Lowmus – Play songs to your audio (music) system

Screen shot: Amarok XUL Remote + Winamp Edcast Plugin
Screen shot: Amarok XUL Remote + Winamp Edcast Plugin

Objective:
I wanted to play music from my laptop to my music system. So, if I fire up Amarok (or Winamp, in case it’s my wife), and I play a song – that should start playing onto my music system.

The best way to achieve it was to connect a low end machine on the network and connect the Audio out from the sound card of that machine into the music system’s Auxiliary port. Hurdles were the software to make it work seamlessly. Follow on…

Requirements:
Apart from a low end system, you also need the perfect OS, which expands to openSUSE. Perfecto.

  • an old system (can be as old as a Pentium 100 Mhz, with some 128MB RAM to spare)
    • this old system would be connected to the Auxiliary input of your music system
  • an openSUSE 10.3 CD (KDE) – Gawd, I love the lizards..
  • a laptop running any Linux or Win*****

After I got 10.3 SUSE running on the host, I connected lowmus (that’s the name I gave to my Pentium 2 166 Mhz with 256 MB RAM) to my old Panasonic audio system (a really old model) and did this:

  • sudo zypper in fluxbox icecast amarok

The next thing to do was login locally to the box (lowmus) and select fluxbox as my default window manager. I configured fluxbox to run amarok and icecast at startup. Essentially, this:

  • mkdir -p ~/.icecast/log/
  • cp /usr/share/icecast/doc/icecast_minimal.xml.dist ~/.icecast/icecast_minimal.xml
  • # changed password on line 24 onwards in ~/.icecast/icecast_minimal.xml
  • # changed logdir to ~/.icecast/log on line 134 onwards in ~/.icecast/icecast_minimal.xml
  • # changed user and group on line 183 onwards in ~/.icecast/icecast_minimal.xml
  • # edited ~/.fluxbox/startup to add these lines:
    • /usr/bin/icecast -c /home/$USERNAME/.icecast/icecast_minimal.xml &
      /opt/kde3/bin/amarok &
  • Used icecast plugin for Winamp on the laptop to stream video to lowmus
  • Configure icecast plugin to stream as Ogg and give the host IP of lowmus along with the passwords you had set above
  • Make sure to configure Amarok on the remote host (lowmus) to play a local stream
    • Fire up amarok on lowmus
    • Click on Playlist > Add Stream > enter [http://localhost:8000/stream.ogg
    • The stream.ogg is the mount point you configured in your Winamp plugin (edcast) or Amarok plugin
    • Hear the sound of music already? (if your player on laptop is playing music)
  • If you play Amarok on your lappy, there are loads of plugins available for icecasting music to lowmus
  • The only other thing you need on your laptop is the Amarok XUL remote
    • Make sure to do a sudo zypper python-qt on your remote host (lowmus)
    • Amarok XUL remote should be installed by doing Amarok > Tools > Script Manager > Install Script > (select the xul-remote-tgz file) and click ok! (do that on lowmus)
    • Configure the script to have the localhost’s IP and a port (preferable 8888) – click Run!
    • Fire up firefox on your laptop and connect to the IP above, like 192.168.1.4:8888
    • It would automatically install Amarok Remote plugin for firefox
    • Go to Tools > Amarok remote on Firefox (laptop) and click on Configure
    • Give your host (lowmus) IP a username (given in a step above) and password – port=8888
    • After you connect, you see Amarok’s playlist on your laptop from the remote host
    • You can increase/decrease volume using amarok remote and change to a different song on the playlist on the remote host (if you have enlisted those)

Play along!

7 Replies to “Lowmus – Play songs to your audio (music) system”

  1. If you are comparing foobar and amarok in terms of resource usage then foobar wins(not more than 2-3 MB). The only catch being UI of foobar not as good as that of Amarok.(If you care about UI)
    Now the main thing — the sound quality in foobar is better than amarok. The amount of configuration and tuning one can do in foobar (actually a player for pros /conoisseurs) is higher than that of amarok.

    Too bad amarok doesnt support any plugins for music enhancement along the lines of DIFX . In foobar you can add many plugins to fine tune sound quality, UI..

    And lastly, I have seen many people trying to run foobar on wine or asking for foobar (which is open source btw) port to linux. Btw, I am using amarok waiting for the port :)

  2. Sorry the enhancer is DFX and not DIFX (this comes under DSP plugins)

    And one more thing if UI is considered amarok rocks (particularly amarokfs ) !

  3. @Raghu: Thing is, with around 2GB of RAM at my disposal, I won’t really care about optimization. True, you need to optimize applications on Windows, cuz the OS is the devil himself. Good for Windowers. :)

  4. The best way was to connect a low-end machine on the network and connect the audio output sound card of this machine in the auxiliary port of your stereo. Hedges has been the software to operate smoothly

  5. Things i have seen in terms of laptop or computer memory is the fact there are requirements such as SDRAM, DDR and the like, that must match up the specific features of the mother board. If the computer’s motherboard is kind of current while there are no operating system issues, improving the memory space literally normally takes under a couple of hours. It’s one of the easiest laptop or computer upgrade processes one can think about. Thanks for discussing your ideas.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *