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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
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.
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
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...
look it up. my brother was ooing and aaahing about these wi-fi speakers
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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
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.
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
Zuckerberg bought an Island for privacy, with the money he made when you willingly gave him your privacy.
There, fixed it for ya!
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.
Facebook has a shadow profile on people who have never agreed to allow them to collect information on them.
Many people willingly whore out their details, but facebook will make money off you whether you want them to or not.
I have an FM transmitter with the range of a good mile. Purchased legally from Amazon, so Iâ(TM)m sure they have the FCC clearances.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Which should be illegal. If you haven't given them consent, they should not have any legal grounds to keep, let alone publicly display, that data. They should have full liability for any identity theft or fraud that may occur with that individual, and they should be able to be sued in court for damages. If they choose to publicly disclose it regardless.
Why? We have non-disclosure and need-to-know laws for a reason. Their "right to profit" (NOT an actual right, mind you.) does not outweigh the individual's need to protect their identity, credit, and safety. Especially when they lack any form of specific agreement with said individual. (Not debating the whole: "You can sign away your legal rights" crap that the so called "land of the free" allows. That's a topic for another day.)
They are publicly admitting that the individual doesn't have an account with them, therefore any data they have should be:
A. Immediately regarded as unverified and unactionable information. (We wouldn't want to be accused of libel too many times now would we?)
B. Removed from public view. (Including registered users.)
C. Discarded immediately. (They did not have permission to retain that data from it's owner. Acting on it would be a violation. Just as it would be a violation for a person in a privileged position, (say a school administrator), to act on information disclosed to them about someone else, (in that case a student), for personal gain.)
Personally, I don't think the laws should need to be re-written every single time a new technology comes along. Preferably we need to enforce the existing laws, but we do need to limit this behavior, and if it requires a law change to get it done, then so be it. People have a need to protect themselves from rumors and misinformation that is spread about them. Facebook and any other such platform should not be exempt from that solely because someone else gave them that data.
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.
Zuckerberg bought an Island for privacy, with the money he made when you unwittingly gave him your privacy.
There, fixed it for ya!
You spelled unwittingly wrong.
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.
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.
Am using mt-daapd (an older cousin to forked-daapd) on a QNAP NAS. Have 2TB of storage (running MythTV on it, too) and can stream my entire library to iOS and Android devices, Roku Soundbridges (old devices - have several) and DAAP clients on desktop OSes.
Works well, with the exception of iTunes clients, which Apple intentionality breaks for these servers.
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.
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.
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.