), I'd judge it inferior.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Wireless would work for LAN communications but I don't see how wireless would help with connecting speakers, video, etc.
well, if your systems use linux you could always make it so the other computers each have permission to one of the sound cards in /dev.. tben just tell their xmms to play to it.
I have to admit, I'm a head-over-heels lover of my SliMP3s.
/. ticker every 15 minutes on each unit, just because I can.
The reasons you should be too:
It's platform independent, but is also really tightly integrated into your itunes/musicmatch/winamp playlists. A single server, whatever your religion, can saturate the network before the server gets bogged down. This said, I recommend a Mac server, just because iTunes is amazing, and I really don't like having to deal with Linux config when I'm not being paid to.
$200/unit, and all the playlists on your network can be streamed from one location. At 10/100 speeds, it'd take about 15-20 of the things to saturate your network, if they were all running at the same time.
All of your libraries and playlists will be shared and distributed thruout the house. Doesn't matter if you're going to a boom box with a ghetto-wired cassete adaptor. Run cat5 to the room (cheap), and choose the most suited amplification method, from powered speakers, to a MacGyvered boom box, to a proper receiver.
The company is super cool, comes out with feature updates constantly, and the server software is open source, should you choose to use the built-in Perl powered httpd server versus just using a remote.
I'm not an employee of Slim Devices, just an insanely happy customer. That's a whole lot of elegance in a small, inexpensive package.
And it plays a mean game of Tetris, gives my weather report, and does a
Now you want to put 6! amplifiers inside the computer. And then run it to amplifiers at line level (you'll want balanced, 3 pin lines) to amplifiers to the speakers (or are you running long runs of TOSlink optical cable
This is hardly a new thing to tackle. Folks like smarthome and others carry multichannel amps with remote controls.
You are prepared to drop a couple grand on amplfiers and a couple more on controls as well as on the speakers, right? (better this than spending money on television and cable and whatnot).
But I'm looking at... computer.
Wireless or Ethernet.
Streaming.
slimp3 can turn files into sound in the room you're in.
No audio noise as you run line level 40-60' to local amps.
No specialized amps, you can attach it to that Kenwood your dad still has in the garage for your garage. You can attach another to the nice amp in the entertainment room.
put conduit in the walls instead of just running wires, that way later you can change the wires for the next technology that comes along.
Sure, if you've got more money than brains, you could do that.
But if you're going to wireless speakers (which invariably suck because there's another stage of conversion or modulation, then transmission, then demodulation), you could simply use centrally-located older machines (ie. cheap) and use wireless keyboards or other means to remote control them.
Lots of the solutions under consideration seem to involve having VNC hosts and other junk like that. Why? I don't get it. Here's how this former professional audio technician would do it:
Remember, sound quality is dependent on the electronic quality of the sound card you're using, not on the CPU speed of the processor. Generally, if it can play an MP3 without skipping, it's fast enough. DO look for *old* Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound cards where the output amplifiers are in 8 pin DIP packages with "LM741" on them; in under 10 minutes you can bring them to almost the sound quality of the finest $2000 CD players.
And don't do stupid things that say "I think car audio is KEWL" and run unbalanced line-level audio all over the house unnecessarily. Run Cat-5 all over the house; run the sound card outputs to the amplifier as neatly and as shortly as possible in each room.
If you do it that way and have a good quality stereo system (ie. the speakers are actually made of wood and the amp claims it's only 50W but seems to weigh over 75lbs anyway), your fidelity will be limited mostly by the quality of the MP3s you're playing.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
There are a number of mp3 streaming appliances hitting the market now, and most of them support the use of concurrent independent listening sources using the same mp3 library, served up to the codec/client appliance by a single server.
My favorite is at www.slimp3.com, which has the added benefit of being open source, but no optical output.
The playback quality supposedly varies quite a bit (by codec) from manufacturer to manufacturer. Do homework if you are purchasing at this point in time.
I'm a month away from picking up my own slimp3 and a wireless bridge.
how did you know i was jewish? i'm genuinely impressed.
/me faints at the memories of horrible ISA IRQ/DMA/IO conflicts with ONE off-brand POS soundcard back in the nineties... ~8(
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I'm also working on this exact same project. I'm planning to start a major remodeling job on my house starting this fall. Many of the things you are looking to do I'm also trying to accomplish. Here's the general outline of my plans:
;-) ) to play the same music. I will need to be able to adjust the volume levels independently in each room, as well as needing an easy way to "mute" a room or all of the music in all of the rooms, FROM ANY ROOM.
Bedrooms: I'm only running Cat5. Each room will have a custom built PC with a decent sound card and speakers. These machine are for the kids to watch videos, do homework, play games, listen to music, etc. Each of these machine will boot into some sort of GNU/Linux (right now the plan is Gentoo) as the primary OS. Unfortunately, they will also have a Win2K boot option for playing games. Util WineX/Transgamign goes GPL or many more games (thank you BioWare for NWN) go native Linux, I'm afraid that Win2K will remain in my, and my kids life.
Den, Kitchen, dining room, backyard patio: A pair of decent speakers mounted to the wall with the speaker cables neatly tucked away out of sight.
Family room: I plan on building a custom home theater PC running GNU/Linux that will be used as a PVR, TV, CD player, DVD Player, CD Ripper, DVD Ripper. Also attached will be a VHS for the older tapes. This machine will be hooked up to a nice 5.1 (or better) speaker system. These speakers will be "switchable" to also play "piped-in" music as well.
I have several "scenarios" that I want my A/V system to support:
1.Party: In this scenario, I would like to "program" all of the speakers in the Den, Kitchen, dining room, backyard patio, and family room (which will all be on the first for (except the backyard patio
2.Clusters of people doing stuff: I can see myself cooking dinner, in the kitchen, while one of my kids is playing with a friend in the living room. I would like to listen to my own music in the kitchen while my kids either watch videos (on the HTPC) or listening to "piped" music, radio, or Internet radio from a "audio server". The other rooms are "silent". In other words I can deliver independent audio to individual rooms. (By Internet radio I mean consumer Internet radio as well as shout/icecast)
I'm looking for an integrated/elegant solution. I would like an audio server in the basement that can be remotely controlled from each room that play music from an audio library of OGG files, Internet radio sources or radio tuner cards in any combination.
(I also plan to have a video server, actually a simple file server, with backed-up DVD images to act as a video server (thank you dvdbackup))
I don't want desktops or laptop scattered around the house actually doing the "audio work". I'm figuring that any PC on my home network can create/manipulate audio playlists that can be played in all rooms or an arbitrary subset. I will need to develop an "integrated remote control" system. I'm thinking of small, embedded, computers with an integrated LCD touch screen and networking that I will mount in the wall in each room on the first floor, as well as on the back of the house. These computers would provide a touch screen interface for controlling the audio in that room (with the option to control audio in other rooms or throughout the house). The controls would include volume levels, muting, playlist control, and the ability to choose from Internet or broadcast radio sources. In the family room it must also be possible to "switch" the speakers from the "piped" audio to the HTPC. When these wall mounted computers are inactive they would display the date/time and weather (or something).
I have also considered PDAs with 802.11 but I like the fixed solution from a clutter/aesthetics point-of-view. Also, PDAs like remotes will take a lot of abuse and tend to get lost. On the other hand, I have not ruled out the PDA solution yet.
Ok, now you know what I'm looking to do, here's where I'm at:
And mapped a drive on the machines, so media player can do the work. a file server, the computers do the actual browsing and playing, and nobody has to listen to the same thing the others are listening to. I can play over an 802.11 connection, or via the 100base network at home.
"There's no problem that the proper application of high explosives can't solve" Cpl Miller www.mindlayer.com
Why would anyone use anything but wireless, networked devices? I don't get it, sorry.
The best household mp3 solution that I've found is the SliMP3 (http://www.slimdevices.com). I've got two of them. It's a small, elegant hardware interface for your mp3 server that connects to your stereo. It uses a Perl app as it's server, so it works well with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It also has a web interface, supports mp3 and AAC, and has a responsive support line. Check it out.
I agree with the other comments regarding the SLIMP3. It is THE way to go for getting MP3 sound on your stereo. The software is open source to boot!
Deep breath, inhale, exhale. There. All better now?
I did this with an old p133 and 2 soundblaster cards. The server sits in the den with 2 amps connected to it and speaker wire running to the speakers in the diffrent rooms. Its all controlled via 2 web based interfaces (one for each zone) and works out really slick
http://gid0ze.net/roomjuice/
The SLIMP3 is a device that will stream mp3 files from your already existing file server. No extra hard drive is necessary. The code for it is open sourced and there are quite a few user-made hacks for it. The SLIMP3 just outputs to normal RCA connections which can act as an input into your normal stereo receiver. It even has a nice looking screen to show the song ID3 data.
This way, you have as much storage as you want and you can use your normal stereo receiver to control the speaker outputs to each speaker installation. It's a lovely solution!
First of all, somewhere in the world, there's a webcast output plugin for xmms. Configure a copy of xmms to use it on the server machine, and point all your vnc sessions at that copy of xmms which is webcasting currently. Then you can have each of the smaller machines receive the webcast (just run a little daemon wrapper script around mpg123 that connects to the main server with a retry or something of the sort) and output it to their personal set of speakers with your method of choice.
