Build a Multi-Output MP3 Server? 394
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?
AVScience Forum (Score:5, Informative)
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/
Re:AVScience Forum (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, if there's one thing the nice folks on the AV Science Forum don't understand well, it's budget constraints. How many people can afford to go out and buy Pocket PCs to replace their remote controls?
same thing, on a budget (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
go wireless (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:go wireless (Score:4, Informative)
This of course assumes an analog signal.
Also if you wanted to run one song in one room and another song in another room there could be interference issues.
Save your money. Give a 486 a job... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Save your money. Give a 486 a job... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Save your money. Give a 486 a job... (Score:2)
Dibs. =P
Seriously, though, would you consider sending me one if I pay shipping? I have family in from out of town, and I don't want them asking so many damn times if they can use my computer.
Re:Save your money. Give a 486 a job... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can I have some PIII 600s? ;)
and
What are you talking about with the Soundblaster? What mod? takes 10 min and what does the LM741 have to do with it? I have tried Googling and nothing leaps out at me.
and
Can I have some PIII 600s?
Re:Save your money. Give a 486 a job... (Score:3, Insightful)
Replace the LM 741! (Score:4, Informative)
General Reply - Free PIII-600s, Hacking SoundBlast (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Which OS? (Score:4, Funny)
hurdles (Score:5, Funny)
My Wife.
Why multiple soundcards? (Score:5, Informative)
It has 4 inputs, and 10 outputs.
Re:Why multiple soundcards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Playing the files on a local machine off a networked drive would probably give you better sound than snaking analog audio cable across the entire length of your house, too.
Re:Why multiple soundcards? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ethernet has already been strung all over the place, and I've set up a 250GB (total) fileserver to be placed in the basement. After that, a client computer at each television / stereo system will be all that's necessary for the ability to listen to any piece in a huge collection of music, on demand.
In addition, with video-output hardware in the client computers (onboard most modern motherboards, anyway), there's the possibility to watch store
Re:Why multiple soundcards? (Score:2)
If you can't afford that, I'm guessing the house would be small enough that your different audio streams would turn into a jumbled mess because you'd hear them all no matter where you were in the house.
Re:Why multiple soundcards? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a home audio system which is customised to my own needs. I started off at http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-Box-HOWTO.html [tldp.org] and built diskless systems such as this for all the rooms in my house, and can use all independently of each other.
They all run off a standard computer which I turned into a server when it became out of date (500mhz K6-2, 384MB).
It's very cheap to build the diskless systems and the only extra expense you'll have is the CAT5 cabling over the house (if you're like me though, your house is already CAT5 capable).
Tim
I contacted a company in the past (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:I contacted a company in the past (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I contacted a company in the past (Score:3, Insightful)
If you live in an appartment, it's probably hard to justify the cost/reason, but I'm in a house and I would also like to wire each room. You know, play kids songs downstairs, rock in the garage while the wife listens to internet radio. Why not? Why can't we have the technology to do it. I don't think decoding 3-4 MP3 streams would be so hard on CPU usage anymore.
Ultimately,
Re:I contacted a company in the past (Score:2, Interesting)
Go to Ebay. Buy a pile of SparcStation IPX boxes. They have 'good enough' audio output, can be had very cheaply these days, and can run NetBSD in a diskless and headless configuration so they won't make much noise. Boot them off a boot server, share over the sound files with NFS. Telnet into each machine from any other machine on the network to
Easy way to get multiple outputs (Score:5, Interesting)
After that, just figure out how you're going to get the controls to work.
One fileserver, and an I-opener in each room (Score:2)
--
Re:One fileserver, and an I-opener in each room (Score:2)
Remotes (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [sourceforge.net] website
... just network (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Good Idea "on paper" (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck!
Re:Good Idea "on paper" (Score:5, Insightful)
Audio quality? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Audio quality? (Score:2)
Re:Audio quality? (Score:2)
You can get small box-sized preamps that will fit on your desk a
Re:Audio quality? (Score:3, Insightful)
That depends. You could use digital audio and then with one pair of wires you could run the signal, well, all over the damn house if you amplified it. In fact, I'm betting if you amplified it, you could also split one S/PDIF coaxial output out to a number of different speaker sets.
The question is, how cheap can you get either digital speakers, or a little D/A converter that takes S/PDIF in and spits out stereo line level?
Re:Audio quality? (Score:2)
Re:Audio quality? (Score:5, Informative)
So, it depends on the signal that you're routing.
Amplified: Great! it'll probably go as far as you need it. If you're going over a few hundered feet and don't care about the quality (think outdoor speakers), you'll want to look into doing with 70 volt transformers and matching speakers. (the higher voltage will drive the signal much farther, but the audio quality goes to hell). Generally with amplified signals the farther you go the quieter it gets.
Line level (non-amplified signal): Will often work just fine. Since it uses a much lower voltage it is much more succeptable to noise. The two biggest things to watch for are interference and ground loops. You get interference from power sources, running motors, wireless devices, etc. If you convert the signal to balanced it'll be less succeptable to interference (a balanced signal provides a ground reference). Small converters are available from several sources. Ground loops are caused when there is a voltage difference between the "ground" plane on either end of the wire. Often, you'll hear a slight 60 Hz hum. The PROPER way to eliminate this is to make sure all your equipment uses the same ground. If it's all on the same circuit in your house, then you're probably OK. If not, there are small inline devices to eliminate this as well. Look for "Hum Buckers" or "Electo-Optic isolators". Line level will go a suprising distance but you'll want a distribution amp to go over about a hundred feet. Keep in mind that the farther you go, the better chance of having noise problems.
