Stephen C Phillips (Posts about Audio)

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi controlled with a tiny web server

Stephen C Phillips — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:32:48 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi controlled with a tiny web server

Objective

I wanted to be able to tune in to BBC radio stations on my Raspberry Pi and control it through my smart phone with an easy graphical interface.

In fulfilling this objective I got a bit carried away and wrote a small web server from scratch (as you do...) which was good fun, so in the spirit of helping people hack their Raspberry Pis I thought I'd explain how it all works. What follows is mostly an explanation of how web servers and web browsers work: it's actually quite simple and interesting to mess around with. The actual software is useful and works well too!

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi (v2)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 18 May 2014 19:33:47 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi (v2)

This is an update to my recent post on this topic.

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type e.g. radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 11 May 2014 17:09:30 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (v3)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 11 May 2014 14:05:00 GMT

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (v3)

What we are aiming for

A music system with a Raspberry Pi plugged in to an amplifier playing music that you choose with your mobile phone. The music can come from MP3s on your phone, from files on your server, files "in the cloud" or from internet radio stations. If there’s more than one Android phone in your household you can have them all synchronised, showing the same playlist and controlling the same music. If you have multiple Raspberry Pis you can put one in each room and choose which one to play the music with. This is all achieved with free software and open standards. I’ve just written some instructions to show how to do it.

Morse Code Transcriber

Stephen C Phillips — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:43:27 GMT

Morse Code Transcriber

I have been working for a while on a tool to "listen to" and transcribe Morse code. I've been wanting to do it for ages and considered a variety of ways, but with more browsers supporting the Web Audio API the time seemed right to give it a go.

Ultimately, the tool will be integrated into my Morse code trainer to listen to students practising the segments of Morse code in that tool and let them know if they are doing it well enough. For now though, the Morse code transcriber is just an alpha-release stand-alone tool which only works properly in Chrome (I should be able to make it work in Firefox as well).

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (revisited)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:06:48 GMT

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (revisited)

What we are aiming for

A music system with a Raspberry Pi plugged in to an amplifier playing music that you choose with your mobile phone. The music can come from MP3s on your phone, from files on your server or from internet radio stations. If there's more than one Android phone in your household you can have them all synchronised, showing the same playlist and controlling the same music. If you have multiple Raspberry Pis you can put one in each room and choose which one to play the music with. This is all achieved with free software and open standards. I've just written some instructions to show how to do it.

Sound configuration on Raspberry Pi with ALSA

Stephen C Phillips — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:53:50 GMT

Sound configuration on Raspberry Pi with ALSA

While setting up a Raspberry Pi to play streamed music using UPnP, I have had quite a bit of trouble understanding how to configure the sound on my Raspberry Pi. This is partly because I am running it in headless mode (no graphical desktop) and partly because sound on Linux is fiendishly complicated.

Anyway, I am making progress in understanding what's going on but I am no expert. Here are my findings on how to control the ALSA system from the command line. All I am focussed on here is getting control of the sound output by the 3.5mm stereo socket. If you want to control the output over the HDMI socket or an external USB sound card then you'll need to do some of your own investigation.

Using a Raspberry Pi with Android phones for media streaming with UPnP / DLNA

Stephen C Phillips — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:03:57 GMT

Using a Raspberry Pi with Android phones for media streaming with UPnP / DLNA

This summarises and completes my previous posts on configuring a Raspberry Pi to play music streamed from another computer in the house, using Android phones as remote controls.

Getting gstreamer to work on a Raspberry Pi

Stephen C Phillips — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:11:45 GMT

Getting gstreamer to work on a Raspberry Pi

Having now got gmrender to compile and run on the Raspberry Pi and use gstreamer as a backend I need to fix the audio quality issues. A bit more googling revealed a post from someone doing much the same as me. One of Chris Baume's commenters also had problems with the audio quality and suggested that directing the audio via PulseAudio fixed it.

A UPnP renderer for the Raspberry Pi

Stephen C Phillips — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 11:24:38 GMT

A UPnP renderer for the Raspberry Pi

I want to use a Raspberry Pi to play music through the micro Hi-Fi system in my kitchen/dining room. Up to now I have had a San Francisco Android phone velcroed to the kitchen wall running the Subsonic client and accessing the FLAC files on my media server via the excellent Subsonic server software (which transcodes them on the fly to MP3). This has been a good solution for a couple of years now but one problem is that the headphone output of the San Francisco is not very powerful so we have to turn the (small) amp up to max to get a decent volume and sometimes you want it higher.