Streaming my music collection from anywhere.

September 18, 2007 at 11:27 pm | In Geeky, Linux |

I'm really in love with MPD. It lets me listen to my music anywhere and let's me use the same interface whether I'm stitting at home or at the office.

Recently I got a Nokia N800 which is great because it has wifi and and a great soundcard (even great speakers for a device of this size): it's begging to be a portable WIFI boombox.

The only problem is that MPD only supports Ogg vorbis through Icecast. Ogg vorbis is available through alsa applications on the N800 but most of the applications on the N800 are not alsa aware, which means that the nice little desktop applet for media streams won't communicate with MPD/Icecast.

I figured out recently that MPD CAN stream in Mp3 format (albeit in a bit of an indirect fashion):

MPD -> JACK -> oddcastv3 -> Icecast -> N800

The process was a little bit involved but not too terribly difficult once I figured out the correct pipeline. It's late and I don't really feel like writing up the whole process. If anyone is interested, make a comment and I'll post some more details.


6 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. Hi,

    I found this and was wondering if there are any N800 audio players that work directly with Icecast yet? What I mean is, I use MPD > Icecast to stream my FLAC encoded music (transcoded to OGG) and it works great when played back on my XP desktop with Foobar2000. I was hoping to find player for the N800 as I just bought one. From what I have read so far it seems pretty iffy.

    Thanks

    Comment by Steve — February 6, 2008 #

  2. Hi Steve,

    The default N800 media player on OS2007 has no problem working with icecast. But only in Mp3 mode, not ogg mode.

    The problem is that MPD will only stream to icecast in ogg mode, and not in mp3 mode.

    Upgrading the N800 to OS2008 reconciles this problem somewhat. On OS2008 you can install the Ogg plugin. However, I think its a bit buggy. It works, but it takes over a minute to precache the stream when you hit play. Which also means that when you change songs there is a minute delay to change songs too. This is only a problem with the media player, it actually works great on the command line (I forget exactly with what, ogg123 or gst-player or something like that)

    One thing to note about Ogg support on the N800. The N800 has hardware acceleration for decoding mp3s. Ogg is done entirely with software, so you will see a battery performance hit.

    One other approach I've found recently is a icecast proxy that can transcode the ogg stream into mp3 and then rebroadcast to the same icecast server. This seemed to work when I played with it, but I haven't used it much at all:

    https://freigeist.org/w//Maemo_mpd_streaming

    Comment by ryan — February 6, 2008 #

  3. Thanks for your quick answer. I will try your suggestion, it seems like a good solution.

    Comment by Steve — February 8, 2008 #

  4. Well streamTrancoderv3 is supposed to do exactly that, transcode ogg into mp3. Unfortunately I get a segmentation fault and it refuses to run. I will keep watching Oddsock's forum but it seems the apps there are not being developed anymore. Where you running it on windows or linux? I am using Kubuntu and really like it. Which version of streamTranscoder did you test?

    Anyway have you tried the XMMS player on your N800? I use it on a Mythbuntu set-top to play back my Icecast streams and it works great.

    Comment by Steve — February 8, 2008 #

  5. I received my N800 and so far I am fairly impressed. I tried using XMMS but it uses to many resources. The best option I have found is to use mplayer, launched from the command line, to play the streams. It plays OGG streams using around 13% of the CPU, and sounds great. I think my setup, server running MPD and Icecast, N800 running a MPD client and mplayer is pretty cool.

    Comment by Steve — February 15, 2008 #

  6. That's great Steve!

    I've used mplayer in the past on the N800, but hadn't reinstalled it after the upgrade to OS2008. I'll have to try it again for streaming oggs!

    Thanks for coming back and sharing this with me.

    Comment by ryan — February 15, 2008 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^
XML Sitemap