HowToAudioRemoteWithMpd

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A trivial way to turn the 770 into a nice audio remote using mpd

This may be useful to you if you have a home network with music files somewhere and a Linux or FreeBSD PC connected to the media room audio setup.

In this situation, having playlist, volume and start/stop control on the 770 turns it into a really nice audio remote control device.

There are many music playing applications and frameworks for Linux. While the actual solution to the above problem turned out to be trivial, sorting out the right tools took me some time.

One solution (mine :) ): * Install mpd http://www.musicpd.org/ on the machine connected to the audio setup. * Install the phpmp http://www.musicpd.org/phpMp.shtml mpd client on any machine running apache (this might be the audio decoder or some other, in my case it's another one because the decoder is a diskless P200...) * Do the very simple mpd and phpmp configuration (see the musicpd.org pages for this) * Enjoy

Rationale: * I wanted the audio machine to do the decompression. There is no reason to have the 770 work on this and it is also desirable to avoid streaming raw audio over wifi (eats bandwidth). This eliminates esd. * My audio player is more or less headless, and I wanted to minimize the number of machines involved, so this eliminates xmms, even if it is easily remote-controllable too (I could probably have used noxmms or other hacks, but I wanted to keep things simple). It would seem that xmms2 could be used in place of mpd when it will be ready, which does not seem to be the case. xmms has an advantage over mpd: it supports many more source formats, and every audio bell and whistle under the sun.

There are few things that I don't like with mpd, namely a lack of support for some relatively common audio formats, and the fact that playlist management is bundled inside the audio daemon, when it should be separate (for sharing when there are several _mpd_s running on separate machines).

However I am quite satisfied with the result. Another nice aspect is that any widget in the house with a web browser can control the audio. You can start a song from the 770, forget it somewhere, and still mute the sound or skip a song from any other computer or web-capable fridge. No more running for the remote!

If you don't have an old, mostly silent PC around, to connect to the HiFi, an even nicer solution would be to use a SqueezeBox from http://www.slimdevices.com. The associated music streaming application (SlimServer) has a web interface which should run just right on the 770. This is almost the same architecture as described above, except it uses centralized catalog management and the audio devices are nicer than my beige box. I may buy one someday...

And the obligatory screen shot. This was not taken on the 770 because I'm too lazy, but it does look the same, I swear ! : http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/phpmp.png