Debian Administration

How about using VLC? you can set it up for a streamed output via HTTP, or multicast, or set it up as a on-demand system. Theres a few howtos about and the VLC docs are also good.

-- Andrew Williams

Is there any particular reason not to just treat the main music store as a file server and just let each client cook up it's own playlist?

Streaming servers are only really useful if you want to set up one or more "radio station" style playlists that everyone on the network can connect to, and perhaps control via HTTP.

Two things you can look at are shoutcast and icecast. Shoutcast is pretty much a standard for internet radio stations and can be found at www.shoutcast.com , that will let you use the same playlist in multiple locations.

Shoutcast runs on linux, but it can only server mp3 files, however there is also a similar program called icecast which can handle ogg files if you need that ability.

http://www.shoutcast.com
http://www.icecast.org -- also found in your local apt repository
http://darkice.sourceforge.net/ -- also in apt

good luck!

You could try KPlaylist - http://www.kplaylist.com to start with. Fairly snappy on a slower server, allows you to set up playlists, or just quicky stream/download albums to whatever machine you want to play it from.

Shout/icecast are also good, and are built from the point of view of broadcasting the same stream to multiple hosts. (Has anyone found a nice & simple web frontend to setting up and playing playlists through shoutcast?)

My final suggestion is mpd (as in apt-get install mpd) or music player daemon at http://www.musicpd.org/ -> One backend player that plays audio through the server's audio hardware, and multiple frontends to control the running playlist, from curses to pretty GTK flavours. (With the GTK frontend, gmpc, it hard not to think of it as acting like a network enabled XMMS.)

Now my dream is for a single app to pull in all these features.... oh yeah.

I had this working about a year ago. Can't for the life of me remember how or with what software, but finally it worked. One server, streaming songs to xmms's on different machines throughout my 4 room appartment. Sweet? No. Because of lag. In every room the music was slightly delayed compared to the other rooms, even though they were tuned in to the exact same stream.

So: I forgot the software sollution. Got an amp that would allow me to hook up a lot of speakers and was able to switch sets of speakers on/off. I dragged wires throughout the appartment to hook up the speakers. Hooked the amp up to the music-server. Installed MPD on the server, and client software on the clients. Done!


Greets,

Maarten

I used to use liveice with icecast for mp3. Now I use icecast2 with ices2 for ogg. Ices2 serves only ogg so if you want both mp3 and ogg streams use ices 0.4.

Regards,
rjc

When I researched this a couple of years ago, there were very few options. An expensive multi-zone preamp and very long wires is the only option I could find that will guarantee synchronization.

The slimp3 server will synchronize multiple players, but only if they are hardware slimp3 players from slimdevices.com. Every other solution I could find, whether software-only or a hardware-software combination carefully advertises the ability to play different things on different players but is curiously silent about the ability to synchronize multiple players. The slimp3 server doesn't guarantee synchronization, partially because it's dependent on the quality of your network, but I can't hear any lag going from one player to another (I own three slimp3 players).

What might work for you is to get a newer version of slimdevice's server software from www.slimdevices.com. The version in Debian is several years out of date by now, and there have been 4 generations of hardware players introduced since then. While synchronizing still only works with a slimdevices client, they now include an emulator written in Java (softsqueeze), which you can run on each client computer. Slimserver also now includes the ability to play or transcode many more formats. The hardware (and softsqueeze, since it's just a hardware emulator) natively plays mp3, flac and wav; other formats, including ogg, are supported via transcoding.

The downside to this is that the software has fairly high overhead; slimserver does not scale well with large music libraries (people with 40k+ tracks regularly complain about bloated memory requirements and slow performance), and you'll have to have Java on each client to run softsqueeze. Transcoding formats adds a bunch of overhead to the server, too. Slimserver also only synchronizes players at the beginning of each track, so the mismatch might get to be annoying if your clients have clock drift.

My article on this site, http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/145 (use and abuse of pipes with audio data) shows you how to abuse netcat and such to do the job in a cheap and nasty way. The music stays in sync.

PJ

If you want a system that integrates well with iTunes (and devices that are designed to work with iTunes - http://www.rokulabs.com/ -, have a look at:

http://www.opendaap.org/

and

http://www.mt-daapd.org/


although to the best of my knowledge there aren't any debs available, but it should be fairly straightforward to build