home audio system

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 07:18:06AM -0500, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
> 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.

But the pi has hardware floating point.  Is it that bad or are you
running the wrong kind of arm linux on it?

> 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.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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