On 17/03/15 11:31, samwise wrote:
Hi, all.
I recently sent my trusty hi-fi which had reached a grand old age of over a decade and a half of useful service off to be recycled. The CD player had long-since stopped working and the radio was never very good, so it ended its useful life being a glorified amp.
I'd like to replace it with something but I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, so I haven't really got much of a clue in this area.
I want something I can connect wirelessly to stream stuff from my Android smartphone, tablet and PC etc. I expect it needs to connect to wi-fi whilst at home where it will be most of the time,
Sonos would do most of those things, but it's pricey. I don't know if it will stream from a smart phone, but it's certainly controllable from one. It can play files on a shared (Samba/Windows share'd) folder. It can play/download from Spotify.
but I'd like to be portable enough to move it without too much hassle on occasion to locations where it won't have access to a wi-fi network.
Well most Sonos things are reasonably portable, but I don't know if they'll work with no local wifi. I suspect they will if you plug the smart phone audio out into a sonos with a line in socket.
As an example, my last hi-fi was recently used to run a few ceilidhs - so I'd like it to be moderately powerful, so I can take it a hall in the middle of nowhere and be capable of playing music streamed from my smartphone, over bluetooth I imagine, and loud enough to work at such an event.
In an ideal world, if I could buy two such devices and have them stream together so that I can have the same music playing in two separate rooms, that'd be quite handy. Maybe synced over wi-fi?
There are bluetooth speakers too, which connect to a smartphone (for example) over bluetooth. This works well, and is simple and a lot cheaper than a sonos. As for if it would be loud enough for a room, I suppose it depends what you buy.
Even simpler than that, is just get some powered PC speakers and plug them into your smarphone with a cable.
Now, my (vague) question is - are there any open standards I should be looking for in this area of audio streaming / hi-fi?
I've looked at this various times, and for various reasons not entirely come up with a good solution. My first attempt was with DAAP running a server called mt_daap, AKA firefly. This is an old Apple protocol, but I think the firefly project (and equivalents) is pretty much dead. On the phone, I ran an app called DAAP media Player by Miceli Bros. The app's crude but it works. This requires a server on all the time you want to play music, the server streams the music to the phone. I gave up on this mostly because I have mp3s and ogg files, and firefly couldn't reliably transcode them as the player wouldn't play the Ogg files on my phone, or I couldn't get it to work. I wanted to persevere so that my media server could stream the files over the internet to my phone when I was away from home, but without the transcoding, it was just too slow and too much data. I came to the conclusion that Spotify would be a better way to go if I wanted remote music steaming, but I didn't want to pay for it, so I gave up.
I eventually went with a raspberry pi computer running raspbian and mpd - media player daemon. I have two actually. One is headless, and one has a screen. Both can be controlled from a command line (over ssh if required) using mpc - media player client. Also, there's a graphical utility gmpc which I use on the one with a screen to control it. I can also control both from my laptop with gmpc. One's connected directly with my amp, one to a bluetooth speaker (gear 4 I think), which is actually connected via the screen's (a tv) sound out socket and a cable.
I did read somewhere about how to stream in sync to remote boxes, but I failed to bookmark the article, and I've never found it since.
Other quick thoughts (I've run out of time) Squeezebox - I'm not sure it's completely dead, and there's a linux package to talk to it I think. DLNA is I think the modern way to do things. I think it's also called and/or related to uupnp. There are various media server packages around, e.g. twonky. There's one I think it was called xbox media centre (XMC?) but it's recently changed name. You can get a raspberry pi distro to run it.
Other ideas, stuff like an apple tv box, or similar do?
Hope this helps. Not snipping the rest to remind me what I haven't commented on, so I can comment later. Good luck!. Steve