In the first part, I talked a bit about setting up the Raspberry Pi as an AirPlay receiver; something that can receive audio streamed over a home’s wifi connection and play it.

Transmitting from Apple

Apple Devices already support AirPlay by default (not a shock – it’s an Apple invention). So to connect an ipad, iphone, itouch etc… is straightforward. You simply double swipe up in IOS7 and enable AirPlay in the control panel. Job done.

Transmitting from Windows

Windows can be made to talk to the Pi using a program called Tuneblade. This is an application (that if you’re streaming to Shairport as described in Part 1, is free) and can be downloaded from http://tuneblade.com/.

Once launched, Tuneblade can be accessed from your system tray and includes a volume control, so remember to turn it up! It streams the audio even if you mute the local audio output – which is handy if you don’t want to listen to your tiny PC speakers.

Transmitting from Android

On Android, some app’s (such as Streambels) support direct streaming to AirPlay – but many popular apps do not, for example, Spotify does not. Similarly, TuneIn the radio app doesn’t. So another solution is required, similar to that used on Apple devices. ie: redirect the entire audio stream of the device.

There are a number of Apps for Android that will stream the entire sound output of the phone to the Pi. For example, one called AirAudio and another called AirStream. Both of these have demonstration versions to allow you to test. However you will have to buy a licence for around £4 to get a permanent solution (ie: one that doesn’t switch itself off after 10 mins). I didn’t find a totally free alternative (and I’m not anti paying software developers in any case!!).

Whilst apps like Streambels that only stream their own audio channel don’t need root privileges, these other applications that give the greater flexibility of sending any audio on the device (such as that coming out of Spotify) by effectively snooping on other applications audio output – do require root access / super user privileges.

This gets you into the exciting area of device rooting. The process for this can be complicated and in many cases results in the device being wiped as one of the steps to do it. This was certainly the case for the house Nexus 7 though happily not my Motorola Atrix phone. Doing so, however gets this solution to work. In addition it also provides access to a variety of other very useful apps including backup tools that can backup application data as well as the install apk’s and much more. Rooting an android device is not for the feint hearted and comes with associated risks of bricking the device and invalidating your warranty. So something you do, at your own risk.

Transmitting to Multiple Zones

By setting up multiple Raspberry Pi’s around the house with different device names you can effectively zone the house into different audio areas. In addition many of these transmitting programs can broadcast to more than one AirPlay receiver at once. In our house, with our network setup, solely using Raspberry Pi’s, they seem somehow to sycnhronise which is very cool for parties!!!

Overview

So … I want Sonos. I want the ability to be able to select tunes from Spotify, my NAS drive, the radio, whatever – on a tablet and have it come out of my hifi without the tablet physically attached to it.

I could use Bluetooth. But the range is poor and the sound quality questionable.

But what if a Raspberry Pi could do the same thing? What if it could receive audio streamed over Wifi, from a tablet, or my phone, or a laptop etc?… turns out it can.

Apple’s AirPlay protocol is usually used by iTunes to allow it to communicate with Apple TV and is the backbone of the project. However as luck would have it, going beyond Apple and iTunes it is possible for other devices to use Airplay including a variety of Android apps and a few windows apps. There is also a linux project, shairport that allows linux devices to receive Airplay streams and play them.

This is the point I have to fess up and say that I should have written up the Raspberry Pi part of this as I was doing it – but hey ho, it’ a month later so this will lack detail but at least give a general overview.

The challenge with the Pi is simple enough: Get it running headless with shairport (which provides the audio listening service and outputs the audio through the Pi’s 3.5mm jack) running as a service from startup. And in fact, using the raspbian distribution this is relatively easy. However there were some issues: First, I quickly discovered that the Edimax micro USB wifi adapter I had, didn’t have the range to reach my router through a couple of walls. So I swapped it for a Ralink wifi usb adapter with a proper stick aerial I had lying around – but could I get the drivers to work? Could I hell!! Additionally, even without this problem and without launching a GUI, raspbian isn’t that quick to boot and I like quick booting!