You control music selections for the whole house from that xmms window, but i suppose you could have a local xmms window as well to play shared files from the server (or local files even) in a room-specific way. If you can somehow make the webcasting use broadcast packets or something you can probably minimize latency, but it could still be an issue (of course six sound cards would be only marginally better, since they'll all have different latencies anyhow, unless they are identical *and* written at the same time).
Of course the real stereo system style solution is to get a receiver with as many outputs as you need. six is commonplace and ten or twenty is not unheard of. Then you can run speaker wire (long distances if needed) to the locations. You can still VNC up those LCDs as much as you desire to. This, in conjuntion with a nice sound card would probably sound considerably better than your six sound card solution, though you'd never be able to change music in one room and not another.
If you use more than one sound card (either in one or many computers), you're going to need some way to handle latency differences. It really depends on how you use your house. If you can ever, in any appreciable way, hear two rooms at once then there's really no tolerance for latency differences at all, but if you're wiring rooms far from eachother (for instance the family room and the patio and the master bedroom, but nothing else), then the webcast solution is probably a better bet (and presumably uses existing wiring since someone asking such a question would be more likely to have run cat5 than speaker wire)
Good luck.
Brian
What ever wire/cable you run you will wish it was something else 4 years from now.
Run conduit if you must run something.
I ran lots of phone line and some coax when I had the walls open.
Later ran better coax (RG6).
I now use cordless phones.
Later fished CAT 5 into a number of rooms.
radio link is now replacing CAT 5
Wish I had another run of coax to each room
(second satelite)
Does EVERYONE in your household want to listed to
the same music? Best each room have a seperate
set up.
My Duron 1.1ghz/256RAM never, never, never skips. Hell, half the time Winamp keeps on playing after the damn thing locks up completely. I've played while defragging, while doing various kinds of encoding, all sorts of things. I don't know that I've ever created a situation with 100% CPU load and saturated IDE channels at the same time, but I don't know that I ever would, so it doesn't matter. Neither of those separately seems to cause a problem...
lol
Most of a CD's cost is not the media; it's the licensing and fees. Try adding in the cost of licensing 100GB of music, and don't tell me you got it all off MP3.com.
You could just chain a bunch of those 1/8 splitters together until you had enough inputs to your sound card for all of your speakers...
Just buy a turtle beach "audiotron". They connect to your home network and can index your mp3 connection over the network. Then you can hook speakers up to the audiotron and play as many different streams as you want. Voila! There's also a similar product from SonicBlue which are available on ebay for about $100US.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
First off, read the below past comments on this article. It ran just recently, and will answer alot of your questions concerning maximum suggested length of audio cable to run, among other options for wiring.
Best Options for a Home Entertainment Network?
Second, you really have to analyze your scenario (i.e. length of audio cord, zoning, etc.) to determine how you want to serve and interface with your MP3 server(s). My opinion, run as much damn ethernet as possible....lots and lots I tell you (unless of course you just install smurf tube). Additionally, dont be silly and attempt to control the volume from the server software. Keep your recievers at a nice level, and install inwall slider switches for volume control to the speakers.
Now to go off the deep end, I will describe my scenario, and all the n-th opinions that I debated with.
I wanted 3 zones in my home: Basement, Kitchen/Living Room/Dining Room, Master Bedroom/Bathroom. Each room has its own set of square inwall speakers, or round ceiling speakers; however are clumped in the zones as described. Server must be out of site in the basement wash room (Wife requirement 1.001.A).
So after measuring how much audio cable I would have to run from the basement to the 3rd floor master bedroom/bathroom, it was time for a new plan (the other zones are no problem since the other zone is directly above the basement wash room).
My scenario is that I originally wanted one MP3 server with multiple audio cards. After many nights giving this a try with XMMS, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player (8, 9, 8-SDK, 9-SDK) I came to the conclusion that it is a pain in the butt. This is especially true if you are using multiple brands of audio cards and/or older machines. Additionally, this still does not solve your multiple reciever problem (or buying a little more expensive mulitple input/output reciever). If you have multiple older machines, use those for multiple severs, *not* client selection machines....I will get to this later.
Because I had such a stretch from the server room to the bedroom zone, I decided that I will need to have another server in the bedroom. I toggled between the option of either a Hush Computer or a Audiotron. Both are silent, small, and look nice in your TV cabinet.
Even though the AudioTron, Winamp, XMMS, all have APIs; I decided a long time ago that I would write my own MP3 server software with WMP SDK and DirectX (so guess my choice of OS). Because I have complete control of the software I created my audio network as such:
You shouldn't run audio (that is, amp output over speaker cables) long distances because you'll lose bass. (Amount depends on the amps damping factor. Basically the amp can't control the woofer and it doesn't sound tight.) If you must have a centralized audio source, you should run line level output to an amplifier for speakers in each room, using high quality shielded cable. This is how it's done in recording studios.
The more complex you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stuff up the drain.
.mp3 and other media .mp3 and other media
!my solution! between three rooms.
Living room amp, with inputs and outputs
5 disk DVD, Digital cable, VCR
Kitchen amp, using tape inputs / outputs.
Turn table
Computer noock -> living room (audio over cat 5)
Hollywood recorder
cheepo computer speakers.
Fileserver downstairs
file share of
web server of
------------------
If I want to hear shit in the kitchen playing from the living room, I press the tape monitor button, I hear whatever that amp recieves.
If I want to hear vinyl from the kitchen in the living room, I just put the amp in the living room on aux.
If I wish to hear MP3s I have two choices
1. Burn to disk, play on DVD player
2. Turn VCR to aux, play mp3 over analog wire
a> play files from computer nook
b> play files from network
-------------
I read this post and it seems like you are making your life too complex with having one PC with several sound cards. That sounds like a pain in the tookus.
If you are wired for cat5, cat5 is adquate for both network and line level audio, though it's probally highly reccomend that you use a seperate run for audio.
If you want cool spiffy pretty much wireless, well then go with standard issue FM stereo transmitter. Not enough range? Well you can use a non used cat5 connnection as an antena to improve reception. FM broadcast through your walls with cat5 would open the door to just using a radio walkman to hear what you want to hear. Existing technology.
Either FM or wire for your transport, it just beocmes a simple matter of having an amp in each room. Doesn't require computers to listen.
-----------
But what if you want something to play something diffrent in each room?
File share / http server... both winamp and xmms support this. Simple PC each room, old laptop should be dandy.
----------
Remote control?
If I want to play from my linux box, I just use xmms and export the display to my pc running xserver software. There was a *dos* based player which might work via telnet, it looks a touch blocky but gets the job done. Otherwise there are many solutions that offer wireless control.
I'm sure there are other solution that employ the use of cgi scripts so you can choose via a simple system that will look much more neat, but hey, i'm happy with just xmms displaying on my PC. Works just great for me.
--------------
The brief....
Centralized sound player, have an option to play to all rooms. FM or wire and an amp. Can be implemented for pretty damn low cost.
Centralized media library, choose a selection from a server.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Their slimp3 and server already does this, over ethernet...
Save yourself the hassle.
I have had one since the first production run, and it's the best audio device I've ever bought.
Best of all, both the server and firmware are Open Source.
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Buying each CD will cost money, no denying that, but if you listen to the original CD, you'll only have 10-12 songs instead of the estimated 19. Using the four-minute average, you'll then have 40-48 minutes of music until you'll have to rotate. You will not be able to listen to arbitrarily selected bands in an arbitrary order, which is part of the main reason of going to MP3/Ogg to begin with and doesn't have a particular monetary value. That's also assuming that the entire CD is worth listening to all in one go.
The licensing cost of 100GB of music will be the same regardless of whether it's on the CD or hard drive. While it may be cheaper to use the original CD medium, it will not be more convenient for listening to music selections in arbitrary order, so it comes down to a question of whether it's more worthwhile to avoid paying a dime an hour or to avoid changing CDs every 48 minutes.
Additionally, I believe it's cheaper to license from iTunes than from CD. However, I gather that this project may not be possible using the AAC files from iTunes.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Info here
Run Cat 5 to each of these in every room. Set up a file server containing all of your music (windows or linux will do just fine).
-ted
You may be interested in Jukebox, it's what I wrote for our student union and it works like a charm.
If you launch multiple copies of it (it's written in C++ and not very memory-hungry), you can easily use it to serve over multiple sound cards.
I currently run it on Linux and FreeBSD.
I'd be happy just to get this peice of shit Compaq to work. In the old days, comp companies built their computers like fucking tanks. How horrible. Below is my current PC company banlist:
Dell
Compaq
HP
Gateway
hrrm.
Running symetrical multiple sound cards under any version of Windows or Linux is hell, I speak from experience. Although a Linux driver actually cured a cross channel hum problem I couldn't eliminate with Windows software and two SB 32s.
