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 --
Is there any device which will provide the above and also things like internet radio functionality (maybe even DAB+?). I'm not looking for a full-on surround sound system, and I don't want to be locked into proprietary technology - I want something which will play nicely with my rooted OmniROM smartphone and, if I ever get round to building one, a Linux-based media server.
I don't yet have a NAS setup, but I'm in the market for one of those eventually. I'd like to be able to play stuff from the NAS when I get that setup, so what sort of things should I be considering from the speaker side and also the NAS side? I've heard of DLNA but not done much reading around on it yet.
I've also heard of Sonus and the (arguably defunct?) Squeezebox as decent proprietary options but not sure they quite fit my requirements? Has there been any open technologies in this area I should look for? Or, as I'm beginning to suspect, should I be looking at something which doesn't have much intelligence in and is basically just a big wi-fi & bluetooth speaker.
I fully intend to do some proper reading around, but I was Interested in anyone's general opinions of things to look for and to give me some pointers to decent buzzwords / protocols that might be worth googling. I thought it might be a topic of interest to others too.
Cheers in advance for any help!
Peter.