For that reason I decided to do it again, using ArchLinux. ArchLinux boots fast and I knew from a previous project that the Ralink wifi adapter could be made to work.

Steps to Setup the Pi

So the steps to success on the Pi

1. Install Archlinux
2. Get Wifi Working
3. Get a build environment working
4. Download shairport package
5. Compile
6. Configure to get it working

To Install ArchLinux you can download an sd card image from here. And then bring the packages up to date using the instructions here. The most important section is that about updating the system. Don’t worry about installing additional software or a desktop environment.

Next – get the wifi working.
This page provides a guide to setting up wifi on ArchLinux. Personally I found the wpa_supplicant approach a real arse – in fact I didn’t get it working. By comparison the automatic Netctl approach mentioned, is very straightforward.

Now that the wifi is working, check that it can get a wifi signal from wherever in the house you tend to position the Pi. If you can’t and you’re using a micro adapter, you may need to change to an adapter with a larger / proper aerial.

Next, some development tools are required. The first command below installs gcc, make etc… the second provides support for git, which is where the shairport source repository is stored.

# sudo pacman -Sy base-devel
# sudo pacman git

My own efforts from this point got a certain distance, including a lot of mucking around with perl packages and cpan, but I was unable to unravel is completely. However, this blog post by Orson Tyrell – works extremely well.

At the end of this, you should have shairport installed and set to automatically startup at system boot.

You may well find that when you send a test signal it is very quiet.

If so, launch

# alsamixer

Set the volume to 100% or close and exit.
If you then call

# alsactl store

(you may need to use sudo) then this volume will be stored away and reused after a reboot.

In Part 2 – I’ll talk a bit about broadcasting to the Pi from other devices.

There were quite a lot of pages used in doing this, but the key ones were:
http://orsontyrell.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/airplay-to-arch-linux-raspberry-pi-via.html
http://engineer.john-whittington.co.uk/2013/05/airpi-diy-airplay-speakers-using-shairport-and-a-raspberry-pi-updated/
And on raspbian
http://trouch.com/2012/08/03/airpi-airplay-audio-with-raspberry/
https://github.com/abrasive/shairport
… thanks to all.

Just had a bit of a hair pulling moment with my DNS-320.

Despite having given myself write privileges to a shared drive, I couldn’t write to it from windows, only read. Every time I tried to do any writing activity, Windows 7 would say “Access Denied” and indicate that I had to get permissions from the Unix user “Nobody”.

I logged into my Debian Squeeze installation to check the permissions on the directory – they all looked fine.

Mad.

Or not so mad.

It seems that the only way to reliably maintain the mapping between the windows user on my laptop and the unix user on the DNS-320 is using the utility that came with the NAS drive, a simple mapping of the network drive in Windows is not sufficient.

So if you run into this problem. Unmap the drive in windows and then recreate the mapping using the D-Link utility.

I gave myself a bit of a shock today by working out something in Linux that actually worked, all by mself! Obviously to any proper linux person it’s little more than a child’s first steps – but it was quite satisfying!

So …

Having got the NAS loaded with all my media files, I enabled the UPnP MediaServer that came with it – to discover it was total crap. And promptly disabled it again.

But the word on the street, is that the Twonky Media Server is good, so I thought, put that on it.

And indeed people have put it on the DNS-320. This post covers much of what needs to be done, providing a link to a build of Twonky for the ARM processor and instructions on how to configure.

The only problem, is that all the instructions are for the lightweight ffp Linux install – rather than debiansqueeze which I’m using (because of the subversion project posted about previously).

Nevertheless – I followed the instructions, and with a few variations … got it to work … which surprised me!

The main thing I did was to strip off every occurrence of /ffp wherever I saw it in a path eg: /ffp/opt/twonky/ became /opt/twonky/
I did this both with the instructions in the blog post and with the content of the two scripts downloaded by those instructions ‘twonky.sh’ and ‘twonkyserver-default.ini’
Note: Two things to be aware of here: 1) Don’t edit these files with Windows Notepad, it messes up the line feeds at the end of each line such that linux doesn’t like the result! The free editor Notepad++ can probably handle it. 2) The debiansqueeze equivalent of the /ffp/start directory is /etc/inet.d so drop the twonky.sh file in there.