I have run two Sb 32 awe's with some success back when Creative actually spent some real money on it's audio designs. However the ever present 128 live version and up craps big ones. I made the mistake of upgrading, the good old 32 awe's are now back and doing the job! (I use my PC to quickly do audio recording of musical ideas I write/play, then I mix my composed parts to check my harmonies. I also have found that recording music snipets to harddrive is a good way to preserve new musical ideas and time stamp them).
I have an older asus p3 dual slot-one mother board with Pci and Isa slots and the sound is not too bad if you are not interested in high quality audio like 24/96 and up digital recording.
Signal to noise is no problem for audio companies anymore, the average "music consumer" can't tell the difference anyway. The new cheap crap I've heard with p4 and newer Sb cards is not even close in quality to the older expensive hardware.
My advice to you, if you are an audiofile, is not to use crap PC sound cards at all. Their drivers suck, their sig to noise ratios really suck on their line outs. Worse, the digital out is prone to interference interupts from within the PC, (emr caused by fans, cheap drives etc). The PC sound card is the biggest (P)iece of (C)rap ever to polute the world of music.
Use real audio devices not crappy, hyped up toys like PC sound cards!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
One thing you have to be careful of (and this is expierence) is that if you want to stream the same content to all the rooms you need to make sure that everything is within about 25ms sync of each other (if not less) otherwise you will hear echos if not just total noise.
This is one of the problems with MP3 streaming as a normal client will buffer 3-4 seconds before playing which can lead to the loss of sync. As such the sound card is a good idea...
HTH
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
the word you spell "tamber" is actually spelled "timbre" - and now you'll be able to look it up to make sure i'm right. :)
Everything Z80 has mentioned, I have experience with, but I think that all of it needs to be taken to the next level and combined to really be of use for this sort of thing. Both more than one sound card and VNC is overkill for this applications, IMHO. I believe that some of the more basic concepts behind these need to be combined with other concepts for a full featured system.
I actually have a system with _some_ of these features in my house, but it isn't as easy to switch between souces as I would like it to be. I can play audio an video (DVD, MP3, VHS, Cable, CD, Radio, etc.) from different sources in different parts of my house to all other parts of my house. I audibly compress the sources so that the commercials and other LOUD sources don't blow my ears. Plus I can control the content in each room from within each room. But it takes a little leg-work to switch the source depending on what I am switching to and from where. I would like to make this much easier and multi-facetted as Z80 is looking to do, but have more important things to do than spend _all_ my time on this project...
I have some basic requirements:
- Control from any room.
- Low overall cost for minimum multiroom functionality, but more money payed will give greater system capabilities.
- one server able to serve each and every room with different content (video and/or audio).
- total control from any room unless someone is in one of the other rooms. This lets you control the whole "castle" if you are the only one home, yet not interfere with someone elses' entertainment if you didn't know they were home...
- built in such a way that it will work *no_matter* what companies live or die. In other words, open and/or standardized formats.
- robust and electrically seperate from internet for security reasons, but able to connect to the internet so that content from the internet can be fully enjoyed.
- Ability to plug any of the modern devices into any room to be *connected* to all sources. Let's see: laptop, palm device, IPod, active surround music and/or video system, etc.
- very Low power consumption when powered off.
I see the data cables (wishfully optics) to have a standard protocol with an upgradable interface in every room that converts to all other current formats.We must constantly realize that all things we enjoy today were only once imagined.
I could go on and on, but I look to the /. community to blow my mind!
--Axigrav :-)
What is the difference between a guitar player and a savings bond?
The bond will eventually mature and start earning money.
BPM Studio Gastro Can output 6 independent mp3 streams with a suitable sound card(s):
http://www.alcatech.com/
I've been happily using their DJ software for years.
from the website:
The BPM Studio Gastro Features
Sound management from one central system
Arrange different playlists with the music of your choice and
direct them to each of the 6 areas.
Control your playlists, volume and sound needs for any area
in realtime.
Intelligent playlists
(store titles in any order, sort and rearrange them anytime)
Archiving of several 10.000 titles possible
Comprehensive drag & drop support
Fooled me, I thought you were Muslim.
And some usb networking dongles. The mods for the audio out on the i-opener are (were) around on the net. The audio is passable/good. They run off of around 40 watts, so you won't heat up the house or go broke paying the electricity. Use the central machine as a file server.
Alternately, the Via Eden machines do a nice job of this. The nice thing here is that they have enough guts to play DVDs back over the network. (DVD over 10baseT is passable, over 100baseT more than adequate). This was my approach to the solution when I decided that I wanted to stream DVDs off my central repository(s). Prior to streaming DVD content, an I-opener (K6 mod) was more than enough, plus you have the advantage of a small LDC display thrown in for no additional cost.
You could use one of those to control the server from anywhere in the house.
Dude !
What I do not undersatnd: You can have cables in the walls. And you want to lay audio cables in order to transmit analogue audio, that requires an Amp and speakers in each room ?
Why don't you replace the audio cable by CAT5 or CAT6 ? Then you can transmit ALL data on the cable (yes, even MP3) and watch video, listen audio, surf the web, play games wherever you have a network-client, evaulating this data. All you will need is some multimedia cabable thin-clients in each receiving room and a pair of active-speakers.
Maaannn... here is what I have done/do at my home:
I live in my own two room apartment, one kitchen one bath and toilet.
- I have CAT5E in the walls,
two patches in the kitchen, two in the bedroom and two in the "couch-corner" of my living-room- (this is wehre my AV Receiver and selfmade MediaServer is)
as well as all the other ends of these cables in- another corner, where my DSL modem, switch and HomeServer is,
along with my micro-home office.Today all PC solutions have a few things in common:
This is how the MediaServer is built up:
Please note, that the fastest component must be the HDD, according to how many streams you want to transmit simultaneously. The CPU could even be a VIA C3 Nehemiah (<Celeron) but I want to be able to rip CDs quickly with this system, that is why I have a P4.
This system is cabable of streeaming simultaneously (!) several media streams (MPEG2/4, MP3/Ogg, etc.) to any location in the appartment !
I did not practically test multiple asnyc streams, as I am out of money for a while
For the bedroom:
For the kitchen:
As for the software...that still is not perfect. At the moment I have set up an icecast server and VideoLAN. This would allow for comfortbale media streaming to Windows and Linux clients, however I plan my own software, though based on these (as well as on Mozilla and DirctFB, maybe gstreamer)
To say "Multiroom" in 2003 is the same to say "Ethernet". That simple.
amix (not logged in)
Not to piss all over the hax0r spirit, but why not look into something like the Audiotron from Turtle Beach. It's a bit on the pricey side, but it's great for serving up (actually receiving) MP3s to a stereo over CAT5 from some machine in your home.
Uncle Eazy
Is there any SlimMP3 kind of unit BUT with wireless access ? The product offered by slimp3 looks awesome, but if I could get away with the wiring, that would be even better !
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
HE DOES NOT NEED 6 SOUNDCARDS FOR 6 DIFFERENT AUDIO-STREAMS !
He needs a server, that can STREAM 6 different BINARY streams to 6 different thin clients in his house.
In addition, he will be able to watch MPEG4 also, adding a little of decoding power to the clients.
It wont be much more expensive than putting an amplifier into each room. (Because this will be a need in order to get somewhat decent quality)
Multiroom is ethernet these days... I just don't get it so few really realize.
And with such thin-clients (for audio any 99 Euro [+RAM] EPIA 533MHz thin-client [fanless, diskless]+ PC speakers will do, add 70USD for MPEG4, add 250 Euro (client needs DOC/DOM, so more expensive) for DOC/DOM local boot) you have IRDA so no need for WiFi/PDA remotes (which such anyway, as long they do not do the Bluetooth trick)
amix (not logged in)
One six minute Ogg file at 256 kB/sec takes up about 10MB of space...
One six minute Ogg file at 256 kB/sec takes up about 90MB of space you moron!
b - bit
B - byte
Cram it into your thick skull!
Install OpenBSD. Plug in six audio devices (USB, ISA, PCI). Create /dev/audio0 through 5. Direct mpg123 to each port. Duh.
a wee while ago , i (for the sake of experimentation) was able to play 4 160 kb/sec mp3's on a k5 133 with 16 meg ram simutainiously using mpg123. 5 made the sound "skip" or whatever the technicle term is , must of been just a wee bit to much :) So any modern processor will be fine for decoding speed.
My house is wired with CAT5, every room
leading down to the server room with a
couple of patch panels.
Taking my trusty Dremel I modded some
CAT5 cables so that output from my MP3
player went into the wall and came out
in the server room. Now took random
patch cables and hooked-up outputs around
the house. After this success, I devised
two CAT5-to-speaker cable types (LEFT and
RIGHT) that let me hook up speakers in
any room in the house.
Actually, it works well. I never thought
UTP would carry the speaker signal, but it
does, and the computer network does not
seem to mind.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
You should donate to the EFF or some other charity.
If you have an Athlon or pentium 4 - use the new BeOSMax V3 (Direct download). It's got pretty much the newest drivers for BeOS, supporting much more than the personal edition. If you've got a pentium and install Max or MiniMax, use the old Gif Translator (not 1.3, there's an incompatabillity there.)
