Streaming Success

[Mike]

I just thought I’d drop a little note about my success today with streaming audio. I am presently at a friends house for dinner, enjoying my own music streaming from home. Earlier, I was asked by my friend if I could stream my music, so I consulted the wiki document, and soon (10 min) had my music streaming from home and being fed to the Airport Extreme to play Sianspheric on the nice stereo here.
Perhaps I’ll update the wiki to include more explicit directions for configuring Network Beacon. It’s all the more impressive because the signal travels from the mt-daapd server -> internet -> airport basestation -> airport extreme in wds mode -> imac g5 -> airport extreme decoder -> stereo. Wow. I love technology.

The specs:
mt-daapd: 20060117
distro: crux (cutom mt-daapd package), with 2.6.14 kernel
hardware: celeron 600 w/ 196 megs of ram
server isp: Bell Canada High Speed

client computer: imac g5 (first gen)
client isp: Primus Canada

[rpedde]

Throw in a “transcoding from flac” and I’ll *really* be impressed. 🙂

— Ron

[Mike]

I don’t have many flac files, but the ogg files didn’t come through very well. They skipped, it’s just too much information. So, um, anyone know when there will be a functional Apple Lossless Encoder? It would be nice to be able to use that instead of Wav, and it would also open up some possibilities with Airport Extreme type devices.

[rpedde]

I’ve got a patch for transcoding to mp3 rather than wav, but I was waiting for the new config parser to be done so i could implement it — I want to be able to transcode to a particular format based on ip address, so you could transcode to .wav inside your network, and transcode to .mp3 when streaming from a remote location.

The config stuff just went in today, so I’ll start working on that next.

— Ron

[Mike]

That’ll be sweet. And presumably, if we’re transcoding to mp3 for some, and wav to others, we can also transcode to other formats as well if so desired? Will we also be able to transcode based on client id’s of any sort? As in, the iTunes users get wav or apple lossless, but other clients that can support other formats can get those instead?

[rpedde]

In theory, yeah, but I don’t really see the advantage of alac over wav — alac is almost a fat as wav and not very portable across different devices. Besides, if you are streaming alac, you are doing it across a local network anyway, not a wan. So might just as well go wav.

And as far as lossy formats go, mp3 is the common denominator, so I don’t see the point of transcoding to .ogg or something.

Dunno.. Seems like .wav and .mp3 cover all the bases. I’ll do that first, and see what falls out from that.

[Mike]

alac is almost as fat as wav? I truthfully don’t know much at all about alac, but I assumed it was basically apple branded flac, which is certainly no mp3 but is also certainly much smaller than wav.
oh well, I guess mp3 it is.

[Author]

Posts