#!/bin/sh

# PROVIDE: twonky
# REQUIRE: LOGIN

. /etc/ffp.subr
name="twonky"
start_cmd="twonky_start"
stop_cmd="twonky_stop"

twonky_start()
{
# Add a route for twonky to be published via UPNP
route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev egiga0 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
cd /opt/twonky
mkdir -p /opt/twonky/data/ &
# Twonky requires one handle per monitored filesystem if inotify is
# used. On many devices, this is set to 8192, which might be too low
# if music or photos are scanned. Therefor this value is raised to
# the doubled amount. If more is required, change the value below.
# Thanks Michael for reporting this!
/sbin/sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=16384 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
# The line below is without logging (logs are written to /dev/null).
# If you want logging, exchange it with the line below the current one.
/opt/twonky/twonkystarter -logfile /dev/null -appdata /opt/twonky/data/ >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
# /opt/twonky/twonkystarter -logfile /opt/twonky/data/TwonkyMediaServer-log.txt -appdata /opt/twonky/data/ >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
}

twonky_stop()
{
# Kill Twonky
if [ -n "`pidof twonkyserver`" -o -n "`pidof twonkystarter`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkyserver"
kill -9 `pidof twonkyserver` `pidof twonkystarter`
fi

if [ -n "`pidof twonkyproxy`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkyproxy"
kill -9 `pidof twonkyproxy`
fi

if [ -n "`pidof twonkywebdav`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkywebdav"
kill -9 `pidof twonkywebdav`
fi
# Remove the route
route del -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev egiga0 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
}

run_rc_command "$1"

#!/bin/sh

# PROVIDE: twonky
# REQUIRE: LOGIN

. /etc/ffp.subr
name="twonky"
start_cmd="twonky_start"
stop_cmd="twonky_stop"

twonky_start()
{
# Add a route for twonky to be published via UPNP
route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev egiga0 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
cd /opt/twonky
mkdir -p /opt/twonky/data/ &
# Twonky requires one handle per monitored filesystem if inotify is
# used. On many devices, this is set to 8192, which might be too low
# if music or photos are scanned. Therefor this value is raised to
# the doubled amount. If more is required, change the value below.
# Thanks Michael for reporting this!
/sbin/sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=16384 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
# The line below is without logging (logs are written to /dev/null).
# If you want logging, exchange it with the line below the current one.
/opt/twonky/twonkystarter -logfile /dev/null -appdata /opt/twonky/data/ >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
# /opt/twonky/twonkystarter -logfile /opt/twonky/data/TwonkyMediaServer-log.txt -appdata /opt/twonky/data/ >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
}

twonky_stop()
{
# Kill Twonky
if [ -n "`pidof twonkyserver`" -o -n "`pidof twonkystarter`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkyserver"
kill -9 `pidof twonkyserver` `pidof twonkystarter`
fi

if [ -n "`pidof twonkyproxy`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkyproxy"
kill -9 `pidof twonkyproxy`
fi

if [ -n "`pidof twonkywebdav`" ]; then
echo "Stopping twonkywebdav"
kill -9 `pidof twonkywebdav`
fi
# Remove the route
route del -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev egiga0 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
}

run_rc_command "$1"

NB: These scripts are provided for reference only – more current versions may vary.

Also – I didn’t bother with this line [[ $(ls -1 /mnt|grep -c HD_a2) -eq 0 ]] && sed -i -e ‘s!/HD_a2!/HD/HD_a2!g’ -e ‘s!/HD_b2!/HD/HD_b2!g’ /ffp/opt/twonky/twonkyserver-default.ini
in the instructions – it does a search and replace – but it doesn’t seem necessary.