I'm guessing that you could run multiple instances of Be In Your Sterio on different ports (8080,8081...) and stream to all your other machines. If you've got bottom of the barrel pentiums, BeOS rocks on those. They should be able to play mp3s fine. 120mhz, 64(ok 32??) Ram, and a 500meg harddrive should do for the clients(don't quote me - it's been awhile since I looked). Check out this page for more links and tips.. I'm sure you could find something else on BeBits that would fit the bill.
BeOS will let you play about a thousand mp3s at the same time with no skipping, it's got gerbil crack in it or something...
You can replace the LM741 with any number of audibly superior amplifiers. Here are some to try (in Order of quality). AD711, TLE2071, 5534 (must put a 20 Pf capacitor beween pins 1 and 8), TLO72, LF351, TLO81 (available at Radio Shack). Any of these will blow away the LM741 sound wise.
Sheesh - I can't believe that, in the 21st century, anybody would still want to put sound cards in a central server and pipe ANALOG around the home??
Make a centralized server which uses a modern set of protocols (RTP, RTSP, RTCP, over UDP, etc.) to transmit multiple sessions of multicast streamed audio and video. The vlc/vls client/server is just one example of an open source system offering most, if not all, of these capabilities.
Some open source systems let you use a local client to control a back channel to get "remote control" capabilities over a chosen stream.
Put Cat5e+ or Cat6 cable in the walls. You will want at least 100mbit ethernet all around to handle the bandwidth requirements (presumably you will want video eventually.) Using at least Cat5e+ lets you upgrade to at least 1Gbps without ripping the wire out of the walls...
Or you can do it wirelessly with 802.11g (802.11b is too slow for quality video, esp. if you want real-time), either instead of wire or as an adjunct to wire.
Put thin clients all around your house. Each thin client (and each fat networked machine) can serve as a remote presentation terminal for your audio/video/multimedia broadcasts. Assuming a low-latency, high-bandwidth network, high quality source material, and server with the right stuff, the quality (audio, video) at the individual terminal is limited only by the presentation components (DAC/amplifier/speakers for audio, video card/display for video, etc..) in that terminal.
Something like this is a better alternative to running grungy, noisy line level analog audio all over the place...
While you're at it, use your thin clients as SIP VOIP telephones, then you can get rid of the phone wires, the legacy phones, AND the audio cables..
Then, for even more fun, integrate this system with your RFID tag-based badge system (or video face recognition system) so that your program of choice will follow you around the house from room to room!
-mdz
I am doing exactly this right now.
I originally wrote a multichannel MP3 server in Visual Basic, with a client to run on a separate computer to build playlists and control the system. Of course, who want to run Windows on a server? - not me, so I started learning Perl, and re-wrote it so I can run the server (Perl) on my Linux box, and run the same client (Perl/Tk) whether I'm booted into Linux or Windows. There is a bit of info on my website about the old Windows version, but I havn't finished writing the info about my new Perl version yet (doh!).
I chose to use Soundblaster 5.1 cards, because:
a) the quality is pretty good (well compared to some crappy cheapo cards anyway)
b) They are widely available and fairly cheap, and have a linux driver
c) They have a (working!) SPDIF output
And most importantly:
d) You can assign front/rear outputs as separate DSP devices, so you get 2 'zones' per card.
At the moment I have 2 cards, to give me 4 zones - It runs multiple instances of MPG321, and it only uses about 1.5% CPU per stereo output on my 1200MHz Duron, so adding more cards should not be a problem.
I feed the outputs to a 4 channel car-amplifier (yes!) so I can get 2 rooms per amplifer. Sound quality is fine, and I can power the amplifiers off the 12V of the server computer (I might need a seperate supply soon though if I add any more amplifiers!). For the main room I feed the lineout into my AV amplifier instead. (I used to run an SPDIF into it, but have a problem setting an individial SB5.1 card to use the digital output - it's all the cards digital, or all analog it would seem...). I made a patch panel using 4-pole Speakon sockets, and run all the speakers back to them. I can then patch the amplifiers through to the speakers on a room-by-room basis.
I avoided a distributed system as I don't want a load of old PCs scattered around the place, with noisy fans, sucking power. I prefer the centralized system, so the server/amps/patch panel are all out of the way in one place.
As for remotely controlling it, well the server listens on a TCP socket for commands, such as PLAYLIST:1:PLAY, GET:PLAYLIST:3 etc etc, and either returns info (such as a list of albums for a selected artist), or controls the player. So I wrote a client in Perl/Tk which I use as the main interface, but also have written a small lirc client so I can use my Pronto to control it. Of course, it's a bit more limited because you can only send commands, and not build playlists etc coz there is no feedback on a IR remote!
Oh and also a small CGI client so I can control from a web-browser (mainly Konquerer on my Zaurus by wi-fi, so I can wander about).
I too would like some touch panels so I can install them in each room. I would probably again write the software in Perl/Tk to run full-screen on the panel, and send/receive commands over Ethernet. But I just ain't got the $$$ for the screens.
I was thinking of building a small control panel using an LCD character display plus keypad, controlled by a PIC. It would use one of those embedded Ethernet transceivers inside an RJ45 socket (can't find the link, sorry) to plug it into my existing network (after I run cable to the appropriate place on the wall), oh and with Power-over-Ethernet too.
Ben
In our student flat we use a pentium 100 (running debian GNU/Linux), which is able to simultaniously decode 2 mp3 streams through 2 soundcards. We've written a nice little deamon which does the mp3/ogg/wav (whatever, it uses xmms plugins) decoding, and it;s controlled by a webinterface, whcih also includes a search and browse function, that let's you add, remove files and browse the playlist. It works like a charm :)
If you would want to have more channels, I'd recommend using 2 soundblaster live's (this will give you up to 6 stereo channels) and a little more computing power (something like a celeron 300 or something will do the trick)
Like I said with regard to the costs, you have to license the music regardless. Putting it through a computer jukebox is just an expression of that license that requires further costs. Hence, you must compare straight CDs to licensed music + the media access system for a computer. You cannot compare the storage for copyrighted media to the cost of licensing the media.
Ok you want multiple streams, a handy web based interface? How about otto?
You can use multiple sound cards that connect to the localhost and play via mpg123 or you can stream them to other clients around the house, or they can listen to their own stream.
HOME=/path/1 xmms
HOME=/path/2 xmms
Buy an iPod and carry it around with you room to room :D
I use it here too! Go to your local radioshop, buy (parts for) a cheap and ultralowpower FM transmitter, hook it up to the oldest mp3capable box you got et voila: MP3 all over the house and in the surroundings. Just make sure you don't bother your neighbours favourite radioshow. But think about how many radio's you allready got, portable and stationary. If you want hifi in some rooms you can still bother with cables etc but this should take care of the toilet, the music while washing your car or the portable you use in the garden. I use it for my alarmclock, with a corresponding script to wake me up with some good music.
Mod the parent back up please... don't ever loose sight of the analog and simple way...
SqyD
To minimize costs i guess that you will want one pc in a central place. It should then be possible to control it remotely in some way.
/Esben
I don't know how much you are into electronics, but it would be possible to make some kind of mixer (maybe software based) that would send a different signal every time a butten is pushed. That way you don't have to walk back to the central pc just to get a different signal.
At first i wanted to place the amplifiers centralized, but when i thought about it; Unless you can get amps with multiple channels at the same time that doesn't matter. That way you are free to either put them by the pc or in the room. You will need an amp for each set of speakers. I don't that that there will be a great degrade in sound quality unless you have a very big house.
To give an overview of the setup i would make:
centralized pc with mp3's. has a sound card for each room -> connected with an amp for each room -> In each room there is a little button which interfaces with the pc somehow. This button cycles through all the different signals played by the pc. You have to write some software for this, but it should be trivial. To extend it a little you could make one more button. This would change song or whatever.
Just some thougts
"Nobody really checks their email any more. They just delete their spam"
I've been planning to add a web server for control and streaming in the next release.
Get each family member an iPod. Have them sync to a machine (OS X preferred but other OS is OK too) with a large iTunes library. Take to any room, indoors or outdoors, etc. Enjoy.
4 outputs, available seperately in the driver, good quality, dirt cheap.
All good points, if you are building a dedicated computer network, but he's moving MP3s....very light duty...
My iBook runs audio for me day and night...off my G4, via Airport & Rendevous. Bandwidth is not an issue.
How about being your own FM station. Not the CD quality you might want... but cheap... well just a thought: http://www.pc2radio.com/en/products.php?sub=pc_fm_ trans
I have had a house-based MP3 server running over NFS for years now... My solution has been to have a stereo near each computer that has local ethernet access, and just run the output from each computer's sound card to the stereo next to it. I have customized shell scripts for Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X that take the best advantage of the system's ps, mpg123 and kill programs -- if you would like a copy (and instructions for use), email me.
While this setup allows for independent songs to be played on each system (which is great for most purposes), there are times when you want to play the same song on each system -- in essence, creating a "concert" around your house. To do this, I set up Icecast on a Linux machine, gave it all of the MP3s to play, and then connect to it from each other computer via mpg123. This approach does work, but the result is less than excellent -- each connection can be timed up to a second or so off from the other ones, which creates a really weird echo effect in the house. While this can be fun for a little while (standing between two stereos you get a "live" effect from studio material), it gets old real quick.
