home audio system

[Stewart C. Russell]

I've been doing something similar to Richard for the last four years.
Here's my setup:

* server: a SheevaPlug (could very easily be a Raspberry Pi).

* software: Firefly/mt-daapd (this is now unmaintained code, and lots of
people have complained about the code quality and produced a variety of
half-assed forks, but it's been rock solid for me for a 30,000+ track
collection). You want the r1696 nightly, or one of its Debian patched
relations. The least half-assed fork is forked-daapd, which adds iPhone
remote control but loses mt-daapd's SQL-based smart playlists.

* hardware: ancient Roku SoundBridges. If you can find these used,
they're pretty good. They crop up on eBay quite a lot because Roku
shipped crappy power supplies that couldn't drive the big VFD displays
on the SoundBridge. A new decent PSU can be had for about $10. They do
wireless (sorta; the very latest supported G) and wired networking, and
have phono, mini-stereo and TOSLINK digital outputs.

mt-daapd and its variants pretend to be an iTunes shared library. There
is lots of software that supports this (curiously, the frequently least
compatible is … iTunes. Hmm). I have had little success with DLNA; I
don't think devices expect to get 35,000 tracks come at them. My DVD
player goes to sleep before it has parsed the whole stream.

Transcoding with a Raspberry Pi will be difficult. You should *just* be
able to do a single stream from flac → mp3 in real time. Last time I
benchmarked it, lame -V2 encoded at 1.3× real time on the Pi. There are
no really good fixed-point MP3 encoders, so lightweight ARM chips really
struggle.

Many NAS boxes have mt-daapd built in. My Synology one is slowly
becoming my main music server, as its dual-core PPC has a little more
grunt than an ARM, and it serves tunes just fine. So you may not need a
separate server.

cheers,
 Stewart
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