Pi music centre - anyone done it?

No, we've actually just upgraded to new phones (dirt cheap in my case, a 'feature phone') which do Voice over WiFi and Voice over 4G properly so we're just getting used to the mobiles working in the house, mostly.

Three's 4G just about gets into the house, we just needed phones to use it.

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Chris Green

Yes, definitely a possibility, small/old laptops can run a basic Linux distribution and, as you say, a remote mouse will do much of what I'm looking for. The *only* issue is that a Pi would use less power.

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Chris Green

Yes, it's not a perfect solution for me/us but a 7" screen would work

*much* better than a phone screen (though some modern phones are approaching 7").

Yes, that was one of the things I was wondering about for a Pi (the screen that is).

While I am usually a command line junkie (mutt for E-Mail, tin for usenet, etc.) and I have played with mpc I don't think it would go down too well with the other users.

I think the suggestion elsewhere in this thread of using a remote mouse would probably be a better solution for us. I use trackballs rather than mice mostly which would work quite well with a Pi and a small screen, just leave one's favourite player software running on the Pi with the screen stuck somewhere handy and then all you need is to roll the trackball and click buttons.

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Chris Green

Not necessarily than a notebook/ But I meant to use the lappy as a GUI while the pi does the back office stuff

--
  ?A leader is best When people barely know he exists. Of a good leader,  
who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say,  
?We did this ourselves.? 

? Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

A large (enough) touchscreen on the Pi. There is the official touchscreen and it might be alright for this. I avoided it because it doesn't have square pixels. I got a smaller version from Pimoroni but that's probably too small for you.

My dumb old-style 'feature phone' clamshell is the one which has a cell plan which I use rarely. My android smart phone doesn't have a plan and it can be used for all kinds of things, a remote for my Kobi Pi, a camera, an mp3 player incl bluetooth, a dictation device, and online via wifi.

As a person who typically doesn't use a cell phone, I've been surprised by how useful the device can be.

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Mike Easter

On Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:45:29 +0100, Daniel James declaimed the following:

If the WiFi is fast enough, some phones can route service through the WiFi rather than using cell towers.

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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

Many electronics starter kits contain a simple IR remote and a sensor which can be connected to the gpio pins. You can also get USB IR sensors which will work with pretty much any remote.

---druck

I've never had much interest in this sort of thing, but I did run across this a little while ago and it _might_ be useful for what you're doing:

For improved sound compared to the Pi's built-in analogue audio output, a USB sound adapter may be much cheaper than one of the HAT devices.

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I would rather have questions that cannot be answered... 
...than to have answers that cannot be questioned 

Richard Feynman

But I have:-

A better camera which is as small and light as many smartphones, and it has a proper viewfinder

A remote keyboard and mouse which are much easier to use than any smartphone screen.

A laptop for browsing the web

A music system which sounds much better than a smartphone

:-)

I'm of the Unix/Linux philosophy which advocates things that do *one* thing and do it well. A smartphone does lots of things rather badly IMHO. Yes, a smartphone is small and portable but that's rarely an issue if I'm on my 'bike or in my car. If I'm walking then I'm probably somewhere that I don't want the distractions of a smartphone, just a (better) camera maybe and something for communication in an emergency.

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Chris Green

That's cheaper than I thought they were, but I think my USB sound adapter was about $1:

Works fine.

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The original slimserver / squeezebox series of MP3 music players, were just large electro florescent displays controlled by a large handheld remote - the display is sharp easily visible across the room.

Failing that expense, you could use an old computer monitor, or LCD TV.

You could change the keyboard for something voice controlled, but your utterances could be drowned out by the music. However, gesture control might work.

Strap a camera on it, and dance in front of it. Use some kind of learning AI on it, so the way you dance changes the type and style of music.

If it keeps playing "the birdy song" then you may have a problem.... ;-)

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Adrian C

Well I am driving several hundred pounds of amps and speakers so I didnt wanna mess around :-)

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Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have  
guns, why should we let them have ideas? 

Josef Stalin

I am also of the philosophy that if I can get one piece of tech to do it rather than two I will.

So my TVs are smart and understand DLNA so I dont have any 'dvd/blu ray' boxes to worry about

Once I had to have a smartphone - in my case the need was to receive text messages in a no-signal area, which meant wifi calling and a particular operator and phone - well why not leverage the blasted thing?

It is also my satnav. And takes dictation.

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Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have  
guns, why should we let them have ideas? 

Josef Stalin

Don't need a smartphone for that. My cheap feature phone (ZTE 2312)

on one charge. I.e. it's rather a good 'phone! :-)

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Chris Green

Good one! dont think that was avaialable for PAYG when I bought mine tho

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Any fool can believe in principles -  and most of them do!

I don't need a good camera, a good keyboard, or a full browser when moving about and mediocre sound is fine for my podcasts. But I love having a small utility right there in my shirt pocket that can do many things adequately. I wouldn't dream of typing even moderately long texts like this one that way, but for a simple "me too" or something, who cares?

The camera is fine for taking meter readings without having to type or find paper and pencil. The browser suffices for checking a definition in Wikipedia. I have better things, but I don't want to lug them around.

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I may have missed something, but this looks more like a video player than something that can stream audio: I had look at the more obvious parts of that site but didn't find any references to supported audio file formats or devices, Pi hats, DACs etc.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org