{"id":1170,"date":"2019-10-27T18:58:46","date_gmt":"2019-10-27T18:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2021-05-21T16:20:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T15:20:49","slug":"raspberry-pi-music-player-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/raspberry-pi-music-player-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Raspberry Pi music player project"},"content":{"rendered":"

My passion is vintage analogue audio but, pragmatically, I also listen to digital stuff for convenience. The trouble is that, with a large collection, it isn’t that convenient to use.\u00a0 This is a project to do something about that.<\/p>\n

\"Pi
Pi Music Player Components<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

I have been buying CDs since soon after they where invented. I have a very large collection. Over the last few years I have got myself organised and ripped the lot to high resolution mp3 files. At last count I had over 2000 albums in my library and it took up about 220 GB on disc.<\/p>\n

My music files are all stored safely in several places, including my Synology NAS. The Synology functions as a Media Server, hosting my music library and making it available to any devices on the home network which understand how to communicate with it. This includes a PlayStation, X-Box, smart TV and our smart phones and tablets.<\/p>\n

This is OK, but hardly Hi-Fi. My next refinement was to purchase a couple of QED uPlay network music players. These gadgets connect to your network and output audio via a 3.5mm jack, so you can feed the Aux input of your Hi-Fi. The sound quality is actually pretty good for something that could be bought at the time for \u00a330. The QED is controlled by a phone or tablet application.<\/p>\n

So here we get to the crux of my problem. I don’t want to have to control my music with a phone app. It’s an ergonomics thing. I want my Hi-Fi to be self contained. I don’t mind using a phone as an optional<\/em> remote control, but the main control should be a box next to my amplifier, with a nice interface.<\/p>\n

Other ergonomic problems are caused by the sheer size of my music collection. A screen bigger than a phone is a must, to better accommodate the volume of text to be displayed. It’s also important to be able to search, so a keyboard would be nice.<\/p>\n

Another significant problem is speed. The display must update quickly as I scroll and search for music. This has been a problem with phone interfaces, which are in constant communication with the server over the network to retrieve the information to display. It all gets rather clunky with a large library. Portable music players (eg Sansa Clip) get round this problem by building up their own index information when you change the library.\u00a0 As a result subsequent searches and menus are quick. Maybe i can do something similar here?<\/p>\n

For more about how I went about this, this read about the hardware here<\/a> and about the software here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My passion is vintage analogue audio but, pragmatically, I also listen to digital stuff for convenience. The trouble is that, with a large collection, it isn’t that convenient to use.\u00a0 This is a project to do something about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,20],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-1170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital","category-paraphernalia","tag-musicbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1971,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wiredwood.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}