My proposed solution to this would be find a low-power FM transmitter that you can hook up to one machine -- play MP3s from a soundcard into the FM transmitter, then tune each other stereo to the FM frequency that the transmitter is using. I must admit that I haven't tried this, so I don't know how well it would work -- I do know that the signal would sound synchronized because radio waves travel at the speed of light. I know that Griffin Technology makes the iTrip, which is an FM transmitter specifically made for Apple's iPod. It claims to only have a 10-30 foot range though (limited by FCC regulations), so I'm not sure how well it would work. I'm sure there's a company or two out there that makes a low-power FM transmitter that would work well on any output source, in any situation.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I knew some fucking idiot would say this. Fucker.
A little different from what you're asking, but here's what I did for a similar setup...
I picked up a discontinued Audrey from 3com and put that in my kitchen, networked through the powerlines using Seimens Powerline ethernet adapters. It mounts a SMB share from my Windows box (can also mount NFS shares) and plays my music through it's built-in speakers, or through attached computer speakers. There's a headphone jack on the device for external speakers.
It runs QNX with a full root shell, along with a web browser and other fun doodads. The mp3s play flawlessly (and there's a plugin for OGG) while taking up very little real estate on my counter. Anywhere I go in the apartment with a powerjack I can get to my Windows box. Wireless is also an option using a Linksys WEP11.
Best of all, my girlfriend loved it and wants me to get a couple more for the apartment. When not in [musical] use, it doubles as a digital picture frame.
Some sites to look over...
Audrey's on Ebay
AudreyHacking.com
www.linux-hacker.net Audrey Forum
Infinity flash image
Instead of using multiple sound cards I suggest you to use the Midiman Delta 1010LT cards:
8 analogue in/outs 2 digital in/outs (via spdif in/out).
The card has excellent ALSA drivers. ( http://www.alsa-project.org )
If you need more than 8 channels just use two cards.
cost: about $450 per card.
http://www.midiman.net/
The quality is outstanding (24bit in/outs)
you could perhaps save a few bucks and try to fiddle with multiple cheap stereo soundcards but things could go out of synch eventually, problems with conflicting drivers, irqs etc.
I implemented a project where I needed continuous 16 channel playback and a Linux PC with two 1010LT cards and the system works like a charm.
I've been living the wireless dream for over two years now...audio and video go full circle, with everything from my DV camera, to 2 PlayStations, to an iBook...G4...Linux box w/PVR....DVD players....big TV...VCRs, all living happily together.
:)
Computers.....home theater... it's not difficult. and I can reconfigure at the drop of a hat. Anywhere I want, inside or out.
Try it, you'll like it
Seconded. I myself would go for the M-Audio Delta 1010 (the rackmount), but the 1010LT is also, if you don't mind a hedgehog sticking out of your soundcards, a truly excellent soundcard (more or less the best you can get).
All the M-Audio cards have excellent ALSA drivers.
Its so simple:
* 1 multi I/O card e.g. 10 in/out have a look at
m-audio.
* don't use wireless for speakers unless
you wan't it to sound like a cheap handheld radio.
* use copper wiring and terminate it to points on the wall, unless using ceiling mounted speakers.
It's called BeoLink
http://www.bang-olufsen.com/sw1761.asp
Of course it's less fun to buy a system than it is to build your own.
Linux + OADJ = BINGO ;) ... link is http://www.holobit.net , page is on croatian language but OaDJ is using english version.Ask them for a demo...
What is OaDJ? It is radio automation software which runs on linux, using postgreSQL database and have two independant players (two sound cards)
As a Semi-Professional DJ using all digital technology, I have obviously have a huge selection of MP3's. I've had similar plans for my place, and the item I found that seems to provide the easiest solution is the Dell Rio Digital Audio Reciever. It plays MP3's anywhere you have a TCP/IP network conection. Just wire every room with a CAT 5 connection (you should anyway, just because!), and hook up a receiver in every room you need one in. Since I haven't actually started my project yet, I don't actually own one, but I know they come with a remote, and I assume that they come with the power capacity to operate at least a nominally acceptable set of speakers. Alternately you would have to package them with a suitable amp to drive even the most outrageous sound system. I found one on eBay, under the lisitng of
Electronics & Computers:Portable Electronics:MP3 Players
A Google search will also turn up a few references as well.
BTW, if anyone actually decides to take this route, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
DaveJ45
http://www.digitaldjkaraoke.webhop.net
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
or NMM for short, might be a software option. Every piece of hardware is considered as a "node", and it doesn't matter where this hardware is located in a network. A so-called serverregistry is aware of every speaker, monitor etc and handles sources of video & audio towards desired output devices (sinks).
From their website: "The goal of our work is to design and develop a multimedia middleware, which considers the network as an integral part and enables the intelligent use of devices distributed across a network. We are currently designing and implementing a network-integrated multimedia infrastructure for Linux (as well as other operating systems). Our unified architecture will offer a simple and easy to use interface for applications to integrate multimedia functionality. Therefore, it can be used as enabling technology for traditional multimedia applications, but also for ubiquitous computing and mobile computing. The result of our work will be made available as Open Source (LGPL and GPL). "
As far as I know there will be a cvs repository soon, and, of course, there is no ready-to-use application for the situation you describe here. But there's a tool called "clic" which is part of NMM that can be used to connect a bunch of nodes (for example the MP3ReadNode with the PlaybackNode), maybe the way you need.
I have a slimp3 and I'm satisified. I'm not familiar with mp3elf, so you'll have to do your own comparison. The software/firmware project is hosted on sourceforge.
Server -
Redhat 8 + LAMP + Netjuke (php music menuing)
Network -
Wireless 802.11B - Linksys flavor
Player Node - (at the hairy edge of wireless conn)
Dell Optiplex, Win2K, Winamp + Interactive TV skin. Elo Touchscreen Monitor. This machine is overkill, but it was laying around.
Audio out from player goes to Bose 321 system.
All audio is encoded OggVorbis approx 168KB.
Ideally, The Dell would be replaced by a mini-itx with a better sound card (optical output). Other than that, it's pretty good.
Granted, after a few more nodes on the network, the WiFi would become saturated but this works for me.
I hope you're not my neighbor, that's going to be one helluva noisy house.
I love Jesus. Even though I am not catholic, I will sneak up to their communion just to taste him.
i have a laptop, can we say portability and a decent price range? you know a laptop can be easily transported throughout any home.
I've got a very simple setup. Instead of trying to get multiple sound cards in one machine and running audio cables all over the house (or going with wireless speakers which really suck) I decided to have a central file server with all the mp3's on it, and small old notebook computers (pentium 1's) which I got cheap off ebay. Make sure you do some research before you bid, and get ones with good built in sound output, otherwise you'll have to buy some PCMCIA (or USB if they even have USB!) sound cards, etc... I've had problems with a few being too noisy, so pick and chose carefully.
In a couple of rooms, they're hooked up to good external speakers. I can additionally surf the web, read email, and ssh into other machines from them, though it's limited... 640x480 displays and low ram keep the fancy web pages from working well. But they're perfect for mp3 playback.
A word of advice - remove their batteries. They're going to be plugged into the mains all the time, so they'll be constantly charging their old batteries, and thus wear them out. Not that you'd care much either way unless you'd want to occasionally grab one and go outside in the back yard and get some sun (add a WiFi card of course.)
In my living room, I have a somewhat decent, but cheap PC hooked up to my surround sound stero and big screen TV. I've got a wireless keyboard/mouse and game pad for it, and also use it as a DVD player and game system (instead of buying a Playstation2). One of these days I'll replace it with one powerful enough to run MythTV and get rid of the TiVo.
This setup has worked very well for me, and the cheap notebooks are usually cheaper than special set top boxes that playback mp3's that you have to fiddle with crappy one line LCD screens scrolling through hundreds if not thousands of songs, etc.
YMMV, but the above works for me.
Hey,
Why run analog signals which will get noise? Get a Slimp3. Run ethernet all over your house, and be all set.
Plus, think about how you are going to control the one computer from each room. A Slimp3 has a remote.
www.slimp3.com
p.s. I don't work for Slimp3, just love using them. You could use just about any network device, I just like the slimp3 because of it's size and simple use. Plus the ability to sync multiple devices to gether and control them all through the web if you'd like.
There are also some systems that work with WiFi, so you don't even need to run wires.
I use NetJuke which streams all my MP3s to any PC on my local subnet. I also use a laptop with wireless LAN 802.11b outside on the patio which can play the streaming MP3 songs, plus I can dual boot the laptop from either Windows or Linux and still play my music. Works great for my purposes.
You may also checkout Linux InfraRed Controller LIRC for a remote control solution. Using LIRC may also allow you to use existing IR remote controls.
good luck!
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
Get an Xbox!
It does the same thing, only with video, too. (Yes, you need a TV to hook it up to)
$180, now + $50 for a mod chip and $30 for the dvd remote and it's only $60 more than the slimp3 for *WAY* more functionality.
http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/
And the software is upgradeable! It won't be a brick because something better comes along.
