Audio

For the audio-renderer, see revious posts, I decided to switch to the trunk version of OpenWRT. I experienced some issues with the USB audio hardware and the trunk version should prove that there are no issues with the USB audio drivers which are already fixed. The following configuration is for the bleeding-edge version, some module names have changed so it cannot be applied to the Kamikaze (10.3) version without modification (e.g. block-mount contains the overlay functionality and kmod-fs-ext4 has support for all ext file-system versions). NOTE: This configuration has stripped all modules which are not necessary for USB audio and Wireless LAN. ...

One important feature for the audio renderer is the support for presets. I do not want to search for my mobile phone in order to select a music source when I enter the kitchen in the morning. The use-case where you turn on your analog radio and the tuning wheel is right at the position of your favorite radio station is unbeatable simple. Therefore the audio-renderer has a list of MP3 streaming URLs where the first one will be played upon startup of the process. The channels can be switched by sending a signal to the server process: ...

A very early version of my UPnP audio-renderer had been released on Gitorius https://gitorious.org/gupnp-audio-renderer (Update 2011-08-01: It has been renamed to m3player and been moved to here). It implements the necessary parts of the UPnP MediaRenderer specification. The implementation is based on excellent frameworks like: GUPnP GStreamer GLib The initial target for the renderer is the OpenWRT platform (see previous articles about a WiFi music player). I decided to use C instead of Vala (that was a decision against Rygel) as the memory constraints are very limited and I need to save memory whereever possible. Although my C language skills are a bit rusty, I did not want to learn another language. Additionally, the usage of Vala would increase the effort to port the whole vala stuff to the OpenWRT build-system. Luckily GStreamer and GLib are already available on OpenWRT. ...

Follow the commands below in order to setup a local environment for working with the latest development version of the GUPNP framework. mkdir $(pwd)/base git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gssdp cd gssdp ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base make && make install cd .. git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gupnp cd gupnp PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../base/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base cd .. git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gupnp-tools cd gupnp-tools PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../base/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base cd .. Run the following commands for setting the environment to use the fresh compiled libraries instead of the OS provided ones (Empathy under Ubuntu 11.04 uses an older version of the GUPNP libraries. I ran into segmentation faults because the libraries did not match): ...

[] [] For my low-budget wireless music player I had to tweak OpenWRT in order to support my setup. For initial tests I decided to use the Music Player Daemon and madplay. The following steps describe how to setup OpenWRT on the TP-Link WR1043ND. It assumes that the OpenWRT 10.03.1-rc4 firmware has already been installed, that the IP address of the router has been set to 192.168.0.111, and that an USB audio, as well as that an USB stick has been connected to the device via an USB hub. ...

After searching the net for quite a while I could not find a pure wireless music player for small money. In case you want to equip multiple rooms in your house with a music player it will cost you a lot of money. All products on the market come with a lot of features, of which most are not necessary. The following links show interesting hacks on how to build your own WiFi music player based on OpenWRT: ...