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Music Media

Hardware Streaming MP3 Components? 34

Posted by Cliff from the adding-the-network-cable-into-the-A/V-mix dept.
woogie asks: "I have finally broken down and ripped all my CDs, and I have a mod_mp3 server with a bunch of different streams based on genres that can deliver those mp3s to anywhere in my house. Anywhere, that is, except my stereo system. Anyone know of decent audio hardware that will read a Shoutcast stream? Sure, I can plug my laptop line out into my tuner's inputs, but I'd really like a device I can just stack on top of my tuner that will accept Shoutcast streams. The only device I've seen that allows this is the Audiotron which appears to want to read your mp3s from an SMB share, but can be configured to read Shoutcast streams if you use special Windows based software to configure it. It would work, but seems a bit pricey given that it targets my needs as an afterthought. There is some promising hacking going on with the Rio Receiver here and here, but getting one to read a Shoutcast stream might be beyond my abilities. Am I missing anything else out there? A simple device that I could just cycle through different preconfigured streams with a remote would suffice."
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Hardware Streaming MP3 Components? More

Hardware Streaming MP3 Components?

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  • The SliMP3 (Score:5, Informative)

    by jackmakrl ( 115512 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:56PM (#3108464)
    seems to be what you want....
    http://www.slimdevices.com/

  • don't overlook the laptop... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fist_187 ( 556448 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:06PM (#3108572) Homepage
    if using a remote is the bulk of the functionality you want, then don't overlook using an old laptop. X10's universal remote ($25 US) has a serial-port receiver and works great for controlling winamp. (there's a few plugins that give you winamp functinoality) .

    the other good thing about that setup is that the X10 remote uses RF for the computer control instead of infrared... so line-of-sight doesn't matter.
    • I have one of these , but have never been able to get it to control volume correctly.

      I've been using with boom 2000 on windows.

      Any suggestions?

    • Can you put up the link to the remote with the serial port receiver? I can't find it.
    • you can get the x10 remote here at X10's website [x10.com].

      the winamp plugin (ampapod) is here at winamp's site [winamp.com].

      i have used the ampapod plugin for several years now with no problems. if you want to use this plugin, DO NOT install X10's software. and if you use it with win98se or higher, you must "disable in this hardware profile" the "serial mouse" when it comes up in device manager. if windows picks up the serial port mouse functionality, the ampapod software won't be able to access it. (win98 and below don't automatically detect it, and thus you dont have to worry about it).

      if you need help/advice, feel free to email me at:
      fist_187[at]hotmail

  • An old computer? (Score:3, Informative)

    by moncyb ( 456490 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:11PM (#3108625) Journal

    Maybe you could take an old Pentium system and use it with Linux/FreeBSD/etc... You'd only need network and sound cards (well along with a motherbord, memory and a floppy/CDROM drive to boot from). Create a root/boot image that automaticly connects to your MP3 server and plays the music.

    I think madplay or mpg123 will do that. The only problem may be if they are compiled with libc, you'll need that too--it'll be hard to fit Glibc and the kernel all on one floppy. :)

    You may have to put in a keyboard and video card just so the BIOS won't complain...

    • Floppies not required (Score:5, Informative)

      by iankerickson ( 116267 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @08:11PM (#3109456) Homepage
      I think an old PC is a great suggestion. As long as you're using DMA to a good sound card and have enough RAM, most anything should work fine.

      However, there's no need to limit yourself to floppies for diskless, dedicated function machines anymore. Sure they cost less than a buck, but there's lots of affordable ways around having to cram everything in a 1.4/2.8 MB compressed image.

      1) Use a CompactFlash card (8 MB $10, constantly getting cheaper) and a CF-ATA adapter ($25-$40). They act exactly like a hard-drive in every way, except less heat, power drain, and noise. Mediocre speed, but a seek time of ZERO (i.e. the transfer rate from CF is flat, unlike the bursts of data you get from a hard disk). No software required. They slowly wear out from writes, but as long you don't use them for swap they should last ~10 years. Or just mount read-only, or upgrade every so often to whatever size costs $10 this year (and buy spares). You can master the CF card on a laptop with PCMCIA slots or with a USB CF reader.

      2) Use a motherboard with Disk-On-Chip or a DoC ISA/PCI card. Almost like a hard-drive, but you need a utility floppy to set it up the first time. M-Sys has docs on these (www.m-sys.com). Drivers are optional, depending how you want the OS to use the DoC. GNU drivers for linux are available. An "old" PC may not have the DoC socket, but most $100 motherboards have them now.