I used this software to make a music server in my car, but they have another project for home audio. /.)
I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but check it out anyways - it might help out on the software end of things (yes, it runs on Linux and does not require X - this is
CAJUN/HAJUN
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
CRESTRON MC2W Control Processor
CRESTRON CNXPAD8
CRESTRON CNX SERIES AMP
CRESTRON TPS1000S (inwall keypads)
Custom Serial String Handler in Simpl+/CUSTOM SCRIPT TO HANDLE THE SERIAL STRINGS
www.crestron.com
I also did your wife.
You can replace the LM741 with any number of audibly superior amplifiers. Here are some to try (in Order of quality). AD711, TLE2071, 5534 (must put a 20 Pf capacitor beween pins 1 and 8), TLO72, LF351, TLO81 (available at Radio Shack). Any of these will blow away the LM741 sound wise.
Precisely. I think Fairchild only designed the 741 as an instrumentation amplifier, so I don't know why they even ended up in audio. That being said...
Lots of audio equipment through the years has used the LM741, which is very noisy (hiss in the audio). I've even seen a 1970s Allan and Heath professional 64 channel mixing console. I pulled the line card out of every single channel and plopped in an LF351, all of a sudden the board was useful for more than just PA at stadiums.
Old Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16s (long 16-bit ISA cards with hardware settings jumpers) had LM741 on the output stages, later versions used a dual LM741 (an MC1458, if memory serves). These ICs are still made mostly only for compatibility; there are lots and lots of pin-for-pin low noise equivalents that you simply put in place of the 741/1458. The old SB16s also had good spacing between the digital and analog sections (build a Faraday cage, soldered to ground, around the analog stages!), used conventional components (none of this SMT crap) and had the same excellent D/A converters as some CD players. In later SoundBlasters, much of the logic and the D/A converters have been folded into the same custom chip to cut costs. But you want to keep the audio as far from the computer's bus as possible; the other side of an IC is not far enough away.
Computers: No. Can't even scoop one for myself. Each computer is accompanied through its life cycle by a pile of papers which would make the IRS jealous. It's horrible, it's tragic, I agree.
486 not playing MP3s?: When Napster first came out, all I had was a 486DX2-50. (I didn't do any multimedia stuff, so I didn't need power.) It played MP3s fine, and so has every other properly configured 486DX I've tried - WinAMP or Windows Media Player or mpg123 - under Windows 95, NT4, Red Hat 5.2. Sure, the CPU is 83% busy to play one song, but it works, without skipping or kicking down to half or mono modes. Turn off all the crap in your Windows startup and system tray.
DMA is your friend. DON'T try to stream an MP3 to a 486 using an NE-2000 network card. Get something a little more refined for the NIC.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Erm... I thought 486s finished at 100... And Pentiums started at about 75...
Why not set up your own streaming enabled web server and make it available both inside your home network and on the internet as well? That way you can browse your mp3 collection from where ever you can find a broadband connection. Keeping in mind to secure it of course.
You may not like the idea of reducing your MP3s bitrate to stream effectively, but it may be a good compromise.
An example of software that uses this is ApacheMP3. This is an excellent avenue for those looking to stream mp3s on a shoestring budget. I use it on my PowerMac 6100/60 running Linux and it works quite well as a private library.
Good Luck!
www.brownsauce.org
I believe you misspelled 'teh'.
Why not set up your own streaming enabled web server and make it available both inside your home network and on the internet as well? That way you can browse your mp3 collection from where ever you can find a broadband connection. Keeping in mind to secure it of course.
You may not like the idea of reducing your MP3s bitrate to stream effectively, but it may be a good compromise.
An example of software that uses this is ApacheMP3. This is an excellent avenue for those looking to stream mp3s on a shoestring budget. I use it on my PowerMac 6100/60 running Linux and it works quite well as a private library.
Good Luck!
www.brownsauce.org
Distribution:
Status output in each room:
Control input from each room:
OK having done this in the last 12 months lets go over the options.
:)
Slimmp3 and Ethermp3nut or whatever are out there and work well for ethernet attached 2 channel audio. I went with the free as in speech ethermp3nut (right name?) as I'm handy with a sodering iron and have friends that can deal with surface mount. These along with a small amp are good for rooms that you only need 2 channels like the bathroom porches etc pretty much anything without a TV. I have 4 drops of Cat5 in every room (one per wall) and use cheap gige agrigation switches from netgear if I need more ports.
OK now for rooms with TV's my primary concern was the TV room I places the server directly below the TV and install some metal piping to chace cables through (grounded to keep any interferience down) The only thing running analog to the TV is the VGA cable and the Svideo cable running to the receiver the audio comes off a standard sound blaster audigy via fiber to the in room receiver. Firewire and USB 2.0 got chaced up as well to run a DVD-R drive in the sterio rack for DVD/CD playback, ripping and recording. A few pairs of cat 5 are used for IR Blasters and receivers. Video is provided via a Matrox 450 Maxx one out used for the VGA to the TV and the other running svideo to the receiver in the TV Room. The TV room has server method of controling things there is a wireless keyboard and mouse, normal remote comands via lircd (more on this in a moment) a dumb terminal a Palm with IR and any laptop that can get on the 802.11g network. Finialy I'm currently working on adding speach recognition for the complete hal look
Other rooms have a pretty standard key pads and screens that work via serial 3 wire. I hacked together a little application to scroll whatever song is playing information and navigate premade playlists that are then passwed back to mpg123 to play it's not perfect but works ok next revision is speach recognition. If thy were close enough (first floor) I used a cheapish 12 channel out 8 in profetional audio card they are easy to come by and generaly support linux check out some garage band supply store to find one, each output looks like a seperate DSP at the application level but still only one IRQ. Because it's a real audio card it outputs a balanced line signal these are much easier to run at distance without interferience. At the other end are pretty straight forward project amps and speakers in the walls I didnt need to go that big wattage wise so these were easy to construct.
Now for the few places that I wasent comfertable running balance line to I used the ethernet to line converters and a receiver this for me was the garage it's detached from the house so I ran multimode fiber a few inces below the ground picking up some cheap 10/100 fiber cards off of ebay and installing them into the linux router with bridging and a boca terminal in the garage thats also hacked to support bridging (have my old 802.11b AP out there for the car) I could have used the audio on the Boca but it just sounded bad (I tried this first) the terminal runs mp3blaster via an xterm to the core server.
The other special room is my bedroom it's the only other TV in the house I have an old trident PCI card that can be jumpered for TV out only (This is a GREAT feature) and that runs a Svideo up (need a booster seeing some artifacts fromt he run) I have a DEC color dumb term attached to an old 9 inch monitor and keyboard in the corner it's directy connected to the server on 3 lines and generly runs mp3blaster or lynx to get to the video playlists and startup mplayer for those. I used 3 ethernut's to give me 5.1 for the receiver in the bedroom and am working on getting mplayer to connect to them correctly.
OK now to the server it's a doul proc Xeon 600 with 2 megs of cache each that I had laying around. Primary video out is a Matrox 450 Maxx secondary is a trident on PCI. I have a few 4 channel out CAD cards that use PCI that can handle the video but need to get scan converters / T
No sir I dont like it.
I've got a Planar 486DX-100 Flatscreen that I purchased for the purpose of playing MP3s. After trying everything from Win95, Win98, and Linux I can say it doesn't work. I tried swapping the CPU between an AMD and an Intel 486 chip. I turned every feature off. I stopped every extra process. I added more memory to the box. I turned down the quality of the MP3 player. The only way to get this to play an MP3 is the have enough memory to buffer nearly the entire song. Granted, I keep my MP3s at a higher bitrate so of course it takes more CPU power. There are add-in boards that would give it a better chance, but a 486-50 you're either running complete crap MP3 compression or your full of crap yourself.
My Itunes stream can support 5 users without a glitch on a cable connect. so on a lan, one old imac, (i run a g3 266) could handle serving the streams.. then the problem is you would need 5 more macs to decode them in each of your rooms.... wait. why would you want 5 different songs playing in 5 different rooms at the same time? Have you harnessed personal quantum superpositioning? ok sorry. so 6 macs on a lan is too much $. are there any set top boxes that can decode the daap protocol? that also have an interface you could choose songs or playlists with? could you use ipods as an interface? run firewire through the walls rather than speaker wires or ethernet and run the ipod into a stereo in each room. so now you need 1 mac, 5 ipods, a bunch of firewire, firewire pci cards and five stereos. i have digressed.
BeOS.
TuneTracker.
you're too good for two cups and a string for audio? *hrmph*
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Buy an X-Box for each room, run XBMP. Network them to a central storage place.
You get the added bonus of being able to watch movies (both divx and DVD) and play games if you have a TV. It also comes with an easy way to control the whole thing. You don't need to leave them on, so they take very little power.
You'll need a mod chip, but don't bother spending any more money on a larger harddrive if you're streaming the music/movies.
Used Xbox+mod chip can be had for under $200 and beats every other system in the price/performance category.
Why reinvent the wheel? If your time is worth $00, then maybe you should.
