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Ask Slashdot: Can You Convert Old iPods Into A Home Music-Streaming Solution?
Slashdot reader zhennian wants to stream music throughout his entire house, "and was hoping that with three old iPods I might be able to put together a centrally managed house-wide audio system."
Ideally it would be possible to control what's playing from a central web interface using an app on an IOS or Android device. With the iPods already plugged into docking stations and on the home wifi network, I assume it should be possible.
A search of the Apple app store didn't bring up much and forking out $AUS400 for a Sonos One or equivalent seems wasted when I've already purchased iPod docks. Can anyone recommend an App that will still be compatible with old (ie. 2007) iPods and might do this?
Or is there a better cheap alternative? Leave your best answers in the comments. Can you convert old iPods into a home music-streaming solution?
A search of the Apple app store didn't bring up much and forking out $AUS400 for a Sonos One or equivalent seems wasted when I've already purchased iPod docks. Can anyone recommend an App that will still be compatible with old (ie. 2007) iPods and might do this?
Or is there a better cheap alternative? Leave your best answers in the comments. Can you convert old iPods into a home music-streaming solution?
Get refurbished Echo dots for under 35 bucks.
Additionally to playing music in all the rooms, voice-operated, it will open the door, make calls, control the lighting and read books to you or good night stories to the kids and help them with their maths.
Assuming the ipods are iOS based then you could use an app like iPENG classic to make the ipod into a squeezebox player
Then you just need a computer or raspberry pi equivalent to run the server software on and you should be set to go
Iot!
They're junk. Hand the off to your local e-waste purveyor.
I did mine with some T-class amps, (about 25 each), Chromecast audio (15 each), some leftover speakers I had lying about, Google Home, and Plex. That way I had decent audio quality (insofar as the speakers were hifi quality). You can tack on extra bluetooth speakers (if they allow 3.5mm inputs) if you don't have speaker pairs, and add more rooms that way. Echo dots are not that great for music.
Just like you can convert and old car into a bicycle I'm sure you can turn iPods into a Frankenstein's monster example of what technology was not supposed to do. The result will nearly always be inelegant, frustrating and I'll bet you a Mars bar you'll throw it away soon after you finish and buy an of the shelf solution anyway.
Speaking of buying these DIY solutions often end up costing fat more than you estimate as you find repeated shortcomings in what you create.
Take it from me, don't proceed unless you're a hobby tinkerer or a bored engineer who enjoys the busy work.
Get a low-power FM transmitter, and use old boomboxes (you probably already have them).
This is very easy to do if you have some savvy. The software has been around for a very long time. The hardware is cheap.
Hardware:
TPLink OpenWRT compatible wifi router with USB port.
USB Hub
USB hard disk
USB sound hardware.
[already existing home stereo(s)]
Stereo patch cables
Software:
OpenWRT with suitable sound modules, the MPD (Media Player Daemon), netjukebox, and apache web server (with php) packages.
Really, ANY minimalist linux box with USB ports and a network stack would work, but these wifi routers are cheap. Super cheap.
You only need one of these (if you install more than one) to have storage attached, if you enable NFS shares, and configure the others to connect. If you have a NAS, you can just use that most likely.
I love these sorts of questions. Dear Slashdot, I have 8 Linksys routers from 2006 in my closet, I would like to know how to wire them together to create a smart garage door opener. I know cheap turnkey solutions exist, but that would involve googling them. I'll be patiently awaiting your answer. Love, A Faithful Reader
First, don't start off with a goal of re-using old stuff. That is backwards.
First determine what you are trying to achieve. Make, buy or scavenge based on that.
(Side note: this is good software practice as well).
Depending on what you trying to do, a RPI3 running https://github.com/ejurgensen/forked-daapd, MPD or similar could be sufficient.
Instead of a RPI3, a router running LEDE could even be used if the cpu requirements are low.
Airfoil will stream content from an iOS device to a computer, and then to multiple target devices (many brands), including iOS 7+ devices running their satellite app. Has balancing and zones, etc.
My brother has it setup this way, using a mishmash of old iPods, Airport expresses, AirPlay compatible speakers and and Apple TV.
This is Sparta^WSlashdot, kid.
Where people understand what ^W means, HTML is considered trivial knowledge,
and we do crazy things with computers and technology because we can.
This was once considered a pillar of geek culture.
Bro, do you even 5-digit UID?
Back in 2002, we ate these projects for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Doing crazy things "because we can" was considered a pillar of geek and hacking culture.
And this here was far from the the craziest stuff.
I mean an iPod is a computer with audio playback and wireless networking.
Putting Linux on it and making it into pretty much anything we want, and then some(!), including people posting kernel patches to do it, was and should be considered normal for us owners of a geek card.
