There's No Place Like Home

I discussed this concept with Liz last night and she thought it was a great idea!

I plan to implement it in several phases and I think the kicker was that Phase I is essentially free.

Phase I is to get music into the kitchen again. There are speakers in the kitchen that used to be hooked up to the stereo in the living room. They got unhooked when I finished up the living room walls and now it’s a pain to re-route the wires to the stereo, so it just didn’t get done.

But I have another power amp and I’m going to take the tuner out of the living room (since we never listen to the radio in the living room and Liz likes to listen to the radio in the kitchen) and build a shelf to put them on and hook them up to the speakers in the kitchen.

Then we will at least have a decent radio in the kitchen. Plus I should be able to wrangle a CD player for cheap or free somewhere. Or we could use my iPod shuffle, but I don’t think Liz would like most of the music I put on it. 🙂

Liz also talked about having a computer in the kitchen (!) – something I had not expected at all, so maybe we could figure out how to make that work as the music player there. I don’t expect that to happen until we redo the kitchen (and who knows when that will happen) as there really isn’t anywhere to put a computer right now.

Phase II will involve spending some money to buy some Network Media Players. One of the cool things about that is that I can buy them one at a time when we have the money. Plus I could buy one to have music in the bedroom, etc. Anywhere there is network available – or I could go the wireless route, depending on what I buy.

I also played with Openfiler a bit last night. That’s going to take some mucking about with to get it fully sussed out. It requires an authentication server of some sort (LDAP, NT Domain, etc) for user permissions, so I finally need to figure out how to make my Samba server a PDC. I started playing with that last night, but the O’Reilly book I have is confusing (how atypical) and appears to be a slap-dash update for Samba 3.0, so it’s full of version 2.2 stuff that doesn’t work.

I was getting frustrated, and I had to chivvy Rosalyn into finishing her homework instead of AIMing her firends, so I stopped.

My coworker just dumped a box with five 80GB hard drives, a RAID card and a pair of 350MHz PII CPUs on my desk, so I should be able to get the filer up this weekend! Whee!

The chassis he gave me last night had two mis-matched CPUs in it – one 333MHz and one 300MHz. He said that it had been running fine for him, but Openfiler didn’t seem to like it very much. If I booted the SMP kernel, it would kernel panic. If I booted the single CPU kernel, it would hang on the Kudzu hardware detection.

So I pulled the 300Mhz CPU and booted the single-CPU kernel and it seemed to be just fine.

Ever since I won my iPod Shuffle, I’ve been getting more and more excited about the ability to play MP3s in various ways and places.

I’m having fun running iTunes on my laptop and ripping my CD collection into it. I’ve been cherry-picking the discs that I rip because I have limited space on my drive, but what if I had (essentially) unlimited space?

I have been talking to a coworker about buying a set of five 80GB IDE drives and a RAID controller to setup a file server in my house. Then the other day the connection was made in my brain – fileserver + MP3 files = online music collection! About 300GB of music! (Well, assuming I had that many CDs.)

In addition to selling me the drives and controller he is giving me an old dual PII 300MHz motherboard and 4RU chassis. I’m going to install Openfiler on it and go to town.

Then the next issue is how to play the MP3s once they are on the filer…

There are a few choices here. Any PC can connect to the share and play them using WinAmp or iTunes. But I would really like to have it hooked up to the stereo in the living room and in the kitchen. And I don’t really want to have to boot up a PC or laptop to do that. It needs to be simple to use so the wife and kids can do it.

Enter the “Network Music Player” devices. So far I have found two of these things. There is the Slim Devices Squeezebox and the Roku SoundBridge.

They both seem nice, and both would do the job. I have two coworkers with the Squeezeboxes and they like them. But they are expensive. The cheapest Squeezebox is $250. On the other hand the SoundBridges start at $150.

However.

Both of these devices require you to run a “server” to feed them the music files. The Squeezebox comes with a supported Linux server called “Slim Server”. The Soundbridge will work with a few Linux servers, including Slim Server, but it looks like they don’t really support any of them. They want you to run some Windows thing or use iTunes. I don’t have a Windows box that runs all the time and am not interested in that.

You can pick up both devices on eBay of course, but not at much of a discount. You can get a SoundBridge for $100 + shipping and there are three Squeezeboxs currently at $75 – $100 (but the auction is not over yet.)

Then of course I could buy some obsolete, unsupported thing like the AudioTron. The AudioTron is discontinued, but some forums posts I found speak highly of it, and they are on eBay for $50 – $100. It would appear that the AudioTron does not require a server piece but rather finds shares with MP3s in them and catalogs them. Hmmm. Intriguing.

If course this all hinges on convincing SWMBO that this is a good thing to spend some $$ on.

There would be additional benefits too. If I rip all my CDs to MP3 and store them on a file server, then I don’t need them out in the living room. I can box them up and store them somewhere else. That would be a good thing.

Maybe someone that is reading my blog (all three of you) knows of another player like this?