Personally, I would get a Arrakis Digilink DC6 6-output system for your scenario.
Arrakis
They probably have DC4 (the 4-output version) available at a discount from people who upgraded.
Contact Jon Young @ Arrakis
(For a single zone system, the Audio Request is the winner. Request - they also have zone expanders, but for 6 zones I'd be inclined to go with the Arrakis as an all in one system).
For those people who would be inclined to say "oh, it's expensive. I want something for $100" let me say this: My time retails at $125/hr. Why spend 100+ hours hacking together a system and tweaking interfaces, ultimately having something that mostly works, but will be a lifetime drain on your time, and have no value to anyone else because no one else would be able to fix it or upgrade it? Buy something off the shelf and use it! The Audio Request runs QNX, and you can sign into it and modify it a bit if you want. Both Request and Arrakis have had teams of programmers and engineers working out the bugs and coming up with good interfaces for thousands of hours, not to mention adding new features (request recently added FLAC and album art to their OS). Place a value on your own time, and you'll see that these units are not unreasonably priced.
aem
-a.e.mossberg
There's actually a reason you don't see this done more often: Unamplified audio (like the stuff coming from a soundcard) doesn't travel very far. 20, 30 feet max before you start getting signal degradation. You'd be better off getting 4 cheap PCs with cheap soundcards and mounting everything remotely over NFS (and there are already stereo components that do this exact same thing.) I know it sounds like a fun project, but you can buy products like this that allow you to access your MP3 collection and control it remotely (via http, remote control, etc.) Basically, you're gonna need some sort of player at every amp, otherwise it's just not gonna sound good.
Run line level signals over cat-5, and use amplified speakers, which start at $10/pair. Buy a cheap receiver or amp on Ebay, or at a garage sale, to drive larger speakers.
A single output, such as a tape output on a receiver or a sound card output, can drive multiple inputs, with no problems.
sig test, pay no attention.
I use a great oss app called otto2 (http://www.rm-r.net/~meff/otto2/index.html) for controlling my music through a perl web interface. It has a rather tiny footprint and Im sure you could run multiple instances of it thru seperate sound cards, tho I havent a clue how. Could be a solution but may be a bit clunky to run too many on one webserver
We used a PII 400 and got a very reliable 5 output stream box using a multi-output card that isn't manufactured any longer. I tried a number of these cards and most of them worked well. [ As an aside, the MOTU high-end units are excellent if you are going to put the output into high-quality amps and speakers, but they are expensive.]
From the software side, we used a custom, multi-threaded MP3 player compiled using Intel's optimizing compilers (which mad a huge difference on the PII) and used a graphical front end with a screen-per-room display showing the album art (scanned in by the user or installer) along with the tracks, play lists, etc.
We did run into a control problem, even though most of our customers were using systems with centrally located gear, which was that getting a PC to run with multiple distinct (and user-uninterruptable) displays simultaneously was expensive and difficult. To supplement this, we created a serial-based interface which allowed for play lists, random play, and basic start/stop/skip controls for each room and could be combined with the GUI over a commercial home control system (like Crestron or AMX).
Basically, we would watch the serial port for commands and respond to the control system by flipping individual windows that corresponded to the room that was controlling the system at the time. The control system, in turn, would put show the screen output in a kind of touch screen mode and send mouse locations over the serial port back to our controller. This worked, but was expensive and complex to handle, since only one room could have control over the GUI at the time. For things like displaying the playing tracks and album along with the next track and providing basic control of the start/stop/skip/repeat sequences, we could send text to the control system over the serial port and it would be displayed on the screen in text fields (allowing the main display to be required only for play-list management). This helped quite a bit.
The control piece was far and away the most difficult part of the project, but since you only have to satisfy yourself, and not the marketplace, I'd suggest that you might find an 802.11-capable PDA as a controller might be useful (and fun to work on). Of course, then you have to either develop your own control protocol or use some kind of CGI and a web server to do the control, but if you separate the players into individual threads or processes that can be easily located, you should be able to send messages (UNIX signals, perhaps) to them and get the level of control that you need.
From a technical perspective, any OS that has preemptive threading and good interprocess communication should be fine for building this kind of system. We found that by creating our own player (despite the need to license the decode patent from Fraunhofer if we were to sell it commercially), we were able to get a finer control of the playback features (such as pause/skip/repeat) than by using single-shot mp3 play commands that were available at the time. I'd suggest looking for how you can get those useful features if you decide to use existing commands in a Linux environment.
Of course, on a Macintosh, you can do the playback through QuickTime, which is going to be easy and highly-controllable, so you have that oppotunity too.
In the end, we found that the customers who got it loved it, but that the installers we were trying to sell to weren't interested in buying a product that required some set-up.
O
Seems like this would help reduce the amount of cabling you'd need.
I have an old computer, a 200 mHz, 128 meg ram POS. For about $30 or so, I gave it a SoundBlaster Live. Put it on an existing ethernet network, in the room with the PS2. The main computers are at the other end of the house. Put Linux on it, and I mainly control it with xmms, tunnelled through ssh. If you had enough old computers (even old enough to be found in a dumpster), you can hook them directly to the speakers, and network them howerver you want, control them however you want. I mainly just rip CDs to FLAC on my desktop machine and use a read-only nfs mount to play them. I'm considering making this sort of thing into a cheap device -- basically a wifi-to-analog-cable converter. Thoughts?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The VIA mini itx EPIA mainboard might be a solution for you.
You can hook up a 12" tft screen via the tv-out plug. and the should go for about 123 USD.
The can on their turn stream from a file/mp3 server.
Replacements for MC 1458 are (in order of quality) AD712, TLE2072, 5532, TLO72, LF353 (available at Radio Shack), TLO82 Again, these will blow away the MC1458 audio wise.
Why not simply run a digital optical out from the computer to a multi-channel distribution pre-amp/amp? Then the computer would be in charge of the stream and the audio hardware would take care of adjusting volume for and sending signal to the various rooms. You could install touchpads with volume controls in every room and route it all back to the distribution pre-amp. Why buy all that computer hardware when the audio hardware is so much cheaper. Just use the computer for the signal source.
SMT crap!? What do you have against SMT.. My guess is that you have grey hair and say things like "back in my day electronics glowed in the dark and I didn't need my bifocals to see the parts...". Personally I like it that my computer and other electronics are (relatively) small and light...
One of the cheapest approaches is to use a pair of six channel capable sound cards and hack yourself some code to merge three ogg files into one "six channel" stream, then just use pairs of ordinary speakers off to different locations. Two sound cards, gets you six stereo speaker sets. With care you get one on the mainboard anyway the other for $30
http://www.audreyhacking.com Audries can be had for about $100-150, and can be set up to play MP3s off of a remote server. They're touchscreen, not too big, and work well for it. I've got one, but mostly it just sits on my desk.
These things are going really cheap and were all the rage like a year ago. I still have 2 floating around and they access my networked music server over Cat5 (need a particular USB Ethernet adapter to do this, but you can reflash several other USB adapters to look like the one the Audrey has drivers for) just fine. Use a pair of amplified speakers for the audio jack (the Audrey uses a Sound Blaster compatible audio card) and you're all set.
The QNX OS on the Audrey is quite impressive considering it's tiny footprint. Boot time is under 20 seconds (mainly b/c the CPU is pretty slow at 200 MHz) but people have trimmed it by cutting down on the services the OS loads at startup and it boots from a flash drive which you can re-flash or change at will. It is a true Real Time Operating System as well. And the file system once you have a hacked Audrey is very Linux like if you like puttering about in the various configuration files via its csh shell.
Go over to www.AudreyHacking.com where you can download various firmware images that perform the sorts of things you want to accomplish. Lots of folks are using Audrey's as cheap network terminals, Home Theater/Multizone Audio controllers, networked music playback stations, home automation via X10 control center using X10's Homeseer web served interface, etc.
Look around and you can probably get one for less than $100 a pop. A real bargain as you're gettting a 200 MHz Low end Pentium compatible CPU, with sound card, networking capability AND a working backlit LCD touch screen in a package that does NOT look like a computer/terminal at all. It is a pretty modern, decor neutral apperance. More capable than a dedicated network MP3 player, you can even get a web browser and e-mail client and other applications working without difficulty. There are several QNX software sites out there to check out.
DaveC
There are no stupid questions...just stupid people.
I have a Sound Blaster ct2940 (16 Value OEM). It uses a Philips TDA1387 DAC and Philips TDA1517 stereo amplifier. Can anyone suggest compatible replacements for these parts?
You're going to need an amp or amplified speakers in every room if you're running line level out to all the rooms.
l s/item-Details.asp?sku=M975-1036
Why not get a Rio Receiver for each room? Ethernet + HPNA connectivity, 10W+10W output. $60 on ebay, $89 on tiger direct http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchToo
Replace the Rio client software with an alternate one like Trio http://triot.sourceforge.net or RioPlay http://rioplay.sourceforge.net
Both clients support Shoutcast and the Trio client allows you to sync a bunch of different receivers when you're playing mp3s so it sounds like you have a whole house audio system.