But hey, we also still knew the Jargon Files and what actual hacking, not cracking, was all about.
Yes, yes, I should be saying something about lawns now...
As with many things, it is quite trivial if you already happen to know how.
Google for "gstreamer audio streaming".
look it up. my brother was ooing and aaahing about these wi-fi speakers
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Every iPod has a 3.5mm jack on it. Use that to plug in the audio itself into any old stereo. Then just use whatever version of plex works for it. Audio is not anywhere near as demanding as video.
Then go ahead and try to fiddle something with those old iPods.
As far as I can tell, a Rasberry Pi and MPD (music player daemon) does the trick faster, easyer and cheaper.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There was a time when slashdot would install Linux on a dead badger, and play their MP3s from a home-brew PDA interface or even voice control. All with one hand tied behind the back.
Fuck off with this amazon and apple botnet shit.
Zuckerberg bought an Island for privacy, with the money he made selling your privacy.
when I built my house in 2002, I put in the speaker wire runs for wall speakers before the drywall went up. Once we closed on the house I used a fox and hound to find the ends inside the wall by connecting the tone generator to the junction box where all the wires converged. I then installed in-wall speakers that I got for a deal on ebay in white so I could dry brush the wall color paint on them to remove that plastic look. I have a simple zone selector switch that bridges the audio to all the channels and lets me determine which ones are on or off (currently its all manual selection as the electronic remote ones are still more than I really want to spend, especially since I rarely, if ever, alter the selections). Several years ago (5?) I acquired a Sonos:Connect and am feeding that into my receiver which I like a lot better than the previous ipod+playlist method. I find the iphone app of Sonos a lot more feature rich than the PC app. This works well for playing the same music in every room like when hosting dinner parties etc. For an individual room solution, there are tons of streaming apps you can use to play on devices like appletv, roku, firetv, etc and utilize your surround sound speakers for music.
Personally I'd use a stack of the Raspberry Pi Zero-W. They're $10 and come with wifi and bluetooth.
What do you mean? African click wheel iPod or European iOS iPod touch?
#DeleteFacebook
Here's some 10-year old software for your 10-year old hardware:
http://www.nongnu.org/streamtu...
http://streamripper.sourceforg...
So on my main server I would set up a streaming proxy, that would also save whatever content from internet radio streams I was listening to, and I'd point all of the other clients in the house to it so they'd all be playing the same thing as I walked from room to room. Usually there wasn't any noticeable lag between them, but different internet radio clients do buffer more than others... just not the ones I was using.
As for controlling the primary playlist, back then I just used ssh + screen back to the server since I was using the console streamtuner client, but nowadays you could probably set up VLC or Clementine to be the head node feeding your proxy channel, and both of those projects have good remote control apps.
I found this approach when I was looking to back up my slimserver hardware after slimserver was bought by Logitech and then dropped, although they continue to maintain the server software now called Logitech Media Server.
CDs are stored in lossless format (flac) on the server (which could also host a player, but I don't.)
You could use your iPods as controllers and players (see the app store). What I don't know is how well synchronizing works for iPod players--haven't tried it.
udin
Hej should havet usel Android gear.
You don't want them eventually puffing out and causing damage to your system and possibly your house. Also you don't need them because they will be plugged in.
A friend who used an old iPod as a white noise machine for their baby and after working fine for two years it nearly caused a fire.
Betteridge says the answer is no, but in this case, it should actually be yes.
Logitech Squeezebox is still around. Install squeeze server on any PC in your home, and squeeze player on the iPods, attach to radios whether it be through the aux in or an old one with a dock, done. Remote control with Orange Squeeze on your phone, or though the Squeezebox console.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It kind of looks like a regular expression. Did Slashdot mangle it?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Burn them. They will give up a lot of quality heat.
The next best solution is converting them in landfill by throwing them in the trash.
HTTP streaming is a solved problem and iOS was made to run native-like apps. Run mpd remotely on your server and create a basic web interface that streams the audio.
The problem with old iPods is that older versions of software are made unavailable when a newer version comes out. Even if that newer version is incompatible with old hardware. If you didn't download Plex in time for example, it's probably no longer an option.
I just crank up the volume on my 600 W amplifier. I can hear it over the whole house and yard (or down the block) without need for any streaming servers.
Pick up some used Squeezebox devices on eBay. Their music server is open source, runs on Mac OS, and is compatible with iTunes. The devices sync beautifully. More info.
You can pick up an 1watt fm transmitter for $30-40(US) and hook it up to the sound card of your music server.
Put cheap fm radios in every room of the house. You can control the music from your phone and the whole setup can be done for about $100, less if you have old fm radios lying around.
I did this for years because we moved around quite a bit and it works fine.