Digital: Bleh! I really want this to work, but I haven't seen a successfull installation with more than 20 feet of wire! I worked one job where they tried both optical and copper but couldn't get it reliably (trying at about 75 feet of signal). When the signal degrades, the audio just goes away - not quiter or noisier. It suprises me that the optical signal won't go farther - it's light dammit! The issue seems to be that the TOSLink cables are designed around a plastic core that is easier to work with - but attenuates too much over distance. Having a device to rebuild the signal every 20 feet is problematic to say the least.
EPIA (Score:2, Interesting)
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 o
Hundreds of feet of audio cabling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hundreds of feet of audio cabling (Score:2)
ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2, Redundant)
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 thing
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2)
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2)
You're completely right, of course. Not only is 2% probably an underestimate (caching has something to do with it) but I bet that modern mp3 players support SSE, and that's helping to keep the CPU usage low.
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2)
However, move up to a Pentium 3 and it seems there's plenty of room to play multiple streams of music, even by just going to a 450 Mhz chip. I would bet that an old 450 Mhz Pentium 3 would be enough to provide 6 streams of quality music.
Like others have said though, get a bunch of cheap client machines, one for each room, and r
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2)
http://www.tech9.net/rml/linux/
I don't know if distros use it, but they should. The difference in using linux on a desktop is night and day with that patch.
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know how things work in computers, and I won't argue about anything on the *nix side of things. But I'll tell you this: the *only* reason my winamp ever skips, is because my PCI bus is busy doing things (generally speaking flushing hard disks, or burning CD-Rs).
If you really are doing stupidly high priority high CPU usage stuff, then set your winamp to 'real time priority' via the task manager. What this does in Win NT/XP/2k is that the process will keep it's t
Umm... (Score:2)
Re:ASCII stupid question, get stupid ANSI... (Score:2)
Actually I don't know about winamp 3 (or whatever the bloated pos one is) I've heard nightmare stories about that, but I have an 1100 duron on a cheap board (k7s5a ver 1.0, cost me $5 in a bundle) and I can put out 2 winamp (2.75) streams thru different sound cards, streaming off the network with cpu load at 100
MOTU (Score:2, Offtopic)
Specifying which output device (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Is it just me,,, (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is it just me,,, (Score:3, Funny)
Existing Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
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
SliMP3, baby (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:SliMP3, baby (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be nice to see the delivery of raw audio instead which would make your encoding format irrelevant.
A
This hasn't been mentioned.. (Score:3, Informative)
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
K.I.S.S (Score:2)
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.
Niles makes a good piece called Bob... (Score:5, Informative)
Glory is a 4-source, 6-output, 30 watts per channel audio distribution center. Check out http://www.nilesaudio.com/products/zr4630.html [nilesaudio.com] for more information.
We use these a lot where I work now, and they're slicker than snot.
How about multiple inputs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Shameless plug for commercial system (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about the future (Score:2)
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 technolog
*shouldn't* be too hard (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [stack.nl], 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".
Re:*shouldn't* be too hard (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheap laptops are far cheaper than high-end Palms capable of 802.11b, and you could buy two of those for the price of aforementioned Palm, and have them in each room or something like that.
Just a suggestion to be taken for a grain of salt.
SliMP3 is the way to go... (Score:5, Informative)
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
be smart.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also working on this EXACT same problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
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:
Why pull cables? (Score:2)
two ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
You control music se
Tape outputs are your friend (Score:2)
!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 k
www.slimdevices.com (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Jukebox (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
multiple sound cards (Score:2, Informative)
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 u
Sync (Score:2)
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
Alcatech BPM Studio Gastro (Score:2, Informative)
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 o
Pick up some old I-openers (Score:2)
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 t
Hardware solution (Score:3, Informative)
Uncle Eazy
Try the CAT5 mod (Score:2, Interesting)
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, b
You have too much money (Score:2, Funny)
My experiences with this... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [icecast.org] 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 [griffintechnology.com], 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.
Same project, my setup (Score:4, Informative)
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
Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
I built one a few years back (Score:4, Informative)
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 [motu.com] 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 [crestron.com] or AMX [amx.com]).
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 [fraunhofer.de] 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
Don't convert to an anlogue signal til you have to (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:But... (Score:2)
Re:But... (Score:2)
Yes. While most soundcards can handle 6 MP3s at the same time, they can't handle 6 different seperated output speakers at the same time. They'd all be playing on the same speakers. Besides, most soundcards don't have 6 seperate outputs anyway. I'm sure it could be done with some interesting interface hardware and some hacking thou
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
It clearly says that he wants different streams, not the same stream lots of places.
Re:But... (Score:2)
OK, I take it back. Ignore my post
Re:But... (Score:3, Funny)
220Euro/Room solution (Score:2, Interesting)
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-clien
Re:220Euro/Room solution (Score:3, Informative)
SIX Soundcards... (Score:2)
A Networked file server is easier (Score:3, Informative)
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,
Re:Why only one machine? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Use Gibson MaGIC (Score:2)
Re:Homebrew controller? (Score:2)
Yeah, you can do it all with 7400 Quad-input NANDs. Lots of 'em!
Back to reality --- depends what you want to do. You can use the parallel port and use it to send simple high/low digital logic; this would be trivial to implement. If you went the serial route, you'd need a ucontroller at the
SLIMP3 (Score:2)
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.
Re:this is retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:this is retarded (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:one word for you... (Score:2)