You can replace the windows based Rio server software with JReceiver http://jreceiver.sourceforge.net for windows or Linux.
Or you could go wireless - very cool stuff, bluetooth powered - not in production yet but you'll see it in the upcoming year: Infinite Range
Try, I dare you to try playing a mp3 of accetable quality 98kbs or higher on a 486 dx 66 or below. It doesn't work with any mp3 player I could find. I think If you specifically wrote an mp3 player from the ground up with the goal of playing on slow hardeware in mind you could might beable to make it work.
Instead of playing the same mp3 on the soundcards wich is really difficult. (The problem is the ocilator built in each cards are not synched) You should play 1(could be the same) mp3 on each of the sound cards with a deamon program like this one:
Music Daemon Player
http://securityportal.com.ar
I already have something which does what you want - I am using a Slimp3 server to stream mp3 data to multiple players around the house (across a wireless network). I have 3 players and they are all able to play a different stream and all at once over a regular 10Mb/s wifi network (all my CD's are encoded to 128Kb/s mp3s)
.5 seconds out which would sound disconcerting to say the least if you were within earshot of more than one player.
If you ran long cables from 6 sound cards to 6 amps around your huse, this could be made to work, but the losses across such long cables would be unacceptable to all but the most tone deaf.
You can get details of Slimp3 from http://www.slimp3.com
One thing it won't currently do (and may never do to acceptable levels of timing) is play the same stream , in sync, to multiple players. Even using multicast, they might be up to
However, if I undertsand your requirement , this (or any other digital music serving device) will do it justice.
This could be of interest for this type of project. URL: http://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/archives/000128 .html
It's a lot harder to service and play around with the electronics on surface mount hardware. Surface mount stuff isn't better quality, it doesn't do anything different. It's less expensive to manufacture.
In many cases, integrated and surface mount equipment leads to lower quality.
Obviously where size and weight is an important factor, surface mounted chips and other electronic components have the definate advantage. I just don't think it's necessary everywhere (like on a sound card) and all it does is make the manufacturing process less expensive (and such savings are not necessarily passed onto the end-user.)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Does SLIMP3 support ogg? I didn't see any mention of it at their website. I did see that it loads it's kernel from a server, and it's open source, so ogg support could be added but I don't know if any programmer has done so.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
How do the new soundblaster cards stand up quality wise? (namely a soundblaster audigy)?
Good? decent? horrible?
timmyf - I read through your entire HOWTO -- very well written, I must say! Maybe I missed something crucial, but how do you navigate through your music files with only a remote and no visual UI?
http://saveie6.com/
Actually I can run gigabit over the CAT5 cabling. No big deal. It just takes my trusty Dremel to slice a 1/4" hole in the NIC, about 2.5mm above the PCI slot connector, so that I can run a length of bullshit conductor down the left-hand side.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
i don't think having six soundcards will solve anything. if they're reproducing the same signal, then it's an incredible redundancy of hardware. if they're meant to power speakers directly, you'll find yourself rather short of amplifier power - ever notive how inconsequential unamplified computer speakers are?
the number of amplifiers you need depends on your design. for example, if the sound were present in only one room at a time, you could use a single amplifier and a custom relay-activated switch box. if you want many speakers playing at once, you'll need more amplifier channels. there is some room for trickiness: you can jury-rig more speakers in serial on the same output, though this makes individual volume adjustments much more difficult; or you can use many-chanelled amps like those meant for cars or surround sound.
for extremely dynamic soundscaping, you'll want a real, whole amp channel per speaker, and a computerized control of where the signal goes. this could be achieved with a fancy sound board featuring several outputs; so, though relaying the same signal, their amplitudes could be continuously varied.
a couple other things to note: you may not need stereo in some of the environments (hallway, bathroom), thus saving channels; subwoofers can be shared between spaces to a certain extent; and make sure you construct it modularly, so that components of the system can be easily replaced later. affix the wires to the holes in the wall so they don't fall in, too!
Which OS?
You want the pinnacle of power, stability, and flexibility. You want... Windows ME.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
There's no reason this ought to be centralized. You will save on cable by just running ethernet to each room and distributing the audio digitally, and it's a more flexible solution, and you'll get better quality audio by not running analog signals over long distances, and the load of decoding multiple MP3/Ogg/whatever streams gets distributed to multiple CPUs too. You need a small quiet computer or dedicated decoder device in each room.
But, I haven't found the right combination of software to do this yet. What I want is something like IceCast but have it actually work, and have it be multi-channel too, so you can listen to different music in each room, or listen to perfectly synchronized music in all the rooms, your choice, and at the same time have it mix in an "auxiliary" stream for voice announcements, simulated telephone ringing, stuff like that. Each stream should be done via broadcast or multicast to conserve bandwidth in the case where you're receiving it in multiple rooms at once. The client software ought to be able to identify and decode various kinds of streams (Ogg, MP3, that new lossless standard, or just plain uncompressed PCM) and mix them together transparently. Maybe it ought to be able to play locally-stored files too, like rplay, for things like telephone ringing etc.
The old-fashioned way to distribute audio is to use the 70V audio standard where the audio is sent at a high voltage and each speaker has a transformer to convert high-voltage high-impedance audio to high-current low-impedance for the speaker. You can add speakers to such a system without changing the load that the amplifier sees quite as drastically. Most commercial installations that have speakers in the ceiling, for Muzak or something, are done that way. But then every speaker is playing the same tune.
I agree. M-Audio products are pretty flawless, they work well under Windows and Mac, and they're inexpensive.
I was tasked with doing real-time encoding of 8 separate audio streams over a corporate LAN, so I set up a box with XP Pro and 2 M-Audio Delta 1010's. It runs 8 simultaneous instances of Windows Media encoder, with each instance directed to look at a different pair of inputs from the Delta cards. This encoder has not been rebooted for over 6 months and is running flawlessly. This says something for the M-Audio drivers, which are the same for the 410 as the 1010.
While my scenario is a little different (I am encoding, you are decoding), multiple instances of any MP3 playback software should be able to run with much less horsepower than my encoders (I'm using a P4-2.4 GHz, and I'm guessing you could play back 4 to 6 stereo MP3's using a P3-500.)
Also, the Delta's outputs are probably hot enough that, using high-quality shielded cable, you should be able to run to just about anywhere in the house without having to worry about loss or interference.
I knew some fucking idiot would say this. Fucker.
Yea, that's what I did.
Just in case anybody really needs a lot of sound channels on one PC, I bet the USB ones (like the Griffin iMic) would work really well - just plug in several of them. As a bonus, you can run USB cable from the computer rather near your amplifier, and cut down on the length of the analog cable, for example in home theater situations etc. And it's not likely to be obsolete anytime soon.
486/66 is NOT enough to play anything higher than 128K/s MP3s, and not necessarily with decent quality. Any Pentium 75 or higher has the horsepower.
Speaking of quality, very few 486s have PCI slots, so you'd be restricted to ISA sound cards. And apart from very select few cards (Turtle Beach Multisound), ISA sound cards have crappy fidelity. The Sound Blaster 16, for example, claims 16-bit AD/DA but in fact uses 12-bit converters.
So I'd recommend any Pentium system 75MHz or faster. That would work.
After reading this story I decided to set it up so I could stream to my PocketPC. I just got it a couple of weeks ago so I figured it could be fun.
s ic/[F olderName].lnk/[song name])
I currently have a Wireless network; it connects my Tivo in the living room (I do run a cable on occasion; but had a USB based 802.11b adapter and HAD to try it on the tivo... works like a charm.
So, I play MP3's with the Tivo; the software to server up the MP3 is a bit different than Shoutcast or Icecast. I hoped I could make it work with my PocketPC anyway. (note: I sorta did, see below).
Problems mentioned by others: Streaming the SAME song at the same time creates sound problems between rooms. Yep, it does. I had a thought on how to fix it, but it would require extentisve software patches. Basicly, the streaming source would TimeStamp the song with a start time; This would cause all units to wait until that moment to start playing the song. If all machines are time-synched to the same source it -could- work; although it may need a fudge-factor to adjust for unknown timing issues. (set a slight delay on the server so all devices SHOULD catch up; have MP3 players skip-ahead to catch up with shared streams.)
Back to the pocketPC.. finding a good (PocketPC 2002 based) program which can play streamed MP3s is a challenge! Most of the players like to access the files directory; or use specific servers (See Microsoft).
I aquired one which seems to have come out of Russia or something; unknown name; it mostly works but the interface is lacking. It doesn't play all the streams for some unknown reason. To make it work as well as it does requires a Playlist which lists all the URLs to access the individual songs. There is currently no way to query the information from the server to get the song list. (the url format is:
http://192.168.1.102:8081/TiVoConnect/TivoMu
I tried using Shoutcast but was rather turned off by it Re-sampling to do MP3s. Stupid, and, for my purposes, useless. (If I had reason to inject other tracks/sounds it would be ok. ie: play DJ)).
Also, I would have to configure a Shoutcast server for each different stream; dumb.
The server software for the Tivo stuff is 'open'. They provide docs on their website, as well as using standard methods, XML formatted data, etc. I may have to try and put something together to deal with it instead.