      3) Use a motherboard with PEX or ethernet boot support to boot the machine off the LAN. If your building a network appliance, it needs a network anyway. For secure boxes, use two NICs and boot off the one not connected accessible to the internet. Most Intel motherboard with a NIC on-board support several network boot methods. You can add a boot ROM to a PCI/ISA ethernet card, but it's just easier to use a motherboard with support built in.

      4) Use a spare CD-ROM drive to boot from a CD-R or -RW burned on your workstation. 700 MB of space, better access time and transfer rate than floppies for about the same price. One problem would be if the CD-ROM can't read CD-R or CD-RW discs, and some older drives cannot.

      5) Solid-state ATA disks are available now, and the price isn't nearly as bad as the solid-state SCSI disks that used to cost a little more than a car for under 100 megs. Still pretty expensive, but it mounts inside like a regular hard disk, only quieter and with no seek time.

      Not that floppies aren't that bad, but there's no need to settle for their restrictions and liabilities anymore. You can craft a silent, low-power solution with no (or fewer) moving parts to wear out and over 8 megs of space for under $50. And you can still use a compressed disk image on top of that for even more space. A bootable CD gives you the most space for your buck, while CF is probably is easiest to implement and upgrade, while booting over the network offers the best of both, if you can figure out how to set it up and have a suitable boot server to use. If you've got small kids or dumb/mean friends, ejectable boot floppies and CDs are just asking for trouble.

      Sure you can buy something off the shelf. But it's more than likely the company will go out of business or cease all support for the product, leaving you SOL if it has unresolved issues. Why pay when you can't create all your own problems for free? ;-)

      • Re:Floppies not required (Score:3, Informative)

        by CMiYC ( 6473 )
        They slowly wear out from writes, but as long you don't use them for swap they should last ~10 years. Or just mount read-only, or upgrade every so often to whatever size costs $10 this year (and buy spares). You can master the CF card on a laptop with PCMCIA slots or with a USB CF reader.

        These are all great suggestions, but I would strongly urge someone NOT to use CF with EXT2. It did not take long for me to wear out a SanDisk even though I had the drive mounting RO almost immediately after boot. The RO trick would only work if the system is completely configured and then installed on the FlashDrive. EXT2 has an uncanny ability of wearing out the cells very quickly.

        I thought I could get away with running it EXT2-RW while I was getting some files in place. However, after two days (or about 16 hours) of working with the unit, I started getting massive errors. Eventually, the FlashDrive just gave out. Fortuantly when I put the next drive in, I was already set to go for RO until it came time to save a file. In retrospect, I wish I wouldn't have used EXT2, but I was cramped for time and didn't want to learn about ROMFS or anything else. (This was my senior design project, which was mostly an exercise in not sleeping for a week at a time.)
      • I'd like to explore this, but I can't find anyone who sells them to end users (I've done quite a bit of google-ing, no dice). Any pointers?

    • Every time the subject of jukeboxes comes up I post the same thing:

      Webplay [sourceforge.net] rocks.

      I guess the specific topic today is all about a "thin" client, but for those of you building complete jukeboxes from junker computers, check this software out. I looked long and hard at jukebox applications before I chose Webplay, though the critical feature for me was LOCAL play, not streaming. But it does both.

  • Looks like you can shoutcast now... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Billy ( 25215 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:20PM (#3108704) Homepage
    This just in... [comms.net] leaves me with the impression that you may shoutcast to your Rio Receiver now.

  • Just build it... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OneFix ( 18661 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:54PM (#3108927)
    Anything you're gonna buy will be way more expensive than just making your own. The system could be built on a reasonable budget for under $100. On PriceWatch [pricewatch.com] a 600MHz P3 (Celermine) CPU + MicroATX MotherBoard combo can be had for $79, and then the case should be easy enough to find.

    That system already has built-in sound. And even if you needed to use a PCI card, an Ensoniq card can be had for $10. You're talking less than $200 for a complete system that isn't just 1 function...

    I'm sure if you looked around you could find something like an old 266Mhz CPU+MB combo for pocket change...

    You could even install an IRDA Drive into the front and use a universal remote to controll the thing :)

    • While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle, in practice I recommend against a uATX system. I went that route for my server and I have often regretted it. While I got exactly the mobo I wanted back then, the variety available isn't as great which might make an upgrade harder today. Also, it is harder to find uATX power supplies, and I expect that to be the first component to fail.

      I also recommend against systems with components built into the mobo. The aforementioned system -- I chose a mobo with built-in video... Well, no matter what I do, I can't get it to work with my other PCI cards... I had to disable the onboard video and put an old Matrox card in anyway.