Finally the ‘twonky.sh’ script makes use of a script called ‘ffp.subr’ which I think is used to start and stop the twonky service. This doesn’t exist in Debiansqueeze. There is probably some native way of achieving the same thing – but I don’t know what it is so instead, I went and found the download for ffp – unpacked it, and retrieved the script. There’s nothing specific to ffp in it so I dropped it into the /etc directory. You do need to go through the file and remove /ffp off the start of any paths that it appears in.

Then as instructed, I ran the twonky,sh script to start the service and connected via a web browser – and OMG!!!! IT WORKED!!!! First time too, which usually only happens to people who are either (a) lucky or (b) liars.

Once I had configured the server through the web page, I left it to get on with the job of indexing my media collection. This was a task that UPnP service that came with the NAS had taken all night to do. Twonky seemed to do it in minutes. Not only that, connecting using Windows Media Player, it downloads the metadata from Twonky so much more rapidly. Streaming of both audio and video is very rapid and smooth as is seeking to a certain spot in the video. All in all – very impressed with Twonky. It’s good.

There are three reasons, changing all this stuff worked:
1) All the scripts use the sh shell which is of course available in both ffp and debiansqueeze (ie the syntax was the same)
2) The folder structures of ffp and debiansqueeze are very similar.
3) Can’t remember – it’ll come back to me.

The only reference for this post, is to thank (again) Uli author of the http://nas-tweaks.net site
for this page http://nas-tweaks.net/384/installation-of-twonky-server-7-on-nas-devices/

Introduction

I recently found myself wanting to work on a programming project at home, using C# and VisualStudio 2010, and like any good developer realised I needed source control. Yes of course I could use Microsoft Sourcesafe, it does integrate nicely with VisualStudio. But lets be honest, it is a pile of crap, I’m used to TFS at work, I can’t be doing with Sourcesafe. Running my own TFS server is probably a bit over the top, I’m not sure I have the spare change in my back pocket for the licencing.

At the same time I was aware I wanted to move my RAID’ed storage / backup solution out of the media system under the telly where it currently lives, to a dedicated NAS device.

Two birds? One stone?

Being a tight arse I went over to Ebuyer and looked up the cheapest unit that supported RAID1 (mirroring) and gigabit transfer rates and found the D-Link DNS320 for £53 inc VAT without disks, it can take up to two 2TB drives. Thinking of my old Linksys router and remembering appliances often run linux under the hood, I had a bit of a google and found this page. Someone had got subversion running on it. Very cool!!

So I ordered one, waited a few days and once it arrived shoved a drive in it. Getting the device up and running was the job of a few minutes work. Getting subversion working – rather longer. Nevertheless – success was ultimately had. For reference, I am not a linux expert – in fact it would be fair to say, I know to next to nothing about it. But I like a challenge…

What will I end up with?

Whilst the DNS-320 ships with its own version of Linux in the firmware, we aren’t going to be able to bolt directly onto that. However there is an undocumented hook (called ‘fun_plug’ which I guess stands for functionality plugin) that is checked on startup and can be used to add additional functionality stored on the hard drive.

To get subversion running on the DNS-320 you need a linux installation that runs alongside the one in the firmware, in this case DebianSqueeze. Installing this does not affect the rest of the NAS and you wont see any impact on the web interface. Once you have DebianSqueeze installed and running, you install and configure the subversion package and away you go.

So what you end up with, is a NAS running linux, that runs DebianSqueeze linux as a plugin that hosts subversion.

Installation

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. To configure DebianSqueeze requires Telnet to be running on the NAS and unfortunately out of the box, this is not the case. Luckily there is a (convoluted) way to get a very thin linux install (ffp) with Telnet onto the box first and then use that to configure DebianSqueeze. Once that is done, the ffp install is not used any further.

This exceptionally well written blog post describes how to install ffp, the “Fonz fun_plug 0.5 for CH3SNAS, CH3MNAS, DNS-323”
Follow it all the way down to the section headed “Logging in using SSH”, but don’t disable Telnet in the last step, as you’re going to need it.

