Pi music centre - anyone done it?

I'm considering my options for music playing around the house. I have much of my music digitised now and available from a file server that's on all the time. What I need is some simple 'clients' that can access the file server and play the music.

So, a Pi can do the 'mechanics' as it were, access the files and play them, *BUT* (and it's a big but) what do you do for a user interface?

I have getting on for ten thousand items arranged in a classified hierarchy, when deciding on what to play I tend to navigate down the hierarchy to the album I want, often I'm not looking for a particular name, rather I want to be prompted by what Isee in a particular genre.

So how can one do this with a Pi, or is some other sort of approach going to work better? It needs a display of some sort and a means of navigating, a remote (as in a TV type remote) would be nice, can one get them to interface to a Pi easily?

... and I'm pretty much against a mobile phone interface, it's too small for my (gently) fading eyesight and I don't get on well with on screen keyboards. I've actually just changed back from a smartphone to a feature phone with real buttons for this very reason.

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Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green
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Won't you need a 'HAT' of some sort to get stereo audio out of it (as opposed to audio embedded in HDMI or mono on the 3.5mm jack)?

Reply to
Andy Burns

mpd.

With the right configuration you can get an mp3 stream, which a pi will happily play. And control is through a standard protocol, with lots of different interfaces available (including a bunch of web-based ones) to suit various tastes. I like

formatting link
among others.

Right now I'm listening to a stream encoded on the media server, played through a Pi and speakers, and controlled it via ncmpcpp (terminal client) and M.A.L.P. on Android.

R
Reply to
Roger Bell_West

Huh? Er, no.

R
Reply to
Roger Bell_West

I used a web browser and a smart phone!

What I did was use a pi zero W and a HiFiBerry D to A converter for the hardware. That runs a homebrew daemon that forks to play either internet radio or flac or mp3 files on a mounted partition from my server, using standrd tools. Web server communicates with this and there is a shared memory area in a ramdisk so daemons can write current state and the rowser read it.,

Very happy to to share source etc.

Oh, well the backend would still work, but you would need to find another UI to drive it.

I dont have a huge problem using a smartphone as the text is deliberately large

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Er yes, if you want any quality at all.

Pi onboard sound is pretty basic.

HifiBerry DAC is good price performamce

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

We can disagree on that. But it's certainly not mono-only on any of the Pis I've used.

Reply to
Roger Bell_West

Am 11.10.2019 um 12:38 schrieb Chris Green:

You can usa any of the KODI derivates. In my opinion the most ressource saving is OSMC. And all is UPnP capable: use upnpplay on your smartphone, choose the source (your nas) choose the renderer (your TV or Amp or whatever) and voila - you can play any of your music. Usually the "kodi" sorts all in Artist - Genre - Year - Album - or whatever it offers...

Reply to
Helmut Harnisch

I have a new Pi 4 which has stereo on the audio jack I think. However I may add a DAC or some such to get better quality.

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Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

Android, as I said, is not for me (for choosing music anyway). What I'm really after is advice/ideas on the 'physical' interface used for choosing music. There are loads of options providing a web interface or a mobile phone interface but I want a (probably) larger and/or dedicated screen and real buttons to press.

I've already done the mpd (or whatever) bit! :-)

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Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

Exactly, it's the UI that is my problem.

We don't tend to have phones at hand all the time at home because there's no mobile coverage here so they're not terribly useful. So I'd really prefer something permanently by the Pi/Audio system. There are also several users so a single dedicated system would be handy.

I guess a tablet (e.g. 7" screen) might work and could be kept plugged in and charged next to the Pi. We have some old[ish] 7" tablets, Android 4.x sort of vintage.

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Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

Once again not answering my question really! :-)

A smartphone *isn't* practical. Not to mention that "kodi" or anything isn't going to be able to sort my music, much of it hasn't much metadata with it, the metadata that there is simply the directory hierarchy.

I want a keyboard/remote with buttons and a screen larger than a smartphone.

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Chris Green
Reply to
Chris Green

Indeed. No reason for it to be

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Then use a laptop. With a remote mouse.

My code only needs a mouse to navigate

Crappy old lappy is not expensive

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Well then an old netbook or similar - anythimg that has wifi and will run a browser.

Sure. If they will run.

The other option is to us another Pi equipped with buttons and a screen....:-)

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

You have WiFi, so they're very useful. Just not for making phone calls.

I appreciate that a smartphone isn't the solution you're looking for to control your putative Pi music centre ... but don't write them off as useless about the house just because there's no cellular phone signal!

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Cheers, 
 Daniel.
Reply to
Daniel James

What sort of screen? You mentioned the possibility of using an old Android tablet -- that'd work as a remote using a web server on the Pi and accessing it through a browser on the tablet. Essentially the same smartphone solution you're so against, but using the tablet instead of a phone.

Alternatively, you could attach a small screen to the Pi and use a Linux media player on the Pi itself ... something like mpd is capable of playing either local or networked media to a variety of clients. Unless you use a normal desktop monitor you'll probably be using a miniature screen made for the Pi, in which case it won't be much bigger than a smartphone.

Have a look at

formatting link

If you have a keyboard attached to your Pi you could use the commandline client mpc (also good for testing) or any one of the other clients available. You can even get client libraries that enable you to write your own client software -- you might write a player program with large text and wire some buttons up to the GPIO bus to drive it (so that you don't need a keyboard).

You can interface an i/r sensor to the Pi and use a normal i/r remote control to send signals to it to control a media player, but the i/r solutions I've seen for Linux always seem a little clunky -- or perhaps it's just that i/r seems clunky now that we have WiFi? The Pi doesn't have i/r hardware built-in as standard, but flirc receivers are available.

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Cheers, 
 Daniel.
Reply to
Daniel James

I though mono audio from rPIs was a thing, a couple of searches turned up results that seemed to confirm it, but it turns out they were red herrings ... still plenty of results saying for decent quality get a DAC.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Mnay modern phones support making and recieving calls over wifi if your carrier supports it too. Cf 'Wifi calling'

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

yep. Timing jitter on the onbard convertyr is likely to make sound a causalty of CPU usage

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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