Naturally, the better the radio, the better the sound, but if you want whole house audio, it's the cheapest option.
1watt is the largest transmitter you can get without an FCC license and it'll stretch out into the yard, which is nice if you BBQ very often.
You can pound screws with a hammer.
But most people use a screwdriver.
I recently built a music streaming solution using a pi 2 I had spare.
The audio quality of the pi is pretty average so adding a DAC is a good idea. The Allo Boss is ~$60 and to me it sounds fantastic (better than my Cambridge Audio CD player). There are a number of audio focused distributions for the pi - I used Volumio which has out of the box support for Spotify, Airplay, playing from local USB or network shares. It has a decent web interface as well which is controllable from phones or laptops.
I do this at home easily with my Spotify subscription. Spotify will allow you to play music remotely on any device that has the Spotify app installed. If your iPod is plugged in to a stereo/speakers with amp, you can now remotely play anything.
The easiest thing to do would be to get a bunch of UE Booms, put them in party up mode, then use the 3.5 jack (or a 3.5 to BT adapter) to play music from the iPod. You'd have to set the Booms up with another device, but I think that should work.
What I generally do with iPods is put them in cars, because most cars today have the iPod USB protocol implemented. They're great in-car, but finding stuff can be tedious because car UIs don't like scrolling through 128GB of stuff.
Every room has a tv, every tv has an apple TV, and itunes can send audio out all of them at once. An ATV2 would do the job, and they go for $45. Got a room with no TV? grab an old airport express. Its audio output can be used as an airplay target. Many home theater receivers have airplay support so they can participate in the accidentally apple centric whole house audio architecture.
I wouldn't use an iAnything because it is a closed ecosystem.
Use any of the plethora of open design arm based modules or boards.
Go well
Turn your music UP.
I do that and can hear my music through my entire house.
. . .
What is the problem here?
Just turn the volume up!!
What am I missing??
Thank you for this suggestion, also made by a few others, including use of iPeng Classic. Unfortunately the MC/MB G2 iPod Touches that I have won't even run the oldest available Squeezebox client or iPeng. Even after trying a whited00r flash. I guess Apple do a very good job of making their old (but still functional) hardware obsolete as soon as possible.
I've been trying to do something similar for a long time at home. The closest I came was using gramofon devices with AllPlay. They were driven by a rooted cell phone with an Android app call AirAudio. It works some of the time. It's disappointing that we don't have a better option. I usually try for a while and then give up and just use bluetooth to one output.
The squeezebox server also supports a web based interface. You could use just the web browser on the ipod touch to connect to the server and control music.
get a cheap hard drive and transfer all your music to it - connect it to iTunes and airplay all your music - set up playlists or just randomly play all - mine plays 24 hours a day every day via iTunes - the remote app for itunes allows you to play with your music remotely while on your home network - see the artwork and whats up next to delete and or add what you want to hear when you want to hear it - someone said airplay speakers arent available - they are - simplest most versatile setup using your pc or mac and itunes airplay - plays in the house on the computer and 2 apple tvs and via three other airplay devices - six locations - all controlled with the remote app! Enjoy - it's nice to have all your music playing wherever you want!
That sucks.. If you can get linux on them, then you might be able to compile squeezelite which is a headless squeezebox slave; admittedly it is a longshot though.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If you're specifically looking for something that can tap into the Apple ecosystem, I'd personally recommend scavenging over on eBay for a 2nd-gen or 3rd-gen AppleTV.* At a glance, it looks like you could probably get one for under $50. Configure it for your network by attaching it to a screen temporarily, disconnect from that screen (if you prefer a headless implementation) and move it to the location where you want to hear music, and pair it up with any audio output device which has either an optical audio input or an HDMI input. (If you don't have such a device lying around, you can grab a cheap sound bar from someplace like Best Buy or Walmart... a quick search showed me several options on their respective websites for between $35 and $50.)
Once you have it configured as described, you can use any iOS device to either stream music from any app on your device to the AppleTV, by selecting it as the audio output device for that iOS device, or you can use the Apple TV Remote app on the iOS device to remotely control music directly on the AppleTV. You can also control the AppleTV similarly from a computer (either PC or Mac) which has iTunes installed.
Speaking of which: alternatively, if you happen to have a computer in the area where you want music -- or a spare computer just lying around that you could put in place -- you could load up iTunes and play music through that computer, controlling it from the iTunes Remote app on your iOS device. It gives you the same basic end result as a headless AppleTV, possibly even with slightly more flexibility, since computers usually have a standard headphone jack; it's just not necessarily the most cost-effective solution unless you already have that computer on hand.
* Note: I excluded 4th-gen AppleTVs above because they're a bit more expensive, and because they only have HDMI (no optical) for output, so keep that in mind if you decide to splurge on something newer.