Next, download DebianSqueeze from here
Open the zip file. Inside is a “how to” and two other files. Follow the instructions in the file from Step 2 (you have in effect already done Step 1).
The very last step of renaming fun_plug.debian to fun_plug effectively discards ffp that we installed earlier, it having served it’s purpose.

Now that you have DebianSqueeze running you can install subversion.
This blog post here provides a step by step guide to do this.
Half way down he mentions the command:
# svnadmin create /var/svn/projectalpha
‘projectalpha’ should be replaced by whatever you want to call your repository.
Other than that, follow the blog exactly, all the way down to the point where it starts talking about running an ssh server on a custom port. You probably don’t need to do that so can stop there.

You now have subversion running on your NAS. Excellent!!

Connecting VisualStudio 2010

Although subversion is usually used with an Apache web server this is not actually necessary. The author of the previous post has avoided doing this opting to instead use the ssh server and communication protocol already installed with DebianSqueeze. This makes it more lightweight and conserves the limited RAM available on the box.

To get VisualStudio 2010 to work with subversion you need a plugin. A popular one is AnkhSVN which can be downloaded for free.

Once installed, assuming you don’t have the Tortoise SVN client installed then you need to help the plugin understand the ssh protocol before you can use it in VisualStudio.
This blog post describes how.
NB: The configuration file mentioned in the post is described as being in your My Documents\Application Data\subversion directory, this is in XP. In Windows 7, this folder now maps to here: c:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Subversion. You may need to set the Windows Explorer “Folder and Search Options” to “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” to be able to see the AppData folder.

Now restart VisualStudio.

First you need to enable Subversion as the source control plugin for VisualStudio. Go to “Tools->Options” and in the dialog go to the subsection “Source Control” and edit the “Plug-in Selection” to be AnkhSVN.

Now, you can connect to your Subversion repository using “File->Subversion->Open From Subversion.

In the dialog that pops up enter the URL of the subversion repository on your NAS box, which will look like this: svn+ssh://<NASBOX>/var/svn/<SvnRepositoryYouCreatedEarlier>
and you’re in!!!

So now you’ve got it all working. The only thing is this irritating “Plink.exe” window that keeps popping up. It has to go – it just has to.

Download TortoiseSVN from here, install it, find the file tortoiseplink.exe, rename it to plink.exe and replace your plink.exe with it. You can then uninstall TortoiseSVN again.

Hope this has been of help.

Now some thanks and references:
First and foremost Murzal Arsya who made it clear that this project could be done on the DNS-320, outlined the need for DebianSqueeze and provided the step by step instructions for setting up subversion on the NAS.
Next http://nas-tweaks.net which is a great resource for people wanting to use their NAS for more than just NAS and provided the amazing ffp stuff.
Then Shaunc for guidance on svn+ssh, cheers geeza!!
Finally Hao Chen for for the tip to get rid of the plink pop-up window http://haochen.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-plink-pop-up-window-in-netbeans-ide-using-svnssh/

The marketing bumph for this is mostly keen to tell you about the incredible sound technology built in to the T4, how it’s spacial technology provides a stereo sweet spot wider than an outsize sombrero and all in a package the size of a pint of milk.

Well I’m here to tell you that the sound isn’t that great. It’s okay, sure. But it’s not great. The bass lacks punch and the mid is overbearing. Well what did you expect? As Scotty will say (come the 23rd century) “you cannae defy the laws of physics” and I put it to you that for this listener this remains true. It is very hard to get decent bass out of small speakers – the mid will tend to dominate.

Which begs the question? “Why do I love the Orbitsound – T4?” becaue I have to tell you, I do – I really do. In fact, I think it’s a fabulous piece of kit.

The size of a couple of pints of milk – you get all this:
– DAB and DAB+ radio
– FM Radio
– Internet Radio (inlcuding Podcasts such as from the BBC)
– Support for UPnP Media Playing
– iPod suport
– Aux in
– EQ
all for about 70 english pounds.

