Webradio

Intro

I was struggling to fit some requirements:

• I ripped all my CDs on the HD attached to the slug
• I wanted my Philips Streamium (which is not UPnP) to be able to play whatever I want
  • Streamium is not UPnP
  • Streamium doesn't understand Ogg format
  • Streamium has a very poor UI
• I wanted to be able to control the playlist from any other computer in the house
• Why not extending those possibilities from anywhere on the Net?

Resources

• madplay/libmad (fixed point mp3 player)
  • In terms of codecs this is the only fixed-point lib available for the slug and it allows only mp3 playback.
• musicdp, aka mpd (its faq)
  • That's THE solution to manage the playlists, now we need to cope with its playing capabilities...
• http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/SlugAsAudioPlayer
  • With mpd and libmad, good idea but is using the slug soundcard (if you add one), not icecast
• icecast2
  • The solution for streaming, if we find the right way to add a mp3 source to it.
• mpd + icecast2
  • 2 problems: only streaming in Ogg and needs to reencode the stream, too much without a fixed point encoder!
• oggfwd
  • Would solve one problem: does not reencode, but, as the name tells you, only Ogg.
• EzStream
  • Good candidate, feeds icecast with mp3 without reencoding, but needs to be hooked to mpd
• Ices and especially the versions 0.x
  • Same as for EzStream
• Jinzora
  • To be explored... but requires php/mysql, maybe too much for the slug
• Hack mpd with ices client
  • That's the best I could find: a Perl script as scriptable playlist for ices fetches the songs from mpd playlist ans streams them to icecast2
  • Ices in its basic configuration doesn't perform any reencoding
  • Note that the old version of ices is required as the new one supports only Ogg

Let's go

mpd

apt-get install mpd mpc

• Edit /etc/mpd.conf
  • point music_directory to your mp2s or make a symlink from /var/lib/mpd/music
  • define password for clients if you want
• On the slug there is by default no soundcard but mpd cannot start without at least one output, we'll give it a dummy soundcard:

echo snd-dummy >> /etc/modules
modprobe snd-dummy

• Generate DB

/etc/init.d/mpd stop
mpd --create-db

• Launch mpd

/etc/init.d/mpd start
mpc stop

(Remember that we don't use mpd to play music but only to handle playlists)

• When need to update the DB:

mpc update

• gmpc can display content in UTF-8 but depending on the locales of your platform, encoding done by mpd could be wrong, in that case you need to add to /etc/mpd.conf sth like this and recreate the db

filesystem_charset              "UTF-8"
id3v1_encoding                  "UTF-8"

mpd --create-db

icecast2

apt-get install icecast2

• Edit /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml
  • Change passwords in <authentication>
  • Change <hostname> if it's relevant
  • You can add clients authentication as well:

   <mount>
       <mount-name>/mymountpoint</mount-name>
       <authentication type="htpasswd">
               <option name="filename" value="/etc/icecast2/authusers"/>
               <option name="allow_duplicate_users" value="0"/>
       </authentication>
   </mount>
touch /etc/icecast2/authusers
chown icecast2 /etc/icecast2/authusers
chmod 700 /etc/icecast2/authusers

Note that my streamium cannot handle basic authentication, the only way would then be based on IP, with URL auth in icecast2 or simply through iptables.

• Edit /etc/default/icecast2
  • ENABLE=true

/etc/init.d/icecast2 start

• Then to manage users, go to the admin page http://myserver:port/admin/ -> Manage authentication of that source
• Stream playing can be achieved with sth like

xmms http://user:pwd@myserver:port/mymountpoint
vlc http://user:pwd@myserver:port/mymountpoint.m3u

ices

• Debian features only ices2 so we've to compile the old version ourselves

apt-get install libshout3-dev libperl-dev libmp3-info-perl
wget http://downloads.us.xiph.org/releases/ices/ices-0.4.tar.gz
tar xzf ices-0.4.tar.gz 
cd ices-0.4
./configure --with-perl
make
cp src/ices /usr/local/bin
cp conf/ices.conf.dist /etc/ices.conf

• Copy script from http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Hack:ices-client

wget -q -O - http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Hack:ices-client | awk '/<pre/,/<\/pre/'|html2text -width 200 > mpdplaylist.pm

• Edit mpdplaylist.pm
  • my $mediaroot: points to your mp3 directory, must be identical to music_directory in /etc/mpd.conf but with trailing /
  • Add the following lines to use authentication for musicp clients (cf password in /etc/mpd.conf) or to connect to a remote mpd or a non default port

$ENV{'MPD_HOST'} = 'mypassword@localhost';
$ENV{'MPD_PORT'} = '6600';

• Edit /etc/ices.conf

 <Playlist>
   <Type>perl</Type>
   <Module>mpdplaylist</Module>
 </Playlist>

Maybe you need to adapt also <Mountpoint>, <Password> to match the icecast2 source pwd and the <Bitrate> but that's just for info as we won't recode the stream anyway, and once everything is running properly, set <Background> to 1.

• Run

rm /tmp/ices.log
ices -c /etc/ices.conf
# or as icecast2 user:
su icecast2 -m /bin/bash -c "ices -c /etc/ices.conf"

TODO

• setup phpmp2?
• auto upload of ripped CDs?
  • there are plenty of tools to tune id3 tags, mp3info is one of them and by default allows to change one item without touching the other id3 infos.
• ices:
  • default playlist: get songs randomly from playlist file but don't install it in mpd
  • next song: killall -s USR1 ices
  • how to make it remotely?? through icecast2(php auth?) or mpd...
  • ices crossfade?
  • use mpc play to sync display of played song? will consume a few CPU (dummy sound card, we could try to do a dummy libmad ;-)), otherwise be sure to do mpc stop
• icecast authorisation, cf http://www.icecast.org/docs/icecast-2.3.1/icecast2_listenerauth.html
  • as streamium does not understand http auth_basic, one solution is to use iptables to filter access locally and use an icecast2 relay with auth_basic for external use when I'm on-the-go