      YMMV.
      • Yes, I to would normally recommend against building a system with integrated sound/video, but seeing as how embeded systems use the same design (using system memory/CPU to get processing power/memory), and it is becomming increasingly difficult to find MotherBoards without at least having integrated sound, it would be no different than an expensive embeded system...

        And I agree with the issue of the power supply, however the power supply in this system shouldn't be taxed that much...remember, this is just a player...and there will likely be another standard (OGG Vorbis?, MP3-Pro?) by the time one of the components actually fails...

  • Special software? Not. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Whip ( 4737 )
    The only way that the Audiotron requires "special windows based software" to set up ANYTHING on it, is if you consider a "web browser" to be "special windows based software". Matter of fact, not only is it not required, but there is none. The only thing windowsish the Audiotron comes with is AudioStation, for ripping and organizing mp3s...

    You have to use Turtle Radio (http://www.turtleradio.com/ [turtleradio.com]) to configure which shoutcast/icecast streams the Audiotron knows about, but you can add in all your own stations. The Audiotron just downloads its station list when you power it on (or tell it to update). Turtle Radio is free, you just have to register to get the ID code that your Audiotron will use to talk to it.

    Incidentally, the Audiotron is a great piece of hardware. The interface is well designed (as of 2.0, anyhow), it works really well, and the support is phenomenal. Voyetra/Turtle Beach pays a lot of attention to its user mailing list, and has implemented basically every feature that folks on the Audiotron mailing list have asked for. I bought mine a year ago, and haven't regretted it for a second.

  • Fundamental problem. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @12:09AM (#3110462) Homepage
    There is one major problem in this idea. Home and car stereo devices 'push' the audio in a raw format, passing them on to the receiver/mixer which then routes things to the amps. Shoutcast is a pull-technology; you request a stream, and the mp3 server sends it to you in encoded form. Thus, your stereo is sitting stupid, waiting for sound to come on the wires, while your shoutcast server is also sitting stupid, waiting for someone to request a stream.

    For things to work, your stereo unit would need to send a request to the mp3 server for anything to happen; on the other hand, your mp3 server could push the audio to a dumb receiver which is constantly 'listening'.

    Essentially, you would need to sit at a computer and fire up XMMS, then play it out to your stereo. I'm assuming you want the stereo to handle things on its own, via remote control. In such case, you might want to find one of those BookPC-type-things, paint it black or silver and give it an IRMan. You'll need at least one 'smart' component in the loop, might as well make it another low-profile computer.
  • I have been trying unsuccessfully to find a perfect solution for the same thing. To me, it seems to be a waste of money to buy a hardware MP3 player when I have one already... my PC. My system is running 24 hours a day anyway, so it makes sense to use it as an MP3 player. I have seen sites that allow you to control the PC via a remote, so that won't be a problem. The problem is connecting the PC to the stereo. This would be easy if I wanted to keep my server in the living room. But I want the stereo in the living room and my PC in the office. So the question is, how do I connect 'em?

    The choices for doing this are: A) a USB to RCA converter-but the stereo has to be within 15 feet of the PC; B) an FM transmitter/receiver-but I have read reviews and the quality sucks; C) run a line out cable-but again, I hear quality sucks; or D) relocate the stereo to the office and run speaker cables back to the living room-running the cables may be a pain and lack of having the stereo's display in the living room. So far, it looks like option D may be my choice... unless someone else has a better answer.

    • Just try the long line-out first. It's cheap, and if it works well enough for you, you're set.
    • Your C and D is going to have the same problems. In fact, D is probably going to be worse because long cable runs will most likely introduce crosstalk between each other. The only reason I would recommend D over C is that since the signal in the speaker wires is so much greater than the signal in C, it'll be harder to hear the noise introduced to it. However, make the speaker wires too long, and you might require your amplifier to drive harder. Option A is probably the worse idea since you're going to end up taking Digital Data, Convert it to Analog, then to Digital, and then back to Analog. Might as well use a record player while you're at it. ;)
  • One of the things that makes the PC so powerful is the ability to add "dumb" peripherals that add major functionality by leveraging the generality of the PC.

    In this vein, why not have a simple peripheral that:

    1. Gets power from ethernet
    2. Talks IP or some simpler protocol
    3. Has a DAC that is able to convert one uncompressed digital format (say, 44.1kHz PCM) to high quality stereo analog.
    4. Optionally has an IR or RF remote that sends simple events back to the PC.

    Here is the real beauty, especially on a UNIX system: adding codecs is trivial. Really adding any functionality is trivial. Want a random mode, code it up. Need more space, add it to the PC, want to be able to play all songs that match a regexp, code it up. The real slick thing would be that it could play audio that was encoded in a way never even dreamed of by the hardware OR the software designers through UNIX pipes. There could also be a driver that allows it to appear as a simple /dev (maybe /dev/hi-fi?) device, rather than having to address it by IP.