But it gets better. For a device this size, the UI is REALLY good. This if for two reasons. First the display can manage 6 lines of about 25 characters so the developers had plenty of space to work with. Second, the UI is quite rich. A display this size, allows a nicely nested menu system. Selecting a podcast from the BBC is not the keyhole surgery of the two line display of the Revo Mondo say (that I’ve known and loved for the last few years) – it’s actually pleasurable. For someone who listens to a lot of talk radio / podcasts (Radio 4 darling!) it’s a boon.

The switch on / boot time is practically instantaneous and the time to find and connect WiFi to the router if using Internet Radio or UPnP is very quick compared to other devices.

The controls are arranged around the top surface and there’s no remote control which does make the T4 only really suitable for smaller spaces in the home such as a Kitchen or as a bedside radio. As you return to a function previously used it automatically retunes to the last station selected, or in the case of an iPod, unpauses it (when you move from the iPod to something else, it pauses it again – nice touch).

In fact given the size and style of the device, you could actually use it as a device to drive an external HiFi in a similar role to something like a Revo Mondo and it wouldn’t look at all out of place and the sound quality would be well, HiFi. And given that the thing you really want on a remote is a volume control, the lack of a remote then isn’t a big deal.

My only other gripe is that the floppy wire aerial is a bit position sensitive when listening to DAB – but that’s a small detail.

All in all – I’m impressed. The developer who coded up the firmware gave a damn and it shows. There are just lots of nice little touches as though the engineers had actually used their own product (heaven forbid!) This is a good piece of kit at a great price. Well done Orbitsound! Can’t say I understand your marketing though.

So … I’m trying to use Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7 (32 bit) as a UPnP server. I enable all the things I’m supposed to enable. My Revo Mondo can “see” the server, it can even browse the files. But as soon as it tried to play them … nada!
So I try with my laptop. Same result. It can’t play the files.
Just to complete the loop, I try with my Android phone – again – it can list the files but not play them.

I try setting permissions on the files “everyone can read them” etc… no change.

In desperation I try using TVersity instead – but it appears to have the same problem. And additionally seems unable to cope with the size of the mp3 library.

A lot of browsing leads to lots of links on the Microsoft site that seem to have been removed. Only slightly annoying.

Finally – I work it out.

Like many people – my media collection has built up over many years. Either on an external drive, or on a secondary internal drive that gets pulled out of the old machine and plonked in the new one every time I upgrade my PC. Of course, when you do this (either with an external drive or with an internal one), the permissions on the files all relate to the old machine. So in effect, the new Windows 7 installation thinks that the drive is actually remote and refuses to serve the media.

If you copy the media (or a small subset of it) to the local drive and make it part of the music library – you suddenly find you can play it on your UPnP clients. Which is a solution if your system drive has the space. But if it doesn’t you’re still stuffed.

Eventually, I found the answer here http://forums.techarena.in/media-player/1168138.htm. God bless “Vincent”, whoever you are.

The solution is as follows:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE,
Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3. Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later
decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and
change the value to 0.

To repeat, even though this text is talking about RemoteContentSharing and technically your content is not remote (it’s either on an external drive attached to the machine, or an internal secondary drive) – Windows thinks it is because of the obsolete permissions on the files. Following the steps above, will make your world a better place, full of whatever sounds fill your mp3 collection.

After much agonising over DAB and various Internet Streaming devices, I recently bought a Revo Mondo Wireless Network Internet Radio Streaming device.

And it’s very liberating – I find myself listening to all sorts of new radio I would never have got around to finding before.

Obviously you can listen to streamed radio from all over the world, all the various “Listen Again” items on the various BBC Radio sites, plus play mp3 and other audio media stored elsewhere on my home network.

Network sharing of mp3 media was a major reason for getting the device. The standard way the Revo Mondo does this is for you to navigate to the network share where your mp3’s are stored. It then scans them and stores a cache index file away on that network share so that the process is quicker next time around. All of which is quite nice (if you don’t know any better).

But having to grant write access to the network share just so that the Radio streamer can store its cache file is clearly arse. There has to be a better way…
Read the rest of this entry →