Maybe a Dumb Question?

[dtbrown101]

I apologize if this has been addressed already somewhere else, but I'm wondering if this set up will allow me to stream my own music from my laptop or if it will only stream internet radio exclusively.

I've been looking everywhere for a cheap and (relatively) easy way to have a wireless speaker system set up in my apartment and this tutorial has me really excited. Additionally, is it possible for me to have more than one of these set up at once? Ideally, I would love to be able to be sitting with my laptop in my kitchen, turn on my music and have it play through mounted speakers, then be able to turn those off, move to my living room and continue streaming to another set of speakers in there.

Any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated.

[jeroen94704]

If you follow the tutorial to the letter, I believe you will end up with an internet radio player only. However, the basic setup (OpenWrt on a wifi router with a USB sound-card and MPD) will play almost anything.

What you want is definitely possible, as this is in fact pretty much how I have set things up. I have a server sitting in the attic that runs MPD, and two Asus routers also running MPD. What I can do is play music on the server (which outputs to an HTTP stream, not to any speakers), and stream it to either of the Asus boxes, or both at once, each of which is connected to its own set of speakers.

The master MPD player (on the server) can be controlled through a web-interface, or any other MPD client, and this will effectively control what I hear through the Asus boxes.

This is not yet a perfect setup though. Some issues:

- The music coming from the Asus boxes is not synchronized. There's always going to be some timing difference between them. Maybe not a big issue, but this means it's not "true" multi-room music
- The Asus boxes do not have the juice to play AND stream music, so streaming from one Asus box to another is not possible. You will need something more powerful as your master MPD server.
- The standard MPD http streaming output drops when the music stops, so all clients loose their connection. This means I have to start the music on the server, and then hit "play" on both Asus boxes. The way to fix this is by setting up icecast, which allows you to have a "silence" track, which will be played in the absence of any other music playing. I haven't set this up yet though.

Let us know is this works for you!

Jeroen

[mightyohm]

You didn't specify what operating system you are using, but I have used Nicecast on OSX to stream music from my laptop. Nicecast routes audio from the laptop to a local shoutcast server. The wireless router can connect to this like any other shoutcast station. It's not a polished solution but it basically works, and I am sure there are other ways of doing it, but this is what I have used for demos of the wifi radio where there is no reliable wireless (eg. Maker Faire).