Questions on audio capabilities

[0x11010111]

I just discovered this great project and community and have a questions. English is not my first language and I'm not so familiar with audio streaming or Linux so keep with me.

1. AAC and WMA2 support
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The radio stations I need only broadcast through Flash (AAC) or WMA2. I understand that Jeff's firmware doesn't support these, and updating MPD is difficult due to memory limitations and Linux skill.

So I was wondering if anyone had succeeded to add AAC or WMA2 support, and if so how did you do it?

Otherwise is this easy to do via a transcoding server? Are there any on the internet, or can you use something like VLC at home? Or perhaps better to use radio box as UPnP audio renderer and have transcoding capable UPnP server on PC?

Any thoughts or someone who has done these things?

2. Use as a networked audio device
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I was wondering about putting these radio player boxes on a network and being able to use them as sound devices from Windows boxes. I guess this require either:

- some sort of Windows virtual audio device that sends the digital sound across the network.

- or maybe better to have radio box just share USB devices general, with Windows PC being able to treat them as local. We've all seen products that do this thing.

Also any thoughts or experience?

[0x11010111]

Well to partly answer my own question, I used VLC to transcode streaming WMA2/MMS to MP3 on fly, so that wifi radio played test BBC station:

Code: Select all

vlc.exe mms://wmlive.bbc.net.uk/wms/bbc_ami/radio5/radio5_bb_live_int_eq1_sl0 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=none,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:duplicate{dst=http{mux=raw,dst=:8000/bbc/},dst=display} :no-sout-rtp-sap :no-sout-standard-sap :sout-keep -I dummy

Just needed to do the following on wifi box in telnet:

Code: Select all

mpd
mpc add http://192.168.0.23:8000/bbc/
mpc play

But now my knowledge of streaming let me down. Say I want to put the wifi box into a mode where it just plays whatever PC stream to it (VLC), perhaps many different things (formats, bitrates, etc) in series, what is the way to do that?

If I just use http like above, I have to keep redoing the "mpc play" command every time I set VLC to stream something new to it, and it doesn't know what it is playing ("mpc" shows no titles or anything).

So what is best protocol to use, so wifi box can just sit there playing everything streamed from PC, and know name of what it is playing?

I am trying to help myself but would appreciate a nudge in rigth direction.

[mightyohm]

I wonder if icecast would be better for what you are trying to do?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast
http://www.icecast.org/

[0x11010111]

Hi Jeff,

I looked at Icecast before trying VLC, but I couldn't find any reference to transcoding in 10mins of browsing round the site. That is, if I want a server that can fetch streaming audio in (say) Windows Media format and make it available to its own client in (say) MP3 doing the necessary transcoding, then it wasn't obvious to me that Icecast does this. Am I wrong?

BTW Have you any comments on these? Around $35 for a similar device but with two USB 2s (according to wikipedia)!

[mightyohm]

I haven't played with icecast at all, so I'm not sure of it's capabilities. I understand what you are trying to do, but I'm not sure what the best solution is. If there was a way to get mpd to automatically reconnect on disconnection from a stream, that might solve your problem...

I haven't seen the WL-600g before, the tricky thing is usually OpenWrt support (including wireless support). If OpenWrt has it on their list of supported hardware, by all means pick one up and start hacking! (And if not, maybe buy one to play around with anyway, you might be the first to get OpenWrt running on it!)