Thu, 23 Feb 2006
MusicPD over the Net
I use MusicPD for maintaining my audio files collection. It is nice, but it can play music to the locally connected speakers only. So it is impossible to listen to the music played by mpd from the wireless-connected laptop in the next room.
One possible solution would be to share the music collection over NFS or SMB. Another solution can be to use remote esd sound daemon and libao output of mpd.
Nevertheless, I have found something even better: the latest development version of mpd supports besides the ALSA, OSS, and libao outputs also the Icecast output. So I have created an Icecast server for our home LAN, and voila - instant music on the laptop, with no storage required. I have used the mpd and Icecast howto.
It works well, but I have to read the documentation in order to figure out a proper authentication and administration of the Icecast server, and to find out whether Icecast supports also FLAC streams (my current stream uses OGG/Vorbis).