    I suspect that any 2nd year EE student could design and build this thing with a DAC scavenged out of a CD player that suffered mechanical failure.

    You could even use this to replace /dev/dsp for "main system sounds." Allowing high quality, hack-free use of the stereo for general PC audio.

    Some ideas about obvious problems:

    1. Give them all the same MAC, but make the last byte configurable by dip switches (to allow multiple devices on the same ethernet segment). All config could then be handled automagically by the driver.

    2. Design it to take power from ethernet OR an A/C adapter.

    3. It will need some buffer. A few megs should be overkill.

    4. In case this isn't clear, it would be a totally "push" device. It would sit there and just dump whatever came over the wire with its IP/MAC into a buffer, which dumps right into the DAC.

    Advantages:

    1. Never fight with Linux sound drivers again.
    2. All DA conversions prior to the box itself are in software, and therefore don't pick up "chassis noise" like a soundcard does.
    3. "infinite" upgradeability through PC software.
    4. Total platform independence. If it talks ethernet (and IP?), it can control the device.
    5. "Patent-proof" I am pretty sure you can't patent something that is just like something else, only with components /removed/.

    The only real question in my mind is wether it is worth it to implement IP on the thing, or if it would be better to just use a very simple, non-routeable protocol on top of ethernet.

    Does anyone know of anything like this? By like this I mean something that is simply a DAC with ethernet. There a a bunch of devices out there that decode MP3s, etc. That's not what I am looking for.

    Any EEs out there want to take a whack at it?

    And, to come back around to being on topic, he would be able to "play" his shoutcast stream locally, and push it out to his stereo with this thing, if it existed.

    -Peter
    • I'm extremely lost to what you're talking about. If you're talking about a standalone unit, then why do you bring up UNIX and PC upgradability?

      Oh wait a second. You're saying, basically, create a sound card that uses ethernet instead of PCI/ISA. Man, if only infiniband was available now.

      There are quite a few DSPs available that would do something along these lines. You have peaked my interested. You'd basically need a DSP w/ ethernet and then a small external amplifier. You could probably through a 1M SRAM on the board. Use DIP switches to set the IP address, etc, etc, etc. But in the end, you would basically use the PC (and I'm only thinking about XMMS) to decode the MP3s and instead of sending "audio content" to the sound system, it sends it out via ethernet. I wonder if ESD could be adapted to do that even. Hmmmmm....

      Damn dude, I've been CRAWLING for a hardware project (I work for a test and measurement company, and I have all this nice equipment with nothing fun to do). Hmmmm.
      • A sound card that uses ethernet instead of pci/isa, what a great way to say this in less than 80 words!

        The reason I bring up UNIX is that adding a codec would be as simple as "$ foo_codec_play some_song.foo > /dev/hi-fi" None of this wait for the vendor/flash the device/give up on the vendor and rip out the OS and put in Linux crap.

        Seriously, if you skip the remote and just use raw ethernet frames I think this could be done with no brains at all in the "ethernet based soundcard".

        I don't know what "infiniband" is, but as I figure it a 1x cdrom (which is where the 44.1kHz PCM thing came from) xfers at 150kB/s and 10meg ethernet is 1280kB/s ((10mb) * (1024k/m) / (8b/B)). So this thing would use 12% of 10meg and 1.2% of 100meg ethernet, not accounting for overhead.

        I'd prefer setting the MAC by dips. Then if it does us IP, just set up MAC affinity in DHCP. Anyway, like I said, the driver could handle all this. The more I think about it the more I think IP is overkill. Being limited to being on the same ethernet segment as the device is not a big limit. And you could always add a proxy system (if you want to play on a device on a seperate segment you proxy through a machine on the same segment as the device). Again, make the hardware dumb and the software smart.

        Oh, and I updated my email address. Please mail me if you want to persue this. I'll buy all the parts if you build two!

        -Peter
  • There was an article [heise.de] in the german ct' magazine [heise.de] dealing with that. It's about plugging a home-made decoder to the printer port of your PC that does all the decoding for you. All the PC has to do is simply streaming raw MP3-Data to the printer port. There's even a description of how to add a remote-control and a Screen to the device.
  • it looks like all Harman-Kardon receivers can decode MP3 streams, but if you don't have one of those, i think this lovely device [harmankardon.com] might fit your desire. it takes the MP3 stream from your USB port and converts it to digital audio (PCM). One problem, though, is that it sounds like it needs windows drivers to work. then again, they said winmodems would never work outside of windows...and look what happened [linmodems.org].

    --Siva

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