RPi 2 as my music server

⏳ 4 min read

Almost everyone is familiar with what Raspberry Pi is, if you are not aware of it better stop reading! When Pi2 was released with some great upgrades I got one to just tinker with it. Couldn't do much with it until recently. I joined my first full time role at a company, so I spend approx. 6 hours of a weekday at office.

I have my work laptop and then my personal MBPR, syncing music between these is a pain. Sometimes I just want to lay back and browse through my music collection(AFK time). I have a 2.1 speaker set which I usually connect to my laptop when I wish to listen to some music (All the time!)

Things I have

2.1 Speaker System
Raspberry Pi 2
Home WiFi Network

Solution

MPD or Music Player Daemon is a best fit solution for my problem. All my music will be on some kind of memory storage accessible to pi2. If I run mpd on the pi2 connect my speakers to it and I can just connect to it using NCMPCPP on my laptops while in my home network. If I am at office, I can still stream my music collection to my office laptop over a vpn. One good side effect is that there are good mpd client android applications like MPDroid. This way, I have only one place to keep my songs and I can enjoy them everywhere.

The following is a reminder for me as getting MPD to run on Pi2 is not so straightforward. I use a Kali Linux 2.0 image on Pi.

Make sure you connect your Pi in your home network with a static IP. This will allow you to save settings in your mpd clients.
I use Kali as a non-root user, so create an account for it.
Sound is disabled by default on Pi2. Install alsa-utils if not present and load snd_bmc2835 module.
```
  :::bash
  # apt-get install alsa-utils
  # modprobe snd_bcm2835
```
To load this module everytime at boot, just add it to /etc/modules.
```
  :::bash
  # echo "snd_bcm2835" >> /etc/modules
```
I want to run MPD under the non-root user, so this user has to be added to the audio group if not already present.
```
  :::bash
  # grep "audio" /etc/groups
  # usermod -a -G group user
```

Now, hack up the configuration of mpd. Default is present at /etc/mpd.conf. I prefer using it from my home directory, so copied it and edited it. All the sections of self explainatory and I am pasting here a minified version. Make sure you create all the files and folder mentioned here and ensure that MPD has access to write to these locations and your music directory

  :::bash
  music_directory		"/home/tunnelshade/Music"
  playlist_directory		"/home/tunnelshade/Music/playlists"
  db_file			"/home/tunnelshade/Music/mpd/tag_cache"
  log_file			"/home/tunnelshade/Music/mpd/mpd.log"
  pid_file			"/home/tunnelshade/Music/mpd/pid"
  state_file			"/home/tunnelshade/Music/mpd/state"
  sticker_file                   "/home/tunnelshade/Music/mpd/sticker.sql"
  user				"tunnelshade"

  bind_to_address		"0.0.0.0"

  port				"7000"

  password                        "password@read,add,control,admin"

  input {
  	plugin "curl"
  }

  audio_output {
  	type		"alsa"
  	name		"My ALSA Device"
  }

  filesystem_charset		"UTF-8"
  id3v1_encoding			"UTF-8"

And lastly, have to start MPD at every boot. If we add a service then it will start with system privilege, but there is one alternative. Add it as a user cron after start. So, for me the cron entry will look like (crontab -e)
```
  :::bash
  @reboot mpd ~/.mpdconf
```
Just reboot and connect from your favourite devices.

Screenshots

2015-